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

Abstract

That football Head Coaches will be dismissed for poor performance and will quit when they have better outside options seems obvious. But owners may find it hard to distinguish poor performance from bad luck and may find it difficult to identify and attract talented Head Coaches from other clubs even if their current Head Coach is performing below expectations. Equally, Head Coaches may have few options to move to better clubs even when they are performing well. Using rich data on Head Coach characteristics we identify determinants of quits and dismissals across four professional football leagues over the period 2002–2015. We find that Head Coaches’ probabilities of dismissal are significantly lower when the team is performing above expectations, with the effect strongest for recent games. However, in contrast to earlier studies, we find that performing above expectations also reduces the probability of Head Coach quits. Head Coach success in the past, as well as Head Coach experience, reduce the probability of being dismissed, even when conditioning on team performance, suggesting Head Coach human capital has some ‘protective’ effect in managerial careers. Past experience has little effect on quit probabilities—with the exception of tenure at the current employer, which is associated with lower quit rates. We test the robustness of our results by confining estimates to first exits, within-season departures and by dealing with unobserved Head Coach heterogeneity.

The Performance Effects of Wise and Unwise Managerial Dismissals

“…As an alternative matching method, we follow Paola and Scoppa (2012) and Bryson, Buraimo, and Simmons (2018) and omit the restriction that each dismissal has to be matched to a nondismissal of the same team 13 . Thus, for every (un)wise dismissal, we match a corresponding (un)wise nondismissal using only the CS.…”

“…Based on the considerable influence of the head coach on the team, research on coach changes in professional football conjectures that coaches play a crucial role in determining team performance (Bryson, Buraimo, and Simmons 2018; Paola and Scoppa 2012; Koning 2003). Consequently, if coaches matter and a team performs poorly, replacing an ineffective coach with an effective one should improve team performance (van Ours and van Tuijl 2016).…”

“…33 There exist, however, some exceptions. For example, Madum (2016) finds a positive performance effect but only for home games; Muehlheusser, Schneemann, and Sliwka (2016) find that dismissals enhance the performance of homogeneous teams but not of heterogeneous teams; and Bryson, Buraimo, and Simmons (2018) find a positive performance effect after dismissals but no effect after voluntary quits. …”

Time to Say Goodbye: A Duration Analysis of the Determinants of Coach Dismissals and Quits in Major League Soccer

“…Some studies find that coach experience before employment is associated with a decrease in voluntary (e.g., Audas et al, 1999) and involuntary coach turnover rates (e.g., Audas et al, 1999;d'Addona & Kind, 2014;Frick et al, 2010). Instead, other studies find that coach experience is associated with an increase in dismissal (e.g., Van Ours & Van Tuijl, 2016) or quit rates (e.g., Bryson et al, 2020). Also, most studies find that dismissal probabilities increase with coach age (e.g., d 'Addona & Kind, 2014;Dobson & Goddard, 2001) but find an insignificant effect for quits (e.g., Van Ours & Van Tuijl, 2016).…”

“…The increasing number of studies examining managerial turnover using sports data consists mainly of two strands. While the first strand studies the determinants of coach changes (e.g., Holmes, 2011;Salaga & Juravich, 2020;Wangrow et al, 2018) and distinguishes in a small number of cases between coach dismissals and quits (e.g., Bryson et al, 2020;Van Ours & Van Tuijl, 2016), the second strand deals with the effect of coach changes on team performance (e.g., Audas et al, 2002;Bykova & Coates, 2020;Paola & Scoppa, 2012). Because this study examines the determinants of coach dismissals and quits in the context of professional football, the literature review concentrates mainly on studies in this research field.…”