EFL Managers Pay the Price of Muddled Thinking

It is no secret that the shelf life of a Premier League manager has been shortening steadily over the last decade as the amount of money in the game has increased. 

One of the busiest betting markets in football is the Next Premier League Manager to Leave Post market, which currently features Sheffield United’s Paul Heckingbottom as the favourite. By the time you read this, the Sheffield United board may have already decided to roll the dice in the hope that his replacement can keep the Blades in the top flight.

This phenomenon is not confined to the Premier League, however. Across all levels of the professional game, it seems that patience is dwindling, and managers are paying the price.

So far this season, 24 managers in the Championship, League One and League Two have left their posts through sacking or mutual consent. Ten years ago, the figure at the same point of the season was just 12. Since the beginning of October, six Championship clubs have dismissed their manager. Sheffield Wednesday are on their third manager this calendar year.

Once the season is underway, the period from the start of November through to early December is the deadliest time for managers, as clubs decide whether to pull the trigger ahead of the hectic Christmas schedule and the crucial January transfer window, which means we can expect a flurry of sackings and departures as 2023 winds down.

It could be argued that increased money in the game, at least some of which trickles down to the Championship, League One and League Two, means higher stakes for clubs and a higher performance level from managers, particularly given the intense competition for manager positions.

Since the end of the 2020/21 season, 124 managers have been dismissed across the four English leagues. The parallel figure a decade ago was 92. Yet there is no sign that demand is coming close to outstripping supply, and every year a fresh crop of hopeful young managers scramble for a seat on the EFL merry-go-round. So why not roll the managerial dice every season?

Some clubs are more trigger happy than others. Watford has had six managers since Xisco Munoz was fired in October 2021. At the time Munoz was sacked, the Hornets were 15^th in the Premier League, and at the time of writing, they are 13^th in the Championship.

Fans might argue that managers are well paid and that high profile jobs attract high salaries and equally high risks. Certainly, no-one would argue that football manager should be a job for life, and loyalty, particularly in the lower leagues, is a two-way phenomenon.

The problem is that there is no evidence that replacing your manager every 18 months produces results, not even in the short term. The so-called ‘new manager bounce’ has been studied many times and has been shown to be non-existent. One of the most compelling studies came in 2017, when a football consultancy took a closer look at team performances either side of managerial departures.

On the surface, there was some evidence to support the theory that a new manager produces a short-term boost to performance. The study of football leagues across five nations found that the average number of points gained in the eight games before and after a dismissal rose from 0.8 to 1.2.

Look closer, however, and you find that based on Expected Goals, which is a more accurate measure of a team’s performance, they averaged 1.2 points per game before and after the manager’s dismissal. In other words, there was no significant improvement in performance.

In a low-scoring game like football, it is often unwise to draw conclusions based on a small sample of results. Yet it seems this is exactly what clubs are doing. Watford is an egregious example of a club committed to this failed strategy, but across the football league it seems that clubs are making muddled decisions under pressure, for which they are often not held to account.

The chaos at Manchester United over the last decade has provided a high-profile example of well-paid executives pulling the plug on managers without any regard to the upheaval caused, with the result that the club has spent millions on assembling different squads for different managers, with diminishing returns in terms of points and trophies.

Where the Premier League leads, it seems that the Championship, League One and League Two follow. Football fans are often accused of short-term thinking, but those in charge of our football clubs are often equally guilty of muddled and panicky reasoning and it is managers who pay the price.