Did Sam Allardyce (left) and Roy Hodgson deserve to get the boot?
As is traditional in English football, the holiday season was enlivened by the departure of nine league managers. That makes over 30 dismissals or resignations since the season began; an annual turnover of almost a third of the managers and coaches with five months of football to go. This is a human resources massacre: the attrition rate for senior management in the rest of the private sector is a fraction of this.
Some of these departures are personal decisions, like Steve Coppell standing down at Bristol City before the season got underway; some are about power politics, like Sam Allardyce being sacked from Blackburn Rovers after their purchase by Indian battery-chicken magnates. But most of these dismissals have come during a run of poor form. In a competitive, performance-driven business, this might appear rational. Football, as usual, proves to be anything other than rational in its behaviour.
The evidence shows that a team’s position in the league is overwhelmingly determined by the size of the wage bill. Teams might fluctuate a little from the norm, over or underperforming, but the bands are narrow. Managers could be judged against their contribution to performance within these metrics—yet clubs rarely set realistic targets against which to judge their key employee.
What research there is about the impact of managers on performance suggests that nearly all benefits come in the medium to long term, achieved by people who have built up sufficient length of service and experience. (See, for instance, “The Effects of Managerial Changes in English Professional Soccer, 1975-1995,” by Benny J Peiser and Matthew O Franklin, Journal of Football Studies.) Yet the average tenure of dismissed managers across the four professional English leagues has shrunk from nearly three years in 1992 to less than one and a half years today. Most first-time managers lose their jobs between six months and 12 months after starting, and half of them will never manage again. Consequently, English football has massively destabilised a central element of its workforce, and created an employment culture in which staff are judged before their impact can be registered.
None of this would be so stupid if change delivered results. The cliché is that new managers “give teams a lift.” But this is not borne out in practice. Factor in the inevitable highs and lows of something as protean as a football team’s performance, and the honeymoon effect of a new manager in the Premiership is about two and a half points in the short term and almost nothing over the rest of the season. Things get no better further down the leagues, plus evidence from other team sports confirms the dismal payback from change. And this is before taking account of the financial, psychological and administrative costs of transition.
The best one can say is that, after a mid-season managerial change, a team’s performance varies more than usual over the short term. So, while the average impact is almost negligible, there are a very small number of cases where performance massively improves or collapses. A team in trouble which changes manager is basically buying a lottery ticket. That might make some kind of sense at clubs that look doomed without divine intervention. But for Newcastle to sack Chris Hughton when they are mid-table is, like almost every decision taken under the current regime, ludicrous, destructive and counter-productive.
If economists have exposed the irrationality of football’s decision-making, how can we explain the persistence, indeed the intensification, of the game’s institutional stupidity? For this, we need an anthropologist; for football is a world in which symbolic power, ritual and unspoken webs of shared meanings hold sway.
In this world, the fate of managers is understood as a dramatic narrative, providing an emotional hook for the media’s interpretation of clubs’ performance; witness the recent coverage of Carlo Ancelotti at Chelsea or Roy Hodgson at Liverpool. This is great showbusiness, but disastrous corporate management. Second, decisions over managers are made in a context shaped by fans, whose perceptions are invariably unrealistic, driven by instant gratification and clouded by emotion. In this context, the firing of managers can be seen as an act of ritual purification.
One cliché does stand up: managers’ fates are shaped by “the dressing room.” Fail to impose your authority there and it’s all over. This sounds fair, but it has handed players an extraordinary veto on their managers’ careers. Dressing rooms are ultra-conformist and hierarchical, where the ill-formed opinions of a few “senior players” take on the status of unchallengeable truths. And players’ interests are (naturally) short-term and individualistic. What company would let a bunch of super-mobile contractors with no management experience hold sway over the CEO?
As is traditional in English football, the holiday season was enlivened by the departure of nine league managers. That makes over 30 dismissals or resignations since the season began; an annual turnover of almost a third of the managers and coaches with five months of football to go. This is a human resources massacre: the attrition rate for senior management in the rest of the private sector is a fraction of this.
Some of these departures are personal decisions, like Steve Coppell standing down at Bristol City before the season got underway; some are about power politics, like Sam Allardyce being sacked from Blackburn Rovers after their purchase by Indian battery-chicken magnates. But most of these dismissals have come during a run of poor form. In a competitive, performance-driven business, this might appear rational. Football, as usual, proves to be anything other than rational in its behaviour.
The evidence shows that a team’s position in the league is overwhelmingly determined by the size of the wage bill. Teams might fluctuate a little from the norm, over or underperforming, but the bands are narrow. Managers could be judged against their contribution to performance within these metrics—yet clubs rarely set realistic targets against which to judge their key employee.
What research there is about the impact of managers on performance suggests that nearly all benefits come in the medium to long term, achieved by people who have built up sufficient length of service and experience. (See, for instance, “The Effects of Managerial Changes in English Professional Soccer, 1975-1995,” by Benny J Peiser and Matthew O Franklin, Journal of Football Studies.) Yet the average tenure of dismissed managers across the four professional English leagues has shrunk from nearly three years in 1992 to less than one and a half years today. Most first-time managers lose their jobs between six months and 12 months after starting, and half of them will never manage again. Consequently, English football has massively destabilised a central element of its workforce, and created an employment culture in which staff are judged before their impact can be registered.
None of this would be so stupid if change delivered results. The cliché is that new managers “give teams a lift.” But this is not borne out in practice. Factor in the inevitable highs and lows of something as protean as a football team’s performance, and the honeymoon effect of a new manager in the Premiership is about two and a half points in the short term and almost nothing over the rest of the season. Things get no better further down the leagues, plus evidence from other team sports confirms the dismal payback from change. And this is before taking account of the financial, psychological and administrative costs of transition.
The best one can say is that, after a mid-season managerial change, a team’s performance varies more than usual over the short term. So, while the average impact is almost negligible, there are a very small number of cases where performance massively improves or collapses. A team in trouble which changes manager is basically buying a lottery ticket. That might make some kind of sense at clubs that look doomed without divine intervention. But for Newcastle to sack Chris Hughton when they are mid-table is, like almost every decision taken under the current regime, ludicrous, destructive and counter-productive.
If economists have exposed the irrationality of football’s decision-making, how can we explain the persistence, indeed the intensification, of the game’s institutional stupidity? For this, we need an anthropologist; for football is a world in which symbolic power, ritual and unspoken webs of shared meanings hold sway.
In this world, the fate of managers is understood as a dramatic narrative, providing an emotional hook for the media’s interpretation of clubs’ performance; witness the recent coverage of Carlo Ancelotti at Chelsea or Roy Hodgson at Liverpool. This is great showbusiness, but disastrous corporate management. Second, decisions over managers are made in a context shaped by fans, whose perceptions are invariably unrealistic, driven by instant gratification and clouded by emotion. In this context, the firing of managers can be seen as an act of ritual purification.
One cliché does stand up: managers’ fates are shaped by “the dressing room.” Fail to impose your authority there and it’s all over. This sounds fair, but it has handed players an extraordinary veto on their managers’ careers. Dressing rooms are ultra-conformist and hierarchical, where the ill-formed opinions of a few “senior players” take on the status of unchallengeable truths. And players’ interests are (naturally) short-term and individualistic. What company would let a bunch of super-mobile contractors with no management experience hold sway over the CEO?
