Abstract
Whether a coach dismissal during the mid-season has an impact on the subsequent team performance has long been a subject of controversial scientific discussion. Here we find a clear-cut answer to this question by using a recently developed statistical framework for the team fitness and by analyzing the first two moments of the effect of a coach dismissal. We can show with an unprecedented small statistical error for the German soccer league that dismissing the coach within the season has basically no effect on the subsequent performance of a team. Changing the coach between two seasons has no effect either. Furthermore, an upper bound for the actual influence of the coach on the team fitness can be estimated. Beyond the immediate relevance of this result, this study may lead the way to analogous studies for exploring the effect of managerial changes, e.g., in economic terms.
Highlights
Fred Everiss, responsible for the soccer team of West Bromwich Albion (UK) coached his team over 46 years (1902–1948) without any interruption
Any variations during the season are due to temporal fluctuations whereas systematic variations mainly occur between different seasons [6,7]. This observation already gives a hint to formulate our main hypothesis in line with [3] that changing the coach during the season is useless and would have no effects in the subsequent team performance
For a specific Coach Dismissals (CDs) event, occurring after match day tCD, we identify all events where some other or the same team during any season displays a similar goal difference during tCD subsequent matches and has still at least 10 matches to play after this time interval
Summary
Fred Everiss, responsible for the soccer team of West Bromwich Albion (UK) coached his team over 46 years (1902–1948) without any interruption This is probably the all time world record for coaches in professional soccer. In Germany, for instance, Volker Finke is the record holder He coached the professional soccer team of SC Freiburg for almost 16 years (1991–2007) without interruptions (German record), due to the relegation into the Second German soccer league his team had to leave the Premier German Soccer league (the so called ‘‘Erste Bundesliga’’, established 1963) four times. Such loyalty is very unusual in professional team sports. Gyula Lorant as well as Joerg Berger are the most often dismissed head coaches in the German Bundesliga (six times each)
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