Sack the manager!

Having just completed the lectures on the economics of sport, one thing we didn't have time to cover was managerial issues. A hugely common reaction of football supporters (and I don't doubt it's restricted to football) is when a team starts to struggle to call for the manager to be sacked (and failing that, the board too).

Clearly in the workplace if an employee isn't particularly good, it's best if they can be removed and someone more effective put in place. However, it is guaranteed that someone better can be found? Will the disruption be sufficiently small to make it worthwhile?

Does it work though?  The evidence suggests now; this paper by a couple of prominent sports economists, suggests not - in fact in the subsequent three months the team then underperforms. They look at about 25 years of data and find that there's no obvious improvement in the team's performance after a manager is replaced.

The biggest problem, of course, is that we never observe what economists call the "counter factual" - what would have happened had things been different. Hence, QPR fans can complain endlessly about how Mark Hughes has "taken them backwards", yet the fact is we don't know where QPR would be now if they had a different manager in charge since Mark Hughes was appointed.

Into that absence we can inject either some economic theory, or we can try and use data, which is what the paper linked above does. If we can look at enough episodes of teams doing badly getting rid of their manager (and not doing so), then we can see what happens, on average.

It tells us that, on average, it's not effective getting rid of a manager, yet teams persist in doing so...