One important thing to note about Andre Villas-Boas is his ridiculously good hair.
You don’t spend a record-breaking €15 million (£12.9; $16.3m) fee to sign a rookie manager away from Porto unless you’re sure you know what you’re getting, and something Chelsea certainly do. , in the heady days of 2011, was the man with the swirling, fox-red side-parting looking very cool tossed in the air during the trophy celebration.
Villas-Boas at Porto in 2010 (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Such hair has sexy new ideas — a philosophy, perhaps. It has the kind of rakish sweep that could command a press conference, smoldering volcano above the jagged peaks of an unbuttoned collar. But when the 33-year-old prodigy conducted his first interview as the world’s most expensive manager, all glamor quickly disappeared.
“Don’t expect something,” Villas-Boas gently warned, “from someone.”
True to his word, he was fired in March.
Villas-Boas at Chelsea might have gone down as a historic mistake if not for all the other managers teams have squandered transfer fees in recent years alone: Marco Rose at Borussia Dortmund (€5 million up front for a dull season); Adi Hutter to Borussia Monchengladbach (€7.5 million, ditto); Julian Nagelsmann at Bayern Munich (€25 million for 19 months); Graham Potter to Chelsea (let’s not talk about it). They are the cream of the crop, the club’s head coaches can’t afford to wait, but in their new jobs they have the shelf life of a bunch of battered bananas.
How do we know if a manager is good? The question seems too obvious to ask – anyone in the pub will be happy to explain it to you out loud over a pint – but professional organizations with millions at stake grapple with it every year. Apparently the answer is bad hair. Nor can it be trophies, as those are only available to managers who are at top clubs. If the study of future coaches can be called a science, it remains largely theoretical.
“We’ve done work in football clubs and leagues, actually, what predicts the success of the head coach and it’s very difficult,” said Omar Chaudhuri of sports consultancy 21st Group. “There are very few strong predictors.”
Everyone loves a winner, so it makes sense for employers to start by looking for top-of-the-table teaching talent. But we also know that in the highly unequal world of European football, wage bills are fate for most teams, no matter who is in the technical area. The managers we admire most are the ones who find a way to punch above their weight.
To pick those overachievers, we can start by modeling the relationship between squad strength and success using crowdsourced “market values” from Transfermarkt, which is a decent proxy for player quality when you don’t have wages. We’ll average this season’s values with last season’s, where available, to give coaches some credit for player development, then weight the values by minutes played to account for absences.
For the performance component, we will use a 70/30 blend of unpenalized expected goal variance and actual goal variance, which takes the strength of the team relatively well and more emphasis is placed on the parts of the game that coaches are likely to have an influence on (creating and denying chances) rather than the parts they are likely not (finishing, saving shots, successful lobs -lobby for penalties by doing the VAR rectangle thing with their fingers).
The results are remarkable. Over the past seven seasons in Europe’s top leagues, our simple model of player quality can explain about 80 percent of teams’ success.
But what about the remaining 20 percent – who should get credit for that?
If we look at the outliers in the chart above, it seems fair to say that Gian Piero Gasperini’s freewheeling style helped elevate Atalanta’s mid-budget squad into a Champions League contender a few years ago, and the entire platoon of head coaches and interim men overseeing Schalke’s disastrous 2020-21 campaign are unlikely to be too hot on their job. Maybe performance over squad value is a fair measure of what a manager brings to the table.
Rest assured, this season’s list of the top teams for adjusted goal difference over expectations is a veritable who’s who of coaching legends and the game’s hottest up-and-coming managers.
Xabi Alonso rejected overtures from Bayern Munich and Liverpool to stay at German champs-in-waiting Bayer Leverkusen, while Brighton’s Roberto De Zerbi, no less an authority than Pep Guardiola was called “one of the most -influential manager of the last 20 years ,” remains a strong contender for the same job.
In Catalonia, Barcelona are eyeing Girona’s Michel. Sebastian Hoeness, Paulo Fonseca, Thiago Motta and Will Still have legions of admirers, and perhaps we should all pay more attention to whatever Eric Roy cooks up in Brest.
Is that so — have we cracked the not-so-secret formula for finding Europe’s next top manager?
All right, just a moment.
An important characteristic for a good sports statistics is stability, or how much it varies from time to time. If last year’s performance doesn’t predict next year’s because the number is too context-sensitive, you probably don’t want to make it the sole basis for any expensive hiring decisions.
By that standard, our manager metric is a bust. For head coaches who change jobs, there is no correlation between the previous year’s performance above or below expectations at their old club and their first season at their new club. Although the difference in goals added seems to be very good at identifying this season’s hottest managers, it has no predictive value for new hires.
When Chelsea spent £21.5 million to sign Graham Potter, he was coming off one of the best runs by any head coach in the last seven years: in 2020-21 and 2021-22, Brighton finished 22 and 13 adjusted goal better than expected. His seven months in London went, well, not so well.
Meanwhile, Brighton signed Roberto De Zerbi even though his last season at Sassuolo was almost average compared to the value of their squad. He had a good season the year before that, and a respectable stint outside the league’s top five with Shakhtar Donetsk in between, but nobody could suggest that his first season at Brighton was the fourth best among the hundreds in our dataset.
What might explain the difference between the two different hiring stories? Perhaps there’s a clue in how Brighton’s famously analytical owner Tony Bloom explains his process. “I am confident,” he said of the De Zerbi hire, “his style and tactical approach will fit our existing squad very well.”
De Zerbi (facing camera) and Potter in 2022 (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
Smart clubs don’t just hire successful managers in the hope that they possess some innate knowledge of how to win. They are careful to match the coach’s tactics with the players they already have, knowing that changing styles will cost them money and time.
“I don’t want to replace 15 players or something like that in two years,” said one veteran analytics consultant, who requested anonymity to protect client relationships. “Because then it becomes a project of kind of cycling through the players and hoping that things work out.”
Not all clubs are as cautious about this move as Brighton. Chaudhuri explained that searches often start with a “piece of performance” to determine if managers are getting the most out of their current squad, but “then you have a piece of style of play, where clubs in generally it’s probably pretty vague about how they want to play. They say, ‘We want the games to be attractive and exciting,’ whatever that means. And then you go, ‘Okay, tell us if what do you think that looks like.’”
Other consultants agreed. “I had this meeting yesterday, I gave five candidates, like, ‘What do you think of these five?'” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, I want these four.’ But I said, ‘One of these four is not really the style you said you wanted.'”
Knowing which managers exceed expectations is the easy part. You can watch their players throw them in the air at a trophy celebration and imagine that your club will do the same next season. But success, on its own, is fickle. It also tends to be expensive. The right question is not “How do we know if a manager is good?” but “How do we know if a manager will be good for this group of players?”
The secret ingredient to getting the right coach is style — and not just the kind with great hair.
(Header photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)
The Athletic recently profiled six of European football’s most innovative up-and-coming managers.
