David Moyes – To sack or not to sack?

Manager turnover vs performance:

A paper on management studies by Dr. Bas ter Weel, examining the performance of football clubs who had changed their managers in the Dutch League from 1986 to 2004, was able to establish quite conclusively that, on average, manager turnover does not significantly improve the performance of the football club in the long term.

Upon sacking of or resignation by a manager, there is an improvement in the performance in the short term, but by studying 212 performance dips for clubs against 103 resignations and 81 manager sackings, the paper is able to establish that the improvement in performance cannot be attributed to the sacking or resignation of the manager of a football club.

Reversion to the mean may be at play in most of the cases, meaning that if a team is expected to win half of its games in a season and goes on a 5 game winning run, no one should be surprised if they lose the next 3 or 4 in a row and vice versa. In the figure below, the control group is made up of all the teams that had bad results and did not change managers, whereas ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ are managers who were sacked and those who resigned respectively.

Moving four game points average vs Time (before and after sacking)

Along with that finding, the paper is also able to show (backed with data) that manager quality, as judged by their experience and achievements prior to joining a club, does not significantly matter in predicting turnover and, also, does not explain much of the performance increase after their resignation. The reasons given for believing that the manager quality does not have a significant effect in a football league is because of the small pool of teams in any league, ensuring a total of only 18-20 managers at a time.

This small market dynamic and availability of an extremely large pool of potential managers drives up the quality of employed managers and lowers the standard deviation of the average manager quality. In layman’s terms, all the managers at the top level are really good and difference in their individual abilities as managers cannot explain the performance of their respective football clubs.

A second reason given for believing that difference in manager quality alone cannot explain a difference in performance is that unlike any other management position where managers have to be qualified to face a specific set of challenges, football managers can be judged based, simply, on their playing careers and their approach to playing football which they cannot fake to their employing club because the information is available for everyone to see. A third, and relatively easier, metric of assessment is the players bought and sold by the manager for a given budget.

This places weight to the players available to a manager and because higher wages show correlation with better performance, the quality of manager becomes less significant. Also, managers who had been attacking players were equally likely to be fired as their defensive counterparts when undergoing similar bad spells.

There are no advantages to playing pretty football if you cannot get the points, even for managers. And I was a little surprised by this result as I was of the belief that a team playing beautiful but non-winning football could buy its manager some extra time compared to his (or some time in the future ‘her’) counterparts who do not care for aesthetics.

Skill vs Luck:

Another paper, titled “The performance of football club managers: skill or luck”, tried to estimate, by taking a more detailed account on a match by match basis, the impact of the manager on a team’s match performance. The method tries to take away external factors like wage bill, net transfer spend, suspensions during the season, injuries, unavailable players due to other factors and total number of additional non premier league games played by the club during the course of the season from its performance in the premier league. And by doing so, it is posited, the manager’s contribution to the success of the team can be established.

According to the method used in the study, only 14 of the 60 managers performed above expectations during the period of 2004-09 in the premier league. Surprisingly, only 7 performed significantly below expectations, which should make the 21 resigning and 27 sacked managers during the period quite unhappy. The worst ones were Billy Davies, Bobby Robson, Kevin Ball, Juande Ramos, Mick McCarthy, Sammy Lee and Tony Adams. And along with the usual suspects, the managers who performed quite well were Avram Grant, Mark Hughes, Martin Jol, Sam Allardyce, Steve McLaren and a certain David William Moyes.

The figure below suggests that David Moyes was able to get the most out of the resources that he had as he performed considerably better than what was expected of him on a tight budget. In fact, the method used in paper showed that the outside the managers in the top four, David Moyes gained the most points above his expected output.

Points per game vs Wage bill.

In addition to estimating manager performance, the paper also develops a ‘bootstrap’ method to determine when a manager should be sacked. The methodology ignores the first 10 games, called the ‘honeymoon period’ by one author, in assessing the manager performance, as this is deemed too small a time period for a manager to establish himself and also to gauge his abilities in terms of winning football games. This analysis reveals that the initial period for a new manager, even the good ones, is relatively rockier than the subsequent calm phase.

This is something that does not surprise many people. But successful/good managers are able to settle into their jobs with 10-20 games of taking charge and the performance after that period tends to stabilize. The results go as far as to conclude that upon failing to stabilize the performance to an expected level within that period, managers ‘are virtually never able to turn things around’.

The numbers in this case may be carrying valuable information about what happens at a football club that performs below expectations for a half a season under new management. This would suggest that sacking a mid-table manager who started with 1 win, 4 draws and 5 losses in his first 10 games after he has put together a run of 3 wins and 4 draws in his next 7 games is an extremely bad idea. This is because he has settled in his job and is performing as expected, even though the points total reads 20 points from 17 games. Liverpool would have made a terrible decision had they sacked Brendan Rodgers after the start he had last season. And this is not just in retrospect; this information would have been available in real time.

David Moyes – To sack or not to sack, that is the question:

Manchester United have the 3rd highest payroll in the Barclays Premier League, the first two being Manchester City and Chelsea. To a casual observer, that alone indicates that under no condition should the manager miss a champions league spot (Top four in the premier league) and keep his job. United have played 40 competitive games this season and have won only 22 of those. That is well below the expected level, given the resources at his disposal. He is well past the 10 game point in his season, so, that argument cannot be made either. Recovery rates upon reaching the point that Moyes has reached in his short time at United are low, almost zero.

There are not many reasons to believe that he will be able to steer United out of their current predicament. And that need not be taken as an assertion that Moyes is a bad manager and that is why he needs to be sacked. All that it really means is that he has breached the statistical point of no return. Because only 7 managers out of 60 performed below expectations, time is only to be provided in order to improve in the bracket that a certain club belongs to. So a high wage bill club is competing with a high wage bill club and threshold is set at the minimum desired level of performance, which in this case is a top 4 finish.

Now, that does not mean that there is no chance that Moyes will be able to fix this, but it would be irrational to think that he will be able to. A person should not play the lotto. Not because there is a zero chance of winning, but because the chance to win the lottery is so little given all the information that we have about it, that it becomes irrational to pursue that route. It would make very little sense to sack David Moyes 11 games from the end of the season, whether or not United intend to keep him long term.

It can be seen as a second chance at the first impression, statistically speaking. If he has not reached the expected level – top four over the last 11 games, he should be gone. I personally do not expect him to get to that level. But it would, strictly, be a business decision. As a fan, I want him out yesterday. But when I’m a fan, I have biases – cognitive and otherwise.

As the chief executive at Manchester United, I would have a contingency plan in place, which can be effected at the beginning of June. I would call the contingency plans Klopp, Simeone and Conte. These are, strictly speaking, sound business options approved in management classes at the best business school of the world. And being the accountant that Ed Woodward, the Manchester United chief executive, is, he should be aware of this given how big a part this is of his job.

I will not make a qualitative case for sacking of Moyes, as those have been made aplenty and all his shortcomings have been listed and explained in great detail already. Many of those are the ones that I agree to. But a style of play argument cannot account for all the variations in performance. Making a case based on that would mean suggesting that choosing an attacking style of play is better than a defensive one when trying to win a game, and there is very little evidence to suggest that to be the case. But there can be right and wrong styles.

Those are based on a particular team’s capability to play a certain style. A case for keeping or sacking a manager based on that can be made. That is, strictly speaking, a measurable managerial ability. A manager who has been sacked is not necessarily a bad manager. It can just mean that he is in the wrong situation, either of his own making or through external factors. Many a great football managers have been sacked, it is not always indicative of ability. I do not believe Moyes to be a ‘great’ manager, but he has been a very good manager for the last 10-12 years and that has not changed in the last 10 months. He will find success again, but it is unlikely to be with Manchester United, I’m afraid.

Links to the papers mentioned in this article:

1. Does manager turnover improve performance ?

2. The performance of football club managers: skill or luck ?