One important thing to remember about Andre Villas-Boas is that he has really good hair.
You don’t spend a record-breaking fee of €15 million (£12.9; $16.3m) to sign a rookie manager from Porto unless you’re absolutely sure what you’re going to get, and Chelsea are sure of one thing, back in 2011. In the heady days, the man with the swirling fox-red side part looked impossibly cool as he was tossed into the air during trophy celebrations.
Villas-Boas in Porto in 2010 (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
There’s a sexy new idea to such hair—a philosophy, perhaps. It has a swagger that could shine at a press conference, smoldering volcanically atop unbuttoned jagged peaks. But when the 33-year-old prodigy gave his first interview as the world’s most expensive manager, all the glamor quickly faded.
“Don’t expect anything from a guy,” Villas-Boas warned gently.
As he said, he was fired in March.
Villas-Boas’ move to Chelsea might have been a historic mistake if it weren’t for the fact that every other coached team has wasted money on transfers over the past few years: Marco Rose to Borussia Dortmund (a lackluster one) 5 million euros paid in advance during the season); Adi Huth moves to Borussia Monchengladbach (7.5 million euros, same as above); Julian Nagelsmann moves to Bayern Munich (19 months 25 million euros); Gregor Tom Porter to Chelsea (we won’t talk about that anymore). These are the cream of the crop that the club’s managers can’t afford to wait for, but in their new jobs they have the shelf life of a bunch of bruised bananas.
How do we know if a manager is good? It sounds like such an obvious question that it doesn’t even need to be asked – anyone in the pub will be happy to explain it to you out loud over a pint – but professional organizations where millions are placed on stakes every year will hear it to this question. Apparently the answer isn’t great hair. Nor can it be trophies, as these trophies are almost exclusively available to managers already at top clubs. If the study of emerging coaches can be called a science, it remains largely theoretical.
“We’ve actually worked with football clubs and leagues around how to predict the success of a head coach, which is very, very difficult,” said Omar Chaudhuri of sports consulting firm 21st Group. “There are few strong predictors.”
Everyone loves a winner, so it makes sense for employers to start by looking for top coaching talent. But we also know that in the deeply unequal world of European football, the wage bill is the fate of most teams, no matter who is in the field. The managers we admire most are those who find ways to exceed their capabilities.
To pick out those players who are overachieving, we can first model the relationship between team strength and success using crowdsourced “market value” from Transfermarkt, which is a measure of player quality when you don’t have wages on hand. Not a bad indicator. We’ll average this season’s values with last season’s values (if available) to give coaches some credit for player development, and then weight the values by playing time to account for absences.
For the performance side, we’ll use a 70/30 mix of non-penalty expected goal differential and actual goal differential, which does a good job of capturing team strength and putting more emphasis on where a coach can have an impact on a game. (creating and rejecting chances) than the parts they might not do (shooting, saving, successfully lobbying for penalties by doing the VAR rectangle thing with their fingers).
The results are stunning. Our simple model of player quality can explain around 80% of team success over the past seven seasons in Europe’s top leagues.
But what about the remaining 20% – who should get the credit for that?
When we look at the outliers in the table above, it’s fair to say that Gian Piero Gasperini’s freewheeling style helped turn Atalanta, a mid-budget side into a Champions League force a few years ago Contenders, while the entire head coach and interim players who also oversaw Schalke’s disastrous 2020-21 season may not be enthusiastic about their jobs. Perhaps performance over team value is a fair measure of what a head coach can bring to the table.
Happily, the list of the best teams with a better adjusted goal difference than expected this season is a list of genuine coaching legends and the hottest new head coaches in football.
Xabi Alonso rejected offers from Bayern Munich and Liverpool to stay at Germany’s alternate champions Bayer Leverkusen, while Brighton’s Roberto De Zerbi, who has as much authority as Guardiola, Called him “one of the most influential head coaches of the past 20 years.” ,” remains a strong contender for both jobs.
In Catalonia, Barcelona have been keeping an eye on Girona’s Michel. Sebastian Hoeness, Paulo Fonseca, Thiago Motta and Will Steele all have legions of admirers, and perhaps we should all pay more attention to Eric Roy at Bres Everything Te has done.
So, have we cracked the not-so-secret formula for finding Europe’s next top coach?
Okay, please wait.
An important characteristic of good sports statistics is stability, or the extent to which it changes from season to season. If you can’t predict next year’s performance because the numbers are too sensitive to context, you probably don’t want to use them as the sole basis for any expensive hiring decisions.
By this standard, our manager indicator is the bust. For managers changing jobs, there is no correlation between performing above or below expectations at their old club the previous year and their first season at their new club. While an increase in goal difference seems great for identifying the hottest managers this season, it has zero predictive value for new hires.
When Chelsea spent £21.5m to sign Graham Potter, he produced one of the best performances of any manager in the past seven years: finishing 22 and 13 at Brighton in 2020-21 and 2021-22 adjusted goals, better than expected. His seven months in London were, well, not going well.
Meanwhile, Brighton signed Roberto De Zerbi, although his final season at Sassuolo was only average compared to their squad value. He had had a pretty good season the year before that, including a respectable spell outside the top five with Shakhtar Donetsk, but there was nothing to suggest he was playing well in the Bundesliga. Leyton’s first season would rank fourth among hundreds. our dataset.
How to explain the difference between these two very different recruiting stories? Perhaps some clue can be found in how Brighton’s famously analytical boss Tony Bloom explains his process. “I believe,” he said of De Zerbi’s hiring, “that his style and tactical approach will be a perfect fit for the squad we have.”
De Zerby (facing camera) and Porter in 2022 (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
Smart clubs don’t just hire successful managers in the hope that they have some inside knowledge of how to win. They will be careful to match their coach’s tactics with the players they have, knowing that changing styles will cost them money and time.
“I don’t want to replace 15 players in two years or anything like that,” said one senior analytics consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect client relationships. “Because then it becomes a project that cycles between players and hopes things work out.”
Not every club is as cautious about this step as Brighton. Chowdhury explained that searches usually start with a “performance section” to determine if the manager is getting the best out of their current squad, but “then you have a style of play section where clubs are usually very specific about how they want to play. Vague. They say, ‘We want the game to be engaging and exciting,’ whatever that means. And then you say, ‘Well, tell us what you think that’s like.'”
Another consultant agreed. “I had this meeting yesterday, and I gave the five candidates, like, ‘What do you think of these five?'” he said. “He said, ‘Well, I like those four.’ But I said, ‘None of those four styles is what you said you wanted.'”
Finding out which managers exceeded expectations is the easy part. You can see their players throwing them into the air during trophy celebrations and imagine your club doing the same next season. But success itself is fickle. It also tends to be expensive. The right question is not “How do we know if the manager is good?” but “How do we know if the coach is the right fit for this group of players?”
The secret to hiring the right trainer is style—and not just the kind with really nice hair.
(Header photo: Russ Barron/Getty Images)
The Athletic recently profiled six of the most innovative new managers in European football.
