One important thing to remember about André Villas-Boas is that he had ridiculously good hair.
You don’t spend a record 15 million euros (£12.9; $16.3 million) to sign a rookie manager away from Porto unless you’re sure you know what you’re getting, and one thing What Chelsea knew for sure: back in the heady days of 2011, was that the man with a swirling fox-red side part looked incredibly cool when thrown into the air during the trophy celebrations.
Villas-Boas in Porto in 2010 (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Hair like that had sexy new ideas – a philosophy, perhaps. It had the kind of brash sweep that could command a press conference, smoldering volcanically above the jagged peaks of an unbuttoned collar. But when the 33-year-old wunderkind conducted his first interview as the world’s most expensive manager, all his glamor quickly vanished.
“Don’t expect something,” Villas-Boas gently warned, “from one man.”
True to his word, he was fired in March.
Villas-Boas to Chelsea could have been considered a historic mistake if all other managers had not squandered transfer fees in the last few years alone: Marco Rose to Borussia Dortmund (€5 million advance for a dull season); Adi Hutter at Borussia Mönchengladbach (7.5 million euros, ditto); Julian Nagelsmann at Bayern Munich (25 million euros for 19 months); Graham Potter to Chelsea (let’s not talk about it). They were the cream of the crop, club head coaches couldn’t afford to wait, and yet in their new jobs they had the shelf life of a bunch of bruised bananas.
How do you know if a manager is good? The question seems almost too obvious to ask – anyone in the pub will happily explain it to you out loud over a pint – but professional organizations with millions at stake feel it every year. Apparently the answer isn’t great hair. Nor can they be trophies, because these are practically only accessible to managers already present at the best clubs. While the study of emerging coaches can be described as a science, it remains largely theoretical.
“We’ve actually been working with football clubs and leagues on what predicts success for head coaches and it’s very, very difficult,” says Omar Chaudhuri of sports consultancy 21st Group. “There are very few reliable predictors. »
Everyone loves a winner, so it makes sense that employers would start by looking for coaching talent toward the top of the rankings. But we also know that in the extremely unequal world of European football, payroll is the destiny of most teams, regardless of their technical profession. The managers we admire most are the ones who find ways to punch above their weight.
To identify these overachievers, we can start by modeling the relationship between team strength and success using Transfermarkt’s crowdsourced “market values” as a benchmark. decent proxy for the quality of players when you don’t have a salary at hand. We’ll average this season’s values with last season’s, where applicable, to give coaches some credit for player development, then weight the values based on minutes played to account for absences.
For the performance side, we will use a 70/30 mix of expected goal difference without penalty and actual goal difference, which captures team strength pretty well and places more emphasis on the parts of the game that coaches are likely to have some influence over (creating and denying chances) than the parts they probably don’t (finishing, saving shots , successfully press for penalties by doing the VAR rectangle thing with their fingers).
The results are striking. Over the past seven seasons in Europe’s biggest leagues, our simple model of player quality can explain around 80% of team success.
But what about the other 20 percent: who gets the credit?
When we look at the outliers in the graph above, it seems fair to say that Gian Piero Gasperini’s freestyle helped elevate mid-budget Atalanta’s side to Champions League contenders ago is a few years old, and that the entire platoon of head coaches and interim guys who oversaw Schalke’s disastrous 2020-21 campaign probably weren’t that passionate in their jobs. Perhaps performance relative to team value is a fair measure of what a manager brings to the table.
It’s reassuring that this season’s list of top teams in terms of adjusted goal difference versus expectations is a veritable who’s who of coaching legends and the game’s most promising managers.
Xabi Alonso turned down offers from Bayern Munich and Liverpool to stay at German champions-in-waiting Bayer Leverkusen, while Brighton’s Roberto De Zerbi, who Pep Guardiola called “one of the most influential managers in the 20 last years”. ”, remains a serious candidate for both jobs.
In Catalonia, Barcelona made eyes at Michel de Girona. Sebastian Hoeness, Paulo Fonseca, Thiago Motta and Will Still have flocks of admirers, and perhaps we should all pay more attention to what Eric Roy is up to in Brest.
So, there you have it: have we discovered the not-so-secret formula for finding Europe’s next top manager?
Well, wait a second.
An important trait for a good sports statistics is stability, or how much it varies from season to season. If last year’s performance can’t predict next year’s performance because the numbers are too context-sensitive, you probably don’t want to make that the sole basis for costly hiring decisions.
By this standard, our manager metric is a failure. For head coaches who change positions, there is no correlation between performing above or below expectations the previous year at their old club and their first season at their new club. Although the added goal difference seems quite effective in identifying this season’s hottest managers, it has no predictive value for new signings.
When Chelsea spent £21.5 million to sign Graham Potter, he had just completed one of the best runs of any head coach in the last seven years: in 2020-21 and 2021-22, Brighton have finished 22 and 13 adjusted goals better than expected. His seven months in London did not go so well.
Brighton, meanwhile, signed Roberto De Zerbi even though his last season at Sassuolo was average for his team’s value. He’d had a pretty good season the year before, and a respectable spell outside the top five leagues at Shakhtar Donetsk in between, but nothing that would have suggested his first season at Brighton would be the fourth best of hundreds in our dataset.
What could explain the difference between these two very different hiring stories? Perhaps there’s a clue in the way Brighton’s famous analytical owner Tony Bloom explained his process. “I am convinced,” he said of De Zerbi’s hiring, “his style and tactical approach will be a great fit for our existing team.”
De Zerbi (facing camera) and Potter in 2022 (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
Smart clubs don’t just hire successful managers in the hope that they have an innate knowledge of how to win. They are careful to adapt a coach’s tactics to the players they already have, knowing that changing their style will cost them time and money.
“I don’t want to have to replace 15 players or something like that over two years,” says a veteran analytics consultant, who requested anonymity to protect client relationships. “Because then it becomes a project of just cycling through players and hoping things work out.”
Not all clubs are as careful about this as Brighton. Chaudhuri explains that research often starts with a “performance element” to determine whether managers are getting the most out of their current squad, but “then you have a playing style element, with clubs generally tending to be quite vague on how they want to play. They say, “We want games to be engaging and exciting,” whatever that means. And then you say, “Okay, tell us what you think that looks like.” »
The other consultant agrees. “I had this meeting yesterday, I gave five candidates, like, ‘What do you think of these five?’ “, he said. “And he said to me, ‘Well, I like those four.’ But I said, “One of these four is actually not the style you said you wanted.” »
Determining which managers exceeded expectations is the easy part. You can watch their players toss them into the air during a trophy celebration and imagine your club doing the same next season. But success, in itself, is fickle. It also tends to be expensive. The right question is not “How do you know if a manager is good?” » but “How do you know if a manager will be good for this group of players?”
The secret ingredient to hiring the right coach is style – and not just the kind that comes with great hair.
(Header photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)
The Athletic recently profiled six of the most innovative future managers in European football.