Where have all the good managers gone?
As football clubs turn more and more towards running the club with data analysis, the number of elite managers has dwindled. Is this a coincidence?
Let’s rewind to the summer of 2016. Manchester City has just hired Pep Guardiola as their new manager. Manchester United have hired ex Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho while Chelsea have brought in Antonio Conte. These are some of the biggest coaching names in Europe joining a Premier League roster that already includes Jurgen Klopp and Arsene Wenger - even if the latter is a bit past his sell by date.
This was the beginning of the end of the height of the Messi vs Ronaldo rivalry that made La Liga the dominant league for most of the decade. The Premier League was making a statement. La Liga’s time will soon be up, and we’re going to be there when it is. First we’re going to bring in the best coaches in Europe. The best players will shortly follow.
Take a look at the list of managers during that 2016-17 season.
There are still some old guard British guys on that list like Tony Pulis, Mark Hughes, and Big Sam. Then there’s up and coming Mauricio Pochettino, Ronald Koeman had just moved up in class to Everton after a successful stint at Southampton, and Slaven Bilic’s stock was at an all time high after a great season at West Ham.1 They’re all next to some of the biggest names in the sport.
The quality of coaching in the Premier League was already far better than it had been just five years earlier and it was only getting better. Fast forward four years to the 2020-21 season and take a look at that list of managers.
Jose Mourinho started the season at Spurs. Thomas Tuchel took over Chelsea midway through the season but good god, multiple Champions League winner Carlo Ancelotti is managing Everton! That’s the power of the Premier League - even the clubs that aren’t the title contenders let alone even in European competition still have the ability to allure the biggest names in Europe. That was how much the Premier League had grown.
More importantly, it’s a testament to how many big names there were in coaching just three years ago.
Within the first two months of 2024, news broke that both Liverpool and Bayern Munich will be looking for new managers this summer. The favorite for both those vacancies is… Xabi Alonso?
Alonso is doing a fantastic job at Bayer Leverkusen. He’s well on his way to ending Bayern’s decade of dominance at the top of the Bundesliga, which is nothing short of a tremendous accomplishment. This is also just his second season of top flight management, and now he’s the front runner for two of the biggest jobs in Europe?
If that sounds a bit bizarre, it is. On the other hand look around, who else exactly is there?
If tomorrow every club in Europe were to hold a draft of currently available managers to start fresh with their club, who is getting selected after Pep? We’re talking about the guys with resume’s. Mourinho is already passed it and will struggle to find another club. Antonio Conte may have already burned all his bridges. Thomas Tuchel doesn’t seem to last more than a year at any job - and he’s not helped by his drab football.
Carlo Ancelotti will go pretty high but he’s up there in age and seems to be on his way out. Who’s next? I think Mikel Arteta is a lot better than a lot of people - including myself - originally gave him credit for but is Mikel Arteta really one of the top managers in Europe? Really?
In just three years Europe’s coaching landscape has gone from having big names all over to place to being a barren landscape.
How did that happen?
The short answer is data happened. The longer answer is teams have gotten smarter.
Last year Kwest Thoughts published a piece on how football discourse is still obsessed with coaches. A match pitting Manchester City against Liverpool is promoted as Pep Guardiola vs Jurgen Klopp. We’re obsessed with the idea of one person being in control.
For a long time that’s the way it was. The manager did everything at the club, so naturally all the success was down to him as were the failures. As clubs started growing that became impossible; you can’t expect one person to run the training sessions and draw up the tactical plans while also scouring the globe for new talent and actually scouting those players. There’s simply not enough hours in the day.
Not only that, it’s just a foolish way to do things. Scouting players and coaching players are two completely different skillsets. Most coaches don’t have any background in scouting. Why then would you ask them to take time away from what they’re good at to be scouts?
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As the money flowed into the game clubs started to realize that winning couldn’t be taken for granted anymore. They started looking for inefficiencies in the game that could be exploited. Any marginal gain they could get could be worth millions. That’s where the data revolution began.
Clubs that embraced data early on started winning. Clubs that didn’t quickly took notice and moved to catch up before it was too late. There’s also been an influx of data driven owners bringing that mindset to clubs.
As every year goes by more and more data floods into the game. As more data comes in, more things get studied. One of the things that is commonly studied is how much impact does a coach have on a teams place in the final table?
More and more research continues to be done on the topic but all of it keeps leading to the same place. At the top level, as long as you have a baseline level coach, coaches don’t matter all that much. Here’s what AC Milan owner, Luke Bornn, said to ESPN’s Ryan O’ Hanlon on the matter:
Scott Willis of CannonStats used data from Macro Football to try and put a points value on managers. He found that the overwhelming majority of managers are only worth between -1 and +2 points in the table. Anything better than that is incredibly rare and anyone worse doesn’t last too long.
As teams get smarter they’re realizing managers are only as good as the players they have. Last season I wrote about how big of an impact timing has on managerial careers. The most successful managers are often the ones lucky enough to take over right when a star player - or star generation - is coming through the ranks.
Go back up to the list of managers from the two highlighted Premier League seasons. Look at where the ‘up and coming’ managers are now.
Ronald Koeman took over Southampton when their recruitment was operating at an extremely high level. He rode the success of having players like Sadio Mane and Virgil Van Dijk2 into a new job at Everton. He didn’t have players like that at Everton and he failed. He went to Barcelona where the club was dismantling a post Messi team. There was some talent there but overall this was one of the least talented Barca squads in decades and naturally he failed3.
A year and a half after Koeman left Southampton, the Saints hired Ralph Hassenhuttl. Hassenhuttl took over towards the end of Southampton’s run of great recruiting. Some higher ups left the club but also, you can only find so many Mane’s, Adam Lallana’s, Luke Shaw’s, and Van Dijk’s before hitting an inevitable dry spell. The club stopped churning out talent as well as they had been, Hassenhuttl was eventually sacked and Southampton were relegated.
Hassenhuttl came from the Red Bull pipeline, a club that knows all about this concept. Red Bull tends to promote from within because they already know the coaches will be playing a style that fits the style of their players.
Hassenhuttl was replaced at RB Leipzig by Julian Nagglesmann. Nagglesmann rose to prominence as one of the hottest minds in Europe behind a team lead by Timo Werner, Marcel Sabitzer, Dayot Upamecano, and Christopher Nkunku - all would eventually make big money moves away from the club. When he was poached away by Bayern Munich, the club brought in Jesse Marsch from Red Bull Salzburg. Marsch’s arrival at Salzburg coincided with the arrival of someone called Earling Haaland.
As for the club that poached Nagglesmann from Leipzig, Bayern Munich, they’re certainly familiar with the idea that the coach doesn’t matter. The Bavarians’s won 11 straight Bundesliga titles having employed nine different managers during that span. Are they winning because they have the best coaches or because they have the best players?
As for the coaches, what’s happened to them?
Nagglesmann won a league title at Bayern as everyone does, then found himself out on his ass the next season4. He didn’t get many looks last summer and ended up being named manager of the German national team in September. At 36 years old he’s already in international football.
Marsch took over a Leipzig side that had just lost most of it’s key players. A dip in form was inevitable but that didn’t stop him from being axed after just five months. He moved on to Leeds where he found a team that didn’t suit his style and he didn’t last long. He hasn’t had a coaching job since. Speaking of hasn’t coached since, neither has Ralph Hassenhuttl since being sacked by Southampton in 2022.
There’s also Graham Potter. At the start of the 2022-23 season he was the next guy coming up in Europe. It only took six games for Chelsea to pry him away from Brighton. Yet Brighton didn’t miss a beat when he left. Potter meanwhile struggled at Chelsea and even though everyone agreed that this Chelsea side was impossible to succeed with, Potter hasn’t worked since.
How many of these coaches were actually that good? In January 2023 US Soccer announced they were conducting a full review of the position of Head Coach Gregg Berhalter - including bringing in an outside agency to help them find candidates. Six months later they announced that their next head coach would be… Gregg Berhalter, not because Berhalter is particularly great but because there really wasn’t anyone better out there.
We used to think that coaches made the players. Now the wisdom is shifting towards it’s the players who make the coaches.
The smartest clubs all understand this. If you choose the wrong manager, you can just make a change whenever you feel like it. If you sign the wrong player to a five year contract, you’re stuck with that player for five years.
Therefore the manager can’t be the most important person at the club. The most important person at the club is the one who is going to make sure you’re not signing the wrong players.
New Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe said just as much in his first official interview as United owner.
In older times managers used to have larger than life personalities and pretty much became the football club. They were essentially functioning as the coach, CEO, COO, Recruitment Director, Director of Football, and Sporting Director all in one. Of course they became the football club.
In today’s game, all those positions are filled by different people, making the manager nothing more than a cog in the system. As clubs get smarter they’ve learned that it’s not practical to fit a team to a coach, but rather fit a coach to a team. In that case, why spend big money on a big name coach when you can just grab a cheaper one should you need to discard him? Why pay a large salary to someone with a big ego who is going to openly complain about how this system works? Not to mention, with FFP rules as they currently are, the less money you spend on a coach, the more you can spend on players.
Clubs aren’t looking at resumes anymore. With every year that passes there are fewer and fewer clubs who are looking at how many trophies you’ve won. They’re looking at what kind of football you have your team play. Does your style fit the players we currently have? If the answer is no, it doesn’t matter what you’ve won in the past, they’d rather take a chance on someone else.
Over the long term coaches don’t win football matches, players do. But football is still a game whose fans demand immediate gratification. If you’re team isn’t doing well in December you can’t change the players, but you can change the coach and give off the appearance that you’re doing something.
Clubs are getting smarter while the talent gap continues to grow. Over the last decade the Champions League has been dominated by Real Madrid and the English clubs. The richest teams who can afford the best players and the team with the best players.
In the old days information didn’t travel as freely as it does now. If a coach had a new tactic or a new way of thinking about the game, no one else knew about it until they played you. That was a huge advantage that could propel you to success for years. In 2024, if you employ a new tactic in a League Cup match it’s blasted all over the internet within a few hours. There’s no secrets anymore. No one is that much smarter than anyone else.
As football clubs grow more astute they’re realizing this. If no coach is that much smarter than anyone else then it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge. You can chop and change all you want. The only thing that matters is a consistency with how they want the players to play.
There used to be a huge knowledge gap between the best managers and those that were merely qualified managers. In 2024 that gap has closed. The average manager has caught up.
Of course we know some of these reputations would change but that’s kinda the whole point of this whole thing
Two players who’d go on to be key parts of a Premier League and Champions League winning team
In between he had a stint with the Netherland where he lead them to qualification to Euro 2020 - their first tournament since the 2014 World Cup. Nothing spectacular, but exactly what their talent level suggested they should accomplish. They also were runners up in the 2019 Nations League.
As everyone at Bayern also does
Great piece, but I feel like saying Nagelsmann didn't get any looks with the implication that he's in international football due to a lack of options/quality (even though Spurs and a couple of other big clubs wanted him last summer, and his sacking was pretty widely reported to be for primarily non-football reasons) is inaccurate.
Bayern are literally trying to get him back after Tuchel ended up doing worse with the same squad (actually, a better one). He's shown through consistent results and adaptability throughout his career that he's among the top crop of coaches in terms of impact.
Great article! Just a question - you've stated previously on X that you don't rate ETH as a good manager. Does that mean you think a bad manager can more significantly influence their team's performance compared to a good manager? If even an average manager could get more out of the current squad, should we look to replace ETH over the summer, even if the potential to sign new players is significantly limited? After all, CL qualification is essential as far as FFP is concerned, Sir Jim Ratcliffe said so himself.
Lastly I'd just like to point out a typo in the text body - the line "Some higher ups left the club but also, you can also find so many Mane’s, Adam Lallana’s, Luke Shaw’s, and Van Dijk’s before hitting an inevitable dry spell" should read "you can only find so many..."