Since publishing my experimental analysis of managers yesterday, I’ve received some questions about luck and positions in the table. Earlier today I clarified the post to explain why, in a table fixed at twenty positions, it’s hard to be both very lucky and very good or very unlucky and very bad. I thought it would be worth showing what happened when I relaxed this constraint. A club’s performance in terms of points isn’t quite as restricted, since few teams get close to the minimum (0) or maximum (114). Of course, going from points to positions in the table requires a…
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What makes a good manager? The answer depends in part on his job description. Some managers are in charge of recruitment, while others must leave it to a director of football or a transfer committee. Most managers take charge of tactics on the field, but a few give their coaches minute-to-minute control. All managers, however, try to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, bringing players together in a lineup that works. And that’s what I’ve tried to measure with these new ratings. As any student of the game knows, a club’s results can depend on both…
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Success in managing soccer teams isn’t all about merit – just ask Roberto di Matteo, who took control of Chelsea for just a few months and came away with a European Cup winner’s medal. There are managers whose teams can’t catch a break, and there are managers whose teams always get the goals just when they need them. Alan Pardew, who is apparently leaving Newcastle after four years for Crystal Palace, belongs definitively to the latter category. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean he was lucky. One of the big topics in soccer analytics is distinguishing luck (or other unknown factors) from…
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