Yesterday Claudio Ranieri scooped the English Premier League’s manager of the month award, and few would dispute that he deserved it. In fact, here at NYA we’d give him a manager of the season award for the matches played so far. NYA’s experimental manager ratings put him well ahead of the pack.

This means that Ranieri has apparently achieved much more than the ability of his squad suggested was possible. Taking luck out of the picture – and he’s had some of that, too – Leicester has overachieved relative to their quality in a way that may indeed be sustainable.

Now, it’s important to realize that many factors besides a manager can affect how players work together and whether they perform at the peak of their ability. It’s also possible that what NYA’s ratings call “luck” – getting more points than expected given underlying performances – has something to do with managerial skill. But this chart gives a pretty good indication of how much each club is getting out of its squad:

(See the note in this post about Garry Monk for an explanation of the chart.)

Ranieri’s at the top, followed by Arsène Wenger and Tony Pulis, two longtime favorites of NYA’s models – yes, that’s right, Arsenal have been unlucky this season. Louis van Gaal is also doing more than one might expect with a squad that’s outside the top quintile in talent. At Everton, Roberto Martínez is having his first decent season in the NYA rankings, at least so far.

And then there’s José Mourinho. I’ve already written speculatively about why he might be toxic for Chelsea this season. But there’s something else afoot, too. If I ran the same rankings using a ball progression model to gauge the quality of a manager, it would look like this:

Mourinho’s potential influence looks much worse for shot creation than for ball progression, though he’s below average on both. So, is Chelsea’s failure to turn good ball movement into good shots Mourinho’s fault? We could ask the same question about Eddie Howe at Bournemouth or Manuel Pellegrini at Manchester City. And we could ask a related question of Martínez; his players seem to be much better at moving the ball (fourth quintile) than they are at creating shots (second quintile), but the shots they’re getting are surprisingly good – is that sustainable?

These are probably things you’d have to be inside a club to know; at the very least, you’d have to watch a lot of video. But when the two models agree that something is wrong, there’s a good chance that, for example, The Special One isn’t exactly helping.

Oh, and Garry Monk? Still subpar.