When should you sack a football manager? Results from a simple model applied to the English Premiership

Chris Hope ()
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Chris Hope: University of Cambridge

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2003, vol. 54, issue 11, 1167-1176

Abstract: Abstract What strategy should a football (soccer, in American parlance) club adopt when deciding whether to sack its manager? This paper introduces a simple model assuming that a club's objective is to maximize the number of league points that it scores per season. The club's strategy consists of three choices: the length of the honeymoon period during which it will not consider sacking a new manager, the level of the performance trapdoor below which the manager get the sack, and the weight that it will give to more recent games compared to earlier ones. Some data from the last six seasons of the English Premiership are used to calibrate the model. At this early stage of the research, the best strategy appears to have only a short honeymoon period of eight games (much less than the actual shortest period of 12 games), to set the trapdoor at 0.74 points per game, and to put 47% of the weight on the last five games. A club adopting this strategy would obtain on average 56.8 points per season, compared to a Premiership average of 51.8 points.

Keywords: management; sports; football; soccer; optimization; stochastic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601621

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