I am coming out on the record as being somewhat suspicious of the value of analytics when it comes to recruiting managers.
I probably have written enthusiastically about it in the past, but more and more I think this idea of using data to pinpoint precisely what a particular manager adds to a team, whether in terms of raw performance or unique playing style, is redundant.
First, the pool of available and experienced top-flight managers compared to players is small, so I’m not sure how much a deep dive is going to produce hitherto unheard of insights into managers we’ve been watching for years in Europe’s big five leagues. I am also frankly skeptical that data alone offers more insight into a particular manager’s playing style than you could glean from an intelligent interview and understanding their training methodology and tactical ideas, and more critically, whether the manager is flexible enough to adapt their approach based on the game’s ever-evolving playing trends.
This is not to say there is no value in analyzing clubs to better understand the potential influences of the manager on a team. Grace Robertson demonstrates as much in her piece from this past week on Unai Emery at Arsenal, wisely pointing out that perceptions he has brought an aggressive pressing approach are misguided. This kind of work is of clear value to clubs, who may want to get an overall picture of how a team might be performing under a newish manager, particularly if there are worrisome trends.
Even better, clubs can use data analysis to dispel a few myths that seem to persist in the game about the kind of person a club should hire as coach. This was in part the subject of Sean Ingle’s piece, largely spun out of an academic paper published last August, which found, among other things, that ex-pros, on the whole, don’t perform as well in the role as ‘outsiders.’
Incidentally, the academics found something else that teams might bear in mind. Bundesliga sides whose managers were former professional players who had played in the top two tiers of German football tended to perform worse, on average, than managers who had either not played professionally at all or played no higher than the third tier. One explanation, according to Dr Gerd Muehlheusser of the University of Hamburg, is that managers who have not been former star players themselves need to be substantially better coaches in order to secure a job as a head coach in the top leagues. “In other words, they must start their managerial career in low divisions and hence have already proven to possess some managerial quality beforehand,” he says.
Though I have my doubts about the value of the paper itself (this idea you can reliably separate the manager from the myriad other factors influencing team performance is still to me a chimera), I am on board with the idea that you don’t need to have been a racehorse to be a jockey, to paraphrase Sacchi.
What’s more, I think if we accept anyone has the potential to be an elite manager, we might be able to glean from the many examples of top tier coaches without playing experience a kind of method to produce a wider and deeper talent pool for gaffers. In doing so, we might even finally break the cycle—particularly in England—of clubs hiring the same mediocre names over and over and over again.
We may not even need to look very far to see how this might work in practice. Take Rene Maric, the tactics genius behind the overwhelmingly dense German/English tactics blog Spielverlagerung. Maric, quite rightly, insists he was a coach before he was a tactics writer, but it was undoubtedly his effusive tactics tomes that led him through a winding career path to become assistant coach at Red Bull Salzburg.
Though in some quarters, Maric’s rise seems fantastical, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone who has poured years of his life into understanding football tactics should become a skilled coach. In a recent interview with German-language publication Profil, Maric insisted anyone with enough intelligence and determination could follow in his footsteps (from Google translate):
Also Marco Rose, the Salzburg coach, was thrilled with Maric. For hours they talked about football. He could see games faster and "analyze both teams simultaneously," says Rose. Companions describe Maric as extremely intelligent. But he dismisses it. Everyone can acquire this tactical knowledge. It's about interest and practice. "If you, like me, spend a lot of time in this, you can." In the blogger scene, Maric is said to have two factors: high intelligence and extreme zeal for work.
What perhaps matters more than Maric himself is the relative openness, at least in German football, to putting someone with his pedigree in a position of significant responsibility. No amount of tactics blogs or data analyses may crack that thick cultural egg, but lord knows the midtable of the Premier League deserves far better than the rusty, 1990s era castoffs who, despite years of mediocrity and failure, still end up on the club shortlists year after year after year.