This is an article I originally wrote for the Betting School in November 2011. Some of the content should be worthwhile despite some of the data being slightly old.

 

Hit or Myth: Does a new manager make his point or points!

You have to love some of the football myths. I remember being asked which player had won the league title with Arsenal and been involved in the Munich air disaster. The answer I was  informed was John Lukic as his mum had been aboard the plane when pregnant and survived the disaster. This is absolute tosh as he was born nearly 3 years after the air crash and was based on the fact that Harry Gregg saved a woman called Mrs Lukic during the disaster who was pregnant.

Thankfully the advent of the internet means it is a lot easier to check this kind of thing and not embarrass yourself with some made up trivia which I have been guilty in the past. My brother in law likes to remind me of some dodgy trivia question I asked him about Imre Varadi and the teams he had played for which he was able to expose as rubbish and declare my knowledge as ‘bobbins’.

This month I want to look at how teams perform with a new manager. Often when a new manager arrives the perception is that the results will pick up as players try to impress the manager. This is the theory I will try to test this by looking at how teams perform in the games before and after the manager arrives to see if there are any profits to be had. I have decided to look at 4 games either side of the appointment. The reason I have chosen 4 games is then we should get two home and two away matches for each team to give a balanced result set.

I am looking at the English Leagues and have taken the information about managers leaving their jobs from the League Managers Association website which has a lot of data for this.

According the league managers association there have been, on average, just over 50 managerial changes in each of the last 5 seasons as shown below.

League	2006-07	2007-08	2008-09	2009-10	2010-11
Barclays Premier League	12	12	14	6	10
npower Championship	11	13	13	19	15
npower League One	13	12	14	12	17
npower League Two	13	9	9	13	16
Total	49	46	50	50	58

I wanted to be able to exclude any changes that happened in the off-season so to do this I only included matches where the next match after hiring was within 14 days and the last match before a firing was within 14 days. Also I have excluded any changes where the new manager was not in place within 30 days of the initial manager leaving. This leaves us with 129 managerial changes over the 5 years.

I have seen some analysis of this kind of thing before and I was expecting to confirm this as a myth but the results are quite surprising. The first thing to look at us how many matches the teams won in the 4 games before and after the managerial change.

	Wins	Games	Win %
4 games before	37	129	29%
3 games before	37	129	29%
2 games before	26	129	20%
1 game before	17	129	13%
1 game after	34	129	26%
2 games after	52	129	40%
3 games after	45	129	35%
4 games after	45	129	35%

You can see the win percentage fall as we get closer to the dismissal and then it picks up in the first game but then makes much bigger jumps in the 3 games after. Taking all 4 games together this equates to a 23% win percentage in the period leading up to the change and then a 34% win percentage afterwards.

Another thing to notice is that it is invariably a bad result that triggers the sacking as there is just a 13% win percentage in the game before a sacking. This is not rocket science but with the number of markets available to bet on for managers being sacked it could help.

After seeing the results the next question that needs to be asked is can we profit from this and the answer looks to be yes if we look past the opening match.

	Win %	P/L
4 games before	29%	-33.99
3 games before	29%	-31.69
2 games before	20%	-53.66
1 game before	13%	-76.61
1 game after	26%	-15.75
2 games after	40%	24.54
3 games after	35%	8.12
4 games after	35%	-0.28

The second and third game after the managerial change look to be the key games for getting a profit and there is some logic to this. In the first game the manager cannot change very much and sometimes is even just watching from the stands. I also believe in this game the prices reflect the fact that bookmakers expect some improvement. In the second and third game the manager has been able to work with the players and get across any new methods/tactics etc. In the fourth game the win percentage is the same as the third game but no doubt the fact that the team has improved will mean the bookmakers will adjust their prices to be lower and so the profit is eradicated.

I must that admit when I chose this choice of topic I firmly had the idea in my head it was going to be a myth but now it is time to dig deeper and see if we can find any more profitable angles.

Looking at the 129 changes the only manager that was able to produce 4 wins out of 4 was Guus Hiddink when he took over from Big Phil at Chelsea. Maybe there could be some scope in looking at the results by division.

	Profit/Loss
	Barclays Premier League	npower Championship	npower League One	npower League Two	Conference
4 games before	-10.66	-17.47	-6.26	-1.15	1.55
3 games before	-10.76	-19.42	0.09	-0.17	1.57
2 games before	-21.88	-19.84	-10.74	-8.95	-3
1 game before	-23.86	-26.19	-9.62	-16.91	-0.37
1 game after	-2.31	6.54	-10.66	-4.97	-1.35
2 games after	-2.49	13.89	1.52	12.17	2.45
3 games after	-11.11	0.69	15.82	5.6	0.12
4 games after	7.82	-3.68	-8.83	4.85	2.56

This table above shows the raw profit and loss by division. The Premier League still shows a loss for the 4 games after a managerial change. Of the 4 games it is only the fourth one that shows any profit. If we look at the Championship it is the reverse and only the fourth game does not make a profit and overall there are some decent results. League One shows an overall loss for the games after managerial change but the big loss is in the first game after the change which we discussed earlier as probably being no surprise. League Two shows a decent profit for all but the first game in and is the most profitable of the lot. There are not many results for the Conference and it is hard to take anything positive or negative from there. I will remove the Conference from the rest of the results.

If we look at the 4 games post change as a whole in the table below we can now more clearly see the loss in the Premier League and the fact the other Leagues are all quite consistent in terms of win percentage. Why is the Premier League different? My personal take is that in the Premier League has huge gulfs in class and that a poor team is a poor team and no amount of managerial magic can change that. Yes, some teams over perform but by and large most teams play to their own level. In the other divisions maybe the improvement brought about by a manager can make a very big difference.

4 games post managerial change	Barclays Premier League	npower Championship	npower League One	npower League Two
Won	34	56	45	33
Total	112	164	132	96
Win %	30%	34%	34%	34%
Profit/Loss	-8.09	17.44	-2.15	17.65

So now let’s pull all this together and see if we can find a profitable angle. The Premier League looks worth avoiding and also we have seen that the first game does not seem to yield decent results and that by the fourth game any improvement has been spotted by the bookmakers. The results for the second and third game a new manager has in charge of a team are shown below by the 3 lower divisions.

	Won	Total	Win %	Profit/Loss	ROI
npower Championship	29	82	35%	14.58	18%
npower League One	28	66	42%	17.34	26%
npower League Two	19	48	40%	17.77	37%
All	76	196	39%	49.69	25%

Some very nice returns in there and with a total of nearly 200 games spanning 5 seasons there is an average of around 40 games per year that would qualify. Something worth looking at for sure and also on the flipside you would not want to oppose a team with a new manager in these games.

The new broom does look to sweep clean in the lower divisions and I would put this one down as a hit for them. In terms of the Premier League I do not think it makes much difference and would not be too concerned with this factor.

If you have any suggestions for any myths to investigate please contact me.

Leon Pidgeon