Yesterday’s dramatic 4-3 victory by Liverpool over Arsenal at the Emirates will be seen as a great triumph for Jurgen Klopp and another nail in the coffin of the reputation of Arsene Wenger. The booing at the end of the match gave a clear indication of what many Arsenal fans felt and the ‘Wenger out’ crowd will have been strengthened. The Arsenal board will pay no attention.
Yesterday’s dramatic 4-3 victory by Liverpool over Arsenal at the Emirates will be seen as a great triumph for Jurgen Klopp and another nail in the coffin of the reputation of Arsene Wenger. The booing at the end of the match gave a clear indication of what many Arsenal fans felt and the ‘Wenger out’ crowd will have been strengthened. The Arsenal board will pay no attention.
Against this background, it is interesting to read one of our leading football writers, Simon Kuper, argue that managers are much less important than they used to be. Writing in the Financial Times, he states: ‘The power of managers has long been overrated. Today, despite their outsize image, they matter less than ever. The best predictor of a club’s success is not who picks the team but the squad’s total wage bill.’
Kuper argues that his work with soccer economics guru Stefan Szymanski shows that, averaged over ten seasons, the correlation between wage bill and final league position is about 90 per cent.
Multiple regression and product moment correlations are powerful and robust tools, but outside of natural science, any regression will throw up ‘outliers’. Put simply, these are deviant cases that do not fit the model, that stand out on the plot of a linear two variable regression using ordinary least squares.
In footballing terms, it is the outliers that are interesting. Leicester City were a dramatic case in point. Kuper rather sourly observes, ‘If Leicester won thanks to the brilliance of their manager, Claudio Ranieri, it is odd that his genius did not manifest itself in the previous 30 years in coaching.’
It is clear that Leicester saw and seized a window of opportunity. Last year all of the favourites for the title faced some challenges and to some extent cancelled each other out. Manchester City and Manchester United are both in a different place this season, arguably in part due to a change of manager.
Morale at United was low, while even Kuper concedes that Guardiola has an expertise in communicating ideas to individual players, One player might require brevity, another benefits from a long discussion.
Kuper reasonably makes the point that most managers don’t last long enough to make an impression on thier clubs. Their average tenure in English football has dropped from 3.5 years in 1992 to 1.3 years now.
He also makes a good point when he says the era of the ‘total manager’ in command of his club has ended. They work with dozens of staffers, ranging from psychologists to data analysts, many of whom outlast the head coach (although casual observation suggests that there is quite a lot of churn at that level with good staff head hunted).
Kuper suggests that there is only one total manager left: Arsene Wenger. That implies that when Arsenal replace him they should overhaul their structure in line with that of other clubs.
So why the public fascination with managers? Kuper argues that this reflects not their power, but their potential as characters. He writes in the Pink ‘Un: ‘The Premier League is a soap opera that needs compelling characters.’
There is much in what Kuper says. It is much more interesting for the media to focus on Claudio Ranieri than the data analysis which he persuasively argues gave Leicester his edge.
However, I think that he overstates his case. I am reluctant to succumb to statistical determinism, but perhaps that is because I continue to adhere to a rather romantic, sepia tinged view of football that is rooted in the 1950s. I know that the hard facts tell me that things have changed and we cannot go back to what may in any case be an imagined past.