Time To Go? Head Coach Quits and Dismissals in Professional Football

Babatunde Buraimo (), Alex Bryson and Rob Simmons ()

No 10600, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: That football Head Coaches will be dismissed for poor performance and will quit when they have better outside options seems to be nothing more than a statement of the obvious. But owners may find it hard to distinguish poor performance from bad luck and may find it difficult to identify and attract talented managers from other clubs. Indeed, most of the literature indicates little improvement in team performance when one coach replaces another. Equally, Head Coaches may have few options to move to better clubs even when they are performing well. We identify significant differences between determinants of quits and dismissals that are largely consistent with a standard model which predicts departures occur when the value of the job match specific surplus for one or both parties falls below the value of outside options. However, dismissals and quits are more common in Italy and Spain than in Germany and France, suggesting institutions may be important. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of principal-agent theory and the wider literature on turnover among CEOs and other corporate leaders.

Keywords: football; team performance; managerial performance; layoffs; dismissals; quits; survival analysis; competing risks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J24 J63 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: De Economist , 2021, 169, 81 - 105

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10600.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Time To Go? Head Coach Quits and Dismissals in Professional Football (2021)
Working Paper: Time To Go? Head Coach Quits and Dismissals in Professional Football (2020)
Working Paper: Time To Go? Head Coach Quits and Dismissals in Professional Football (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10600

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().