Do Managers Matter? Simon Kuper says he could do Alex Ferguson’s job
Apart from transfer rumours, commentary on managers probably forms the bulk of football chatter. Before, during and after every game, every decision is scrutinised; every minute move debated; tactics, strategy, man-management, motivation, appearance — all feed into an endless discourse debating whether any given manager is succeeding or not. Protest and praise come by the truckload, and managers end up prematurely grey from it in every country.
Now Simon Kuper comes along and says, at least at the highest level, it doesn’t even matter who the manager is or what he does. He himself could do as good a job as Alex Ferguson. “The obsession with football managers is misguided,” Kuper writes in today’s FT. “Hardly any of them make any difference to results. The institution of manager is something of a con-trick. Ferguson and Ancelotti are best understood as marketing tools.”
Kuper cites Stefan Szymanski’s research which looked at 40 English teams between 1977 and 1997 and “found that their spending on salaries explained 92 per cent of their variation in league position.” (Though he curiously doesn’t mention it in the article, Szymanski is the co-author of a new book with Kuper using statistics to explain football phenomena).
It’s only when there are “knowledge gaps” (such as Wenger’s advanced knowledge on nutrition and foreign players in the 1990s) that a manager makes a difference, according to Kuper. At the highest level in England now, though, “the Premier League is like a market with almost perfect information,” so no such gaps exist (at least currently — how do we know this will always hold?). Therefore, Kuper concludes, “If I managed United I would probably get about the same results as Ferguson does.”
Kuper acknowledges this wouldn’t actually work in practice, as fans would not accept a man like him due to their cultural need for a manager to meet a certain stereotype — he must be over-35, a former professional, “almost always white”, and have a neat haircut. But in his view, a manager is a mere figurehead conveniently embodying a stereotype to fulfill a cultural expectation in football and avoid rocking the boat.
There is something to Kuper’s claim here. He’s right that the cultural stereotype of what a manager should look like is sadly limited and the role a manager plays certainly does become totemic to a level that exaggerates the actual impact he has. But Kuper oddly concludes that (a) we didn’t already know that the economic factor is dominant; and (b) that this means no manager would be better than any manager.
Syzmanski’s research in fact has only found what’s actually a pretty obvious fact we all understand anyway — being able to pay your players more than your rivals is by far the most important factor in a team’s success? No shit. One doesn’t need to be a professor of economics to have figured that one out. I think most fans with any sense already realise that if you put Alex Ferguson in charge of Hull City, they still wouldn’t win the league given the disparity in resources between Hull and Manchester United. Managers might be lionised, but everyone knows the reason David Moyes won’t win the title with Everton has little to do with his abilities. Common sense has told us this already.
It’s fair that Szymanski and Kuper may help redress our understanding of the balance between the factors a little, if they are correct in the 92% figure cited that leaves perhaps less of a role for managers than we commonly accept (though it’s hard to analyse this rather exact number without seeing Szymanski’s research — for example, how does it account for the fact that the clubs that spend the most on player salaries to get the best presumably also do so for managers?).
The problem is that Kuper runs away with this “discovery” to reach some curious conclusions, beginning with his belittling of Alex Ferguson’s success: “If you are able to stay manager of the world’s richest club for 23 years in an era when money determines results, you are guaranteed to stack up trophies.”
Well, yes. The question is why he has stayed so long. Kuper says it’s because Ferguson’s “accomplishment is not winning, but keeping all the interest groups united behind him for so long. They back him because of his personality, and because he seems to incarnate United.” But wasn’t it Ferguson’s accomplishment in the first place in breaking United’s title drought in 1992 that set in train their entire period of dominance and was crucial in making them the world’s richest club? Where is the analysis explaining that Ferguson had resources that had been unavailable to all his predecessors after Busby over two decades to break the long run of failure in the first place? If you’re going to make this argument based on numbers, you need to back it up with some.
Even if Ferguson has only made a 1% difference on results at United due to his management out of the remaining 8% unaccounted for in determining success from Syzmanski’s research cited, surely that’s significant at the highest level of sport, where we know the margins between success and failure are infinitesimal. After all, many teams with more resources than United have come and gone from the top. Having that consistent 1%, or whatever it is, over 23 years has obviously been critical to United’s ability to build and rebuild under Ferguson.
Sure, Ferguson probably isn’t actually a genius and by far the most important factor in the results under his tenure is indeed Manchester United’s ability to continually pay very high salaries (though notably, he often succeeded with a far tighter wage structure than rivals, something Kuper does not examine) and maybe we should mention this more often. Point taken.
But Kuper takes this and twists it to go from managers not being as crucial as we think they are (except when they are, as in the cases of Wenger, Clough and Shankly that he cites as exceptions) to not mattering at all: “One day a club will stop hiring managers, and allow an online survey of fans to pick the team. That club will probably perform well, because it will be harnessing the wisdom of crowds, and because it can use the money it saves on managers to raise players’ salaries.” (That experiment didn’t get very far with MyFootballClub, did it?)
This seems a bizarre conclusion to reach based on the evidence he’s presented. To say a manager might not make all the difference in the world as some fans think is miles away from being able to conclude on no evidence that not having a manager at all wouldn’t make a difference and would actually improve results.
Kuper has gone just a little too freakanomic here.
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Tom Dunmore is the founder and editor of Pitch Invasion. Follow him @pitchinvasion on Twitter.
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Below is the difference between 1st and second in EPL, and the difference between 4th and 5th since the English FA got 4 spots in Champions League.
38 matches / 114 possible points
Yr – 1st>2nd, 4th>5th
‘09 – 4 pts, 9 pts
‘08 – 2 pts, 11 pts
‘07 – 6 pts, 8 pts
‘06 – 8 pts, 2 pts
‘05 – 12 pts, 3 pts
‘04 – 5 pts, 2 pts
‘03 – 5 pts, 3 pts
‘02 – 7 pts, 5 pts
If you stipulate for the sake of argument that 92% of the game is explained by team payroll it still leaves you with 8% of a X factor (per Simon Kuper) accounting for just over 9 points over the course of a 118 points possible season. That 8% X factor is worth 9 points, or the difference between the title and/or Champions League money over 88% of the time. Even if your team manager is only a fraction of that 8%, it’s still quite a valuable difference.
Also, I have 96% of the same DNA as a chimpanzee but how many chimpanzees can comment on a blog?
Exactly right, Tom. It might also help to point out the rather screamingly obvious fact that money doesn’t self-consciously determine how to spend itself. If you took a club of Manchester United’s resources and allocated its spending on players by random chance, or by letting a baby spin a dial, that club would not have 92% of the success of Manchester United. Money is only effective when the management structure at the club is able to make good decisions about what to do with that money. Maybe the level at which they are able to do so on average leads to a state of affairs in which spending power accounting for 92% of success, but that’s not a mechanistic given. Decision-making still counts, even within the part of the game that’s “determined by money.”
And that’s why it’s so bizarre that Kuper uses Alex Ferguson as his example, since more than many other famous managers he’s known for making non-obvious purchases that disproportionately pay off. Remember Henrik Larsson a couple of seasons ago? I don’t remember any other managers thinking to try to bring him in on loan, but it worked for Man Utd.
“Everyone in the game now has access to best practice” is an incredibly slippery turn, by the way. He wants it to imply that under a given set of circumstances, all managers would make the same team-building decisions. But that’s obviously just not true.
Maybe Alex Ferguson wouldn’t win the Premiership with Hull City, but he did all right in Europe at Aberdeen without paying the salaries of some of the clubs he beat. One of the manager’s main functions is to keep those who hate that they aren’t playing away from the players who are playing and producing.
Someone needs to be in charge in any endeavor. Meanwhile, Kuper is looking for a cheap headline. Unfortunately, he got one here.
“No shit” is probably the quote of the month. It seems as if Kuper studied economics and statistics, wrote a book, and THEN decided it would be about soccer, err, football, err, soccer. His generalization fails to realize the difference between sustained excellence and consistent goodness. Case in point: Chelsea with Mourinho, and Chelsea with “insert manager”.
The stat which interests me is managerial longevity and success. Obviously the chicken and egg can take turns on the carousel, but certainly Arsenal and United’s ownership deserve credit for bearing the relatively lean times.
I’m also curious to see how Kuper’s theory would explain last season’s Bundesliga. I highly doubt that Hertha Berlin’s success was down to their payroll, or Stuttgart’s for that matter. I like Kuper but this is too much.
I agree, but I’ve always said that any reasonable soccer savvy fan of his team could take over for a week or two without the wheels falling off. Especially at the highest levels. Give me Barcelona for a week and I think the team will give Xerez a shellacking, no matter what I do.
Elliott makes a good point about longevity – all the effects that a change of manager brings to a side aren’t as measurable as information. Very often at this level a new manager causes significant fluctuations in motivation. How that levels out and sustains itself is a very intriguing question. How would players relate to a web poll as opposed to SAF? What would be the politics of team selection in such a case?
Having said that, I don’t know if it’s fair to dismiss his ‘wisdom of crowds’ contention on the basis of a couple of failures, Tom. I think someone ought to experiment with it. I’m confident that, given a few parameters (team and league knowledge, intent, team conditions, etc.), a sample of football fans will get all of the tactics right some of the time, and not just by chance. Leadership expectations need not always remain what they are right now.
But even if that’s true, Roswitha (personally I have serious doubts, mostly arising from the “knowledge” parameter you mention), what’s the reason to change them? I’d love to see management open up to more kinds of people than Kuper’s over-35 white men with clockwork haircuts. But beyond that, does “tactics selected by an online fan vote” really seem more fun or more entertaining than the current approach? It seems less so to me.
Your doubts re: “knowledge” are totally valid, Brian – but don’t you think, academically, that it would be a revolutionary social experiment? I feel like if it goes wrong, then it will be down to methodology more often than not. I think the major obstacles in such a case would not be about tactics – they would be about player-coach interaction, about selecting a vote sample, and stuff like that.
And also, doubting transparency in football knowledge disproves another of Kuper’s dodgy assertions, that the market is perfect when it comes to information. I don’t have a top sports journalist’s insight into these things, but I am deeply suspicious of this, especially where transfers are concerned. Not everyone can form the same relationships and networks even in much more rigidly-controlled industries – and how much more like a decentralised bazaar must the world football market be?
I do think it would be fascinating academically, Roswitha — but I wouldn’t want the subject of the experiment to be my club. I don’t think Kuper provides any evidence it would be a success, based on his specious argument about Ferguson’s success. That doesn’t rule out it actually working, of course, but the hurdles it would have to overcome are legion.
Even if it could work — ie, if Kuper is correct that managers don’t matter and collective wisdowm would achieve better results — Kuper also manages to prove his own point on why it could not work in football as it exists as a culture in the foreseeable future, due to the massively entrenched belief in the need for a manager from the supporters to players to ownership. It would require a total sea-change in attitudes. We’d need a few million more Syzmanskis and Kupers around.
I mentioned MyFC in the piece because even in that extreme example — where the supporters were the owners at a low-level of the game with little connection to the club or existing management and who bought into the whole concept based on being able to pick the team — even the first steps towards this were rejected by the supporter-owners themselves as unworkable in practice.
It’d certainly be fascinating, but almost impossible to implement without being a trainwreck from day one, I feel.
I don’t think Kuper is really trying to argue that managers are worthless. I think he’s arguing (in his words “managers are totems.” I think this is especially true of Manchester United and Arsenal where the mans of both clubs put their trust in the manager and is the club identity, especially since player turnover is so high.
I think this holds true of Chelsea, since football policy is really directed through Roman Abramovich’s spending than it is the different managers; the rest is figuring out the squad, which, I’m sure, most of us here could do.
To me, managers like Ferguson and Wenger are successful because of their abilities to grow players through their youth system and finding rare talents that others would ignore. Of course, there are also the innovators who come through once a decade and set new trends regarding formations and training and so on.
As for an experiment– surely there’s an eccentric millionaire and a (sane) blogger out there who could try this out.
Yer i think thats pretty dodgy….would Kuper have brought on a 17 year old who had never played before in the dying minutes of a massive game?… I doubt it.. While that decision may have been luck, Good managers have luck on their side, its part of the game
“(That experiment didn’t get very far with MyFootballClub, did it?)”
This suggests that the “experiment” as you put it has failed, when in fact, myfootballclub.co.uk is still going strong.
The purists will say the “Wisdom of the Crowds” thing isn’t working, but this is only the second season that MyFC have owned EUFC and things continue to evolve, change and improve.
“weenie” — I’m aware MyFC still exists. But has the “pick the team” part of the project taken place as originally envisaged?