Playing for extra-time
With many football managers now being sent for an early bath when results don’t go to plan, Jo Lumani and Hannah Baldwin speak to Paul Hughes from Loughborough University’s Business School, who has produced research which indicates that clubs who give their manager time – rather than a red card – often achieve better long-term results.
Football is a fickle business.
In an era where the average tenure of a Premiership football manager is now less than one and a half years according to figures by Deloitte and Touche, results are king and pressure is immense. Driven by the wealth of England’s top division, the prospect of relegation to the Championship drives fear throughout Premier League Chairmen. Failure is simply not an option.
To your average football supporter, the buck often stops with the gaffer – he is the man tasked with producing a winning team and bringing home three points. It’s a job not without its pitfalls. The adulation and scarf-waving in the stands is often replaced by the calls and jeers of the boo-boys when results aren’t going quite to plan. It’s only a short distance from hero to zero and the stock of a football manager can drop rapidly.
Although it’s the norm to see the head of a football manager on the chopping block when league positions falter, research from Loughborough University’s Business School indicates that long-term managers get better results than those clubs who change their managers on a regular basis.
Though the managerial merry-go-round may be a frequent occurrence in football at all levels, the research illustrates that patience is key – sticking with the manager through a period of poor results provides the best opportunity for long-term success in most cases, especially where there are underlying issues at the club which have not yet been addressed.
Led by Paul Hughes from the Business School, the research is in collaboration with his brother Mat at the University of Nottingham, along with academics from the University of Sheffield and UWE in Bristol.
"“We got the idea in 2005, around the time when newspapers and Sky TV were going mad with all the managers changing their roles," said Paul.
"They were talking about the so-called honeymoon period. Let’s say you’re facing relegation. You get shot of the manager, change to someone else and miraculously you start doing really well, win games and you’re safe.
"We thought that sounded like a load of rubbish. But there’s lots of theory out there in management – scapegoating theory says a manager will get the boot for poor performance; and vicious circle theory says that if you do get rid of the manager, performance will continue to go downwards because you’re tackling the wrong problem. But there’s also the theory that if you keep your manager for too long, you give them too long a tenure, they become stuck in a rut, they follow the same tired strategies and in the end performance will go down anyway – so why not sack the manager and continually change them? There are two competing sides to the argument.
"Football managers used to keep their jobs for about three years, now it’s one and a half, if that. So obviously there’s scapegoating going on there. They’re thinking that the way to be successful is to give a manager a certain period of time, if results don’t pick up or the manager doesn’t fulfil what the chairman of whoever wants them to, you sack the manager and get someone else, because someone else would be better."
The study, which uses data from the inception of the Premier League in 1992 until 2004, focuses on the short-term and long-term impact of manager change in the top flight of English football. Analysis has been extensive, with academics studying the results of around 6,000 football games.
"We got the data from a private company, which specialises in league results and they have all the details on the managers. We broke it down into ten games, defined as ‘the honeymoon period’ which everyone seemed to be talking about – that was ‘the short term’ after a manager had been changed; a further ten games we considered to be ‘the medium term’ and then we looked at 40 games, which is around how many games there are in a whole season.
This research didn’t receive external funding so it’s not biased in any way. It’s a totally independent study, and given the amount of analysis we’ve been able to do, our findings are robust.
"We found out first of all that if you keep the manager for a longer period of time, performance generally goes up. But of course there are a couple of outliers in there – Alex Ferguson’s been at Manchester United forever and Wenger’s been at Arsenal for a decade or so – so we stripped them out and looked at the data again and we still found the same. The longer you keep the manager, the better the performance is. It sounds like common sense, but that’s not happening – probably because football is results driven.
"When we looked at the effect of changing the manager and bringing in someone new, in the first ten games there was a positive increase in performance but nothing statistically significant. That means there is some brief performance reprieve but not much of one.
"So we then looked at what happens during the ‘medium term’. After the initial ten games, performance then tails off and goes back down, sometimes to worse levels than it was before the club changed the manager. Essentially there’s an illusion effect – the club starts to see a small increase in performance, they think they’re on an upward trend and that creates complacency, but in actual fact they haven’t addressed the right problems. The problem might not necessarily have been the results, it might have been support staff, facilities, pay structure, coaching set-up – problems with the organisation as a whole which are dragging the club down.
In reality, the way you should analyse a manager’s performance is to look at the long-term and whether or not they address those weaknesses.
"If they don’t do anything to fix them then the club should sack them and if they do try to and performance still doesn’t pick up or declines, again sack the manager. But you shouldn’t fire them just on the basis of the results. Managers who stay in the posts for the longer term are addressing underlying weaknesses in the club, so performance goes up. It takes about a year to affect strategic change and when you sack a manager you also lose all of their tacit knowledge of many areas, including the squad."
Paul adds that the findings are likely to be highly applicable to other areas, including business.
"Many companies have fast moving environments, similar to football clubs. It’ll be interesting for them to see the effects of what happens when things are really dynamic and you change managers or CEOs quite often – it just doesn’t work."
Like many high-flying companies, football is now certainly a results-business. And although the research has proven that sacking the manager based on results may not be good for the long-term success of the club, it’s unlikely to change. Injuries to your centre-halves, suspensions to your front men and a 4-0 home defeat by a lowly league opponent may always be enough to see the manager receiving yet another P45."
Want to know more?
- Website: www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/bs
- Contact: Paul Hughes
- Email: P.Hughes@lboro.ac.uk
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