Does sacking the manager make a difference in the Premier League?

Sack the manager and results improve. Last Thursday Aston Villa lost 3-0 at Fulham. Afterwards they sacked manager Steven Gerrard. On Sunday they won 4-0 at home to Brentford.

Gerrard was the fourth Premier League manager to lose his job this season. He followed Scott Parker at Bournemouth, Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea and Bruno Lage at Wolves. Before they fired their manager those clubs had averaged 1.0 points per game. Since then they have averaged 1.5. What a turnaround.

Other Premier League managers could have lost their job, among them Brendan Rodgers at Leicester and Steve Cooper at Nottingham Forest. They might still go at some point but they have not gone yet.

When speculation that their manager would be fired was at its most intense those clubs were averaging 0.3 points per game. Since then they have averaged 1.7. They were in a worse predicament than clubs who sacked a manager but they kept theirs and have experienced an even bigger upturn in results.

So, you can sack your manager and get better results, or you can not sack your manager and still get better results.

The fortunes of a football club can go up and down. I wonder: should the manager really get the blame when things go badly, or the credit when things go well – and how much?

Leaders in other enterprises generally have less influence on outcomes than they and their cheerleaders tell us. Daniel Kahneman summarised research into the CEOs of stock market-listed companies in a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. He concluded: “CEOs do influence performance, but the effects are much smaller than a reading of the business press suggests.”

Imagine pairs of companies where one CEO is better than the other. In how many pairs will the company with the best CEO outperform the other? The most optimistic answer Kahneman could find was 60 per cent.

Let us put that into context. If CEOs were entirely responsible for the fate of their companies the answer would be 100 per cent. If CEOs had no impact on performance the answer would be 50 per cent. The most encouraging answer Kahneman could find was much closer to 50 per cent than to 100 per cent.

He wrote: “It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance.”

Victor Hugo in Les Miserables said that success deceives us – it deceives us, he said, because of “its false resemblance to merit”. There were exceptions, he said, but they were rare. I suspect this holds for football managers.

One of the reasons is that when I research the records of a club’s past managers I often find that many of them are pretty much the same.

Gerrard averaged 1.2 points per game as Villa manager. His predecessor, Dean Smith, also averaged 1.2.

Frank Lampard at times has seemed in danger of losing his job as manager of Everton. He has averaged 1.1 points per game. His predecessor, Rafa Benitez, averaged 1.0.

Before them, Carlo Ancelotti averaged 1.5 points per game, Marco Silva 1.3, Sam Allardyce 1.4, Ronald Koeman 1.5, Roberto Martinez 1.4 and David Moyes 1.5 – all better and all similar.

Are Lampard and Benitez both useless? Or did something other than the manager change at Everton?

Consider another club, Crystal Palace. Patrick Vieira has averaged 1.2 points per game. So did Roy Hodgson. So did Sam Allardyce. So did Alan Pardew.

Those figures and others like them suggest two possibilities to me – that there is not much difference in ability between most Premier League managers and/or that they do not have much influence on results.

Former Premier League manager Harry Redknapp said this in a Peter Crouch Podcast: “It ain’t rocket science. Some would kid you that it is. The most important thing you need to be a great manager is great players.”

I studied the sackings of Premier League managers over 25 completed seasons, 1997-98 to 2021-22. I contrasted what happened before a sacking with what happened after. Twenty-two per cent of clubs finished in a lower position, 22 per cent in the same position and 56 per cent in a higher position. Before changing manager those clubs had averaged 1.0 points per game. Afterwards they averaged 1.2.

Typically a sacking took place after 18 games. So I looked up teams who after 18 games had 18 points – 1.0 points per game – whether they had sacked their manager or not, whether they would sack their manager or not. Over the rest of the season they also improved, and by the same amount. They averaged 1.2 points per game.

At what rate will Villa accrue points over the rest of this season for Gerrard’s successor, Unai Emery? There are a lot of potential points-per-game ratios. Perhaps the most likely is 1.2.

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