European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

www.elsevier.com/locate/ejor

O.R. Applications

Within-season dismissal of football coaches: Statistical

analysis of causes and consequences
Juan de Dios Tena

a,b,1

, David Forrest

c,*

Departamento de Economa, Universidad de Concepcion, Victoria 471, Concepcion, Chile

Dipartamento di Economia, Impresa e Regolamentazione, Universita di Sassari, Via Torre Tonda 34, 07100 Sassari, Italy
c
School of Accounting, Economics and Management Science, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, UK
Received 20 September 2005; accepted 22 May 2006
Available online 20 July 2006

Abstract
The paper examines the triggers for, and, consequences of, within-season dismissals of managers (head coaches) in the
top division of the Spanish Football League during seasons 20022003 to 20042005. A major reason for directors deciding
on dismissal is shown to have been concern that the club in question was in danger of demotion out of the division. This
suggests that the clubs hoped to bring about short-term improvement in performance by changing manager. Employing an
ordered probit model of match results, we demonstrate that an improvement in results tended to be achieved but only in
home matches. The nding vindicates the decisions taken by club directors who dismissed their managers and implies that
appeasing fans can have on-the-eld benets. It is consistent with the importance attributed to crowd support in the literature on home advantage in sports.
2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Football; Managerial change; Scapegoat hypothesis; Ordered probit; Home advantage

1. Introduction
In most sorts of organisation, there is a natural
time for changing leadership. In a political party,
it may be after an election defeat. In a business, it
may be when the contract of the Chief Executive
Ocer (CEO) comes up for renewal or when he
reaches a certain age. In a sports club, it is certainly
at the end of a season. Then a new manager will
*

Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 161 295 3674.

E-mail addresses: juande@uniss.it, juande@udec.cl (J. de Dios
Tena), d.k.forrest@salford.ac.uk (D. Forrest).
1
Tel.: +56 41203204.

have time to train his players to adapt to his strategic approach and to recruit new personnel where
appropriate. This mitigates any tendency for disruption to productivity to be associated with the
replacement of the old regime.
Despite the arguments that there is benet to
switching management only at convenient predetermined times for which preplanning is possible,
organisations occasionally dismiss their leadership
with unconventional timing. Bad opinion poll ratings
may lead to a no-condence motion on the leader of a
political party. Falling market share may induce a
board of directors to dismiss their CEO. Similarly,
faced with a series of losses on the eld, the owners

0377-2217/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.05.024

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

of a sports team may decide to dismiss the manager

(or head coach, as he is termed in many countries).
It is of interest whether decision takers typically
achieve their goals when they act in this apparently
precipitate way, which runs the risk of disruption to
the organisation and which may involve high direct
costs in the form of compensation payments for termination of contract. It may be that decision takers
correctly assess when a situation is suciently serious and suciently attributable to the behaviour
of the current leadership to justify immediate dismissal. On the other hand, they may often act out
of panic or may be indulging in scapegoating to
appease stakeholders such as party members, shareholders or fans of the team.
In the literature on managerial change in rms,
there is general agreement that poor prior performance is correlated with the enforced departure of
management (see, for example, Groves et al.,
1995) and some studies point to the policy tending
to be successful (Weisbach, 1988; Groves et al.,
1995; Warzynski, 2000; Hudson et al., 2004). However, diculties arise in selecting which indicators of
rm performance, over what time period, are relevant in testing. Where stock market performance
was the yardstick, Warner et al. (1988) and Cools
and van Praag (2003) found no evidence that managerial change induced better performance.
We examine the issue here in a sports context.
We focus below on 20 within-season involuntary
changes of manager in the Spanish Premier (football) League during the seasons from 20022003
to 20042005. We show that a signicant predictor
of dismissal of management was the club falling into
the part of the standings where demotion from the
division occurs at the end of the season. It is fair,
then, to characterise dismissal in this context as a
response to a situation where the club urgently
needs league points. At this end of the standings,
a small dierence in points accumulated through a
season can make a very substantial dierence to
the nances of the club as those forced into the
immediately inferior division will suer a major loss
in revenue earning capacity.
Compared to the literature on the impact of managerial change in business generally, there is the
advantage here of no ambiguity about what needs
to be measured to assess whether sacking managers
has been a successful strategy: we need to model the
impact of managerial change on on-the-eld outcomes (which themselves are clear cut and not open
to massaging by discretionary accounting).

363

In Section 2, we review relevant studies in the

sports economics literature. In Section 3, we model
the determinants of managerial change. Section 4
employs an ordered probit model to assess the
short-term impact of managerial change on team
performance in home and away matches. Section 5
oers a more detailed analysis, with calculation of
marginal eects for a team facing the threat of relegation. Section 6 concludes.
2. Previous sports studies
In their comprehensive text on The Economics of
Football, Dobson and Goddard (2001, Chapter 6)
include a review of studies, in North America and
elsewhere, of the impact of change of coach on team
performance. Much of the work looks at whether
team output improves in the season(s) following
managerial succession but this is more relevant to
the assessment of between-seasons change of manager. Here our concern is with whether dismissal
of a manager during the season (and a crisis) has
typically reaped short-term dividends. We refer
therefore only to those studies which relate management change to subsequent results in the same
season.
Gamson and Scotch (1964) were early contributors to the literature. Their tests were inconclusive:
they reported that win-ratios improved in 13 of
the 22 cases of within-season managerial change
observed in Major League Baseball between 1954
and 1961. For American Football, Brown (1982)
reported a number of tests that allowed him to compare the subsequent win-ratios of teams which had
performed badly early in the season and red their
coach and a control group of teams with similarly
bad records but which had continued under the
same management. Recovery from on-the-eld
slump was similar as between the two groups. The
nding was suggestive that ring the coach was
irrelevant to the resolution of the slump in results;
but we would point out that a conceivable alternative explanation might be that club owners could
correctly distinguish between slumps being attributable to bad management and bad luck and that the
rst group of teams may not have recovered at all
without the crisis response.
In soccer, Audas et al. (1997) for English leagues,
and Bruinshoofd and ter Weel (2003) for the top
division in The Netherlands, compared the recovery
of teams that had sacked the manager during a
slump with that of those that had not. In each case,

364

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

the recovery rate of the rst group was actually

worse than that of the control group, casting further
doubt on the ecacy of a dismissal strategy. However, the same caveat concerning selection bias
again applies: the boards of clubs that left their
manager in place may have been just those who
(correctly) anticipated that the teams fortunes
would soon turn around.
A more recent approach is based on econometric
modelling of individual match results. This avoids
issues of how to select a control group and takes
into account the quality of opposition a team faces
before and after managerial change. Results have,
however, again failed to vindicate decisions by club
directors to re their coach.
Koning (2003) modelled team rankings and individual match results in the Dutch Premier (football)
League. The model for determining match results
had as dependent variable the dierence in goals
scored between the two teams in a match. Explanatory variables were quality indicators of the two
teams and a dummy to reect which was playing
at home. The parameters of the model were permitted to vary with change of manager.
Koning analysed ve seasons of data from the
Dutch Premier League. In this time, there were 28
coaches red of which four were terminated during
the rst season, 19931994. For 19931994, Koning
found a signicant change of coach eect, with
improvement detected in team quality and in the
extent of home advantage. However, the result
was not replicated for any of the four following seasons (though home advantage improved following
dismissals in 19961997) and Koning concluded as
follows: ring a coach occurs too often. Since it
is not clear that the results on the eld improve after
a change of coach, it is likely that the board of a
team intervenes for other reasons. It is likely that
fan and media pressure are also strong determinants
of the tenure of a coach.
Recently, a popular approach amongst economists in the eld of modelling match results has been
ordered probit or logit with three ranked outcomes,
home win, draw and away win (see, for example,
Kuypers, 2000; Forrest and Simmons, 2000; Goddard and Asimakopoulos, 2004). Work reported by
Audas et al. (2002) and Dobson and Goddard
(2001, Chapter 6.8) adapts a very detailed ordered
probit model to address the issue of whether match
outcomes are inuenced by recent changes in manager. This is achieved by adding to the regressors
variables that reect whether one of the teams has

recently changed manager: there are separate dummies for whether it is the rst or second (and so
on) game since the change in regime. Total impact
is measured by summation of the coecient estimates on these dummy variables. The nding is that
managerial change tends to have a negative eect on
team performance in the remaining weeks of the season, further evidence for the scapegoating hypothesis of managerial change: during a poor run of
results, directors may dismiss the coach to appease
club supporters rather than in any real hope of
short-term amelioration of the clubs plight.
Although scapegoating has been associated in the
sports literature with the need to placate disgruntled fans (Dobson and Goddard, 2001, p. 265), this
abstracts from the possibility that the latter will
itself be a route through which change in management can lead to improved performance on the
pitch. Players talk of the importance of fans getting behind the team and this belief, that the enthusiasm of the crowd matters, that it aects the
performance of the team and perhaps the decisions
of the referees, is reected in academic analysis of
the sources of home advantage. If ring the manager rekindles the enthusiasm of a crowd grown sullen from repeatedly adverse results, the policy may
have a payo in terms of league results even if it
may be characterised in one sense, that of punishing
an innocent man, as oering a scapegoat. There is
a hint of this in Konings nding that, in two of ve
seasons analysed, home advantage strengthened for
those clubs that had changed manager in the Dutch
League. To test the hypothesis further, we will make
a distinction, in our empirical analysis below,
between impact of managerial change on home
and away performance. In contrast to some previous studies, our analysis will control for the quality
of opposition faced in matches played subsequent to
a change of manager. First though, we present statistical analysis of what triggered managerial change
in our context of Spanish football.
3. Causes of managerial change
The Spanish Premier League is structured in the
same way as, for example, that in England to the
extent that there are 20 teams that play each other
on a home-and-away basis to give 38 rounds of
matches (380 individual games). Three clubs are
demoted to the immediately inferior division at the
end of each season, to be replaced by three clubs
promoted from that division.

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

Our sample covers seasons 20022003 to 2004

2005. There were 20 involuntary changes of manager during this period. We exclude from our analysis two voluntary departures, from Villarreal
following the 26th round of matches in 20032004
and from Real Madrid after the third round in
20042005. Of course, whether resignations are
truly voluntary may, in some circumstances, be
ambiguous, since a coach may be willing to leave
by mutual consent given adequate compensation
for the shortening of his contract. However, for
the two particular cases at Villarreal and Real
Madrid, we were satised, after an examination of
contemporary newspaper reports, that the terminations were initiated by the coaches themselves. Neither of them sought any nancial compensation for
early departure.
The frequency of within-season dismissals in
Spain appears to compare closely with that in the
top division in English football: Dobson and Goddard (2001, p. 275) report there to have been 156
such terminations in 27 seasons up to 19981999,
a rate of 5.8 per season. In the slightly smaller
Dutch Premier League, Koning (2003) tabulates
experience during ve seasons when an average of
5.6 managers per season were red. The relative frequency with which Spanish coaches are dismissed is
therefore of a similar order of magnitude as in other
European leagues.
We constructed a probit model to account for
within-season dismissal of the coach. The variable
to be explained took the value one if the coach of
team i was dismissed between match round t 1
and match round t. With three seasons data, and
with the rst round of each season excluded, there
were 2220 observations. Relevant information, for
example, on match scores, league positions and club
budgets, were obtained from the newspaper websites, www.elmundo.es and www.marca.es. Our period of analysis was constrained by the limits on the
period for which some of these old data continue to
be displayed on the websites.
Explanatory variables in the probit specication
included the time of season (represented by the
match round number and its square) and a measure
of managerial eciency (the number of places by
which a clubs current position in the League is
superior to its ranking in terms of its (wage) budget). There were also dummy variables set equal to
one to signify, respectively, that the team was in a
relegation position in the standings, that the team
had lost its match in round t 1, and that the team

365

had already dismissed a manager in the current

season.
Variables with which we experimented in an earlier specication but which were ultimately excluded
on grounds of extreme non-signicance included:
dummy variables for newly promoted teams and
for teams playing in the European Champions League; size of club (wage) budget; an interaction term
equal to eciency multiplied by the relegation
zone dummy; and, to represent club culture, the
number of within-season dismissals of the coach in
the preceding three years.
Some of these variables had appeared to be
important from inspection of simple correlations
with the incidence of dismissal. For example, the
mean budget for clubs which did dismiss their manager in a given season was much lower than for
clubs which did not (33.24m compared with
58.65m). However, multivariate analysis reveals
that low spending per se was not the cause of dismissals. Rather, the threat of relegation proved to
be the principal trigger to change manager and, naturally, this threat is most commonly faced by the
lowest spending clubs, hence the correlation. In
respect of certain other covariates that failed to be
signicant, it should be noted that much less than
one percent of the observations were positive: it is
then to be expected that some plausible variables
will fail to account, in a statistical sense, for the pattern of dismissals.
Results from our nal specication are displayed
as Table 1. In the result on managerial eciency,
there is evidence that boards of directors were realistic to the extent that they assessed coach performance by considering league position relative to
what was to be expected given wage expenditure.
Generally, the raw data indicate that dismissals typically occurred at clubs, which were underperforming relative to the size of budget. The mean value
of the eciency variable at the time of dismissal
was 3.85. Often this improved subsequent to a dismissal, so that the mean value of eciency at the
end of the season (or at the next change of manager
if sooner) at clubs which had red was 2.18. Thus,
on the face of it, changing manager tended to be a
successful strategy; but this result cannot be considered denitive without econometric testing reported
below.
A key trigger of deciding to dismiss the coach
appears to be that a team is in one of the relegation
places in the standings. The relegation dummy,
and another used to signify that a team had lost

366

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

Table 1
Probit results: Manager dismissed before match t
Coecient
Match round number
Square of match round number
Dummy: team lost last game
Dummy: club is in relegation zone
Managerial eciency
Dummy: failing top team
Dummy: club has already dismissed a manager in the current season

0.095
0.002
0.525
1.025
0.046
0.584
0.771

Standard error
0.046
0.001
0.203
0.226
0.024
0.378
0.278

p
2.06
1.72
2.58
4.54
1.96
1.55
2.78

.039
.086
.010
.000
.050
.122
.005

Number of observations: 2220.

Pseudo-R2: 0.21.

its most recent xture, attracted highly signicant,

positive coecient estimates. On the other hand,
results from xtures two and three matches ago
(entered individually or represented by categorical
variables representing successive defeats) did not
prove signicant and are omitted from our model
as reported; this indicates that it was the relegation
threat that was key rather than a run of poor results
per se. Therefore, we may generalise that the threat
of relegation is a strong proximate cause of managerial dismissal; but if the team has at least not suffered defeat in its most recent match, the manager
is likely to be given another chance. So far as timing
is concerned, the coecient estimates on the round
number of the next match and its square, which give
a turning point of 26.04, imply that directors are
most likely to act between the 25th and 26th
matches of the 38 match schedule. If a club is in
the relegation zone at this stage in the season, it is
safe to say that relegation is a distinct possibility:
but there are enough games left that a new manager
might have time to engineer an escape.
The situation described by our result appears
similar to that in English football. Dobson and
Goddard (2001, p. 273) link the record high number
of dismissals across the English leagues in season
19941995 to a restructuring of divisions that meant
that, in that year, more clubs than usual would be
relegated. Relegation is the worst development possible from the perspective of fans and is also likely
to cause nancial problems for the owners. It is
not surprising, therefore, that ring the manager
in-season can be characterised as being often a
response to the crisis of possible relegation. If the
manager can be blamed for the clubs plight, the situation cannot be righted by waiting to the end of
the season to dismiss him because, by then, the club
may be out of the division. The manager in such a
case is in a similar position to the chief executive

of a corporation, which is not merely delivering disappointing results but faces the possibility of actual
liquidation.
It might be speculated that, near the top of the
standings, there are also especially severe nancial
consequences to underperformance relative to sums
committed to player salaries. While in the middle
rankings of the division, it will not make much difference nancially if the club gains a few more or
less points, amongst the leading clubs these points
might determine success or failure to qualify for
the highly lucrative European Champions League.
We therefore included an additional variable related
to the performances of three leading clubs, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Valencia. These are the clubs
with the highest budgets, the only clubs to have won
the League Championship in the last ve years and
the only clubs, which would regard playing in the
Champions League as routine. The variable (failing
top team) takes the value one whenever one of these
clubs is, at the time of the observation, outside the
qualifying zone for the Champions League. There
is some evidence, consistent with the notion of nonlinear nancial consequences, that these clubs may
indeed be more ready to dismiss the coach than
would be expected simply from the value taken by
the managerial eciency variable. However failing top team is not statistically signicant at conventional levels (p = .12). This is unsurprising to
the extent that a large majority of dismissals
observed are in fact at clubs in or immediately adjacent to the relegation zone. This description applied
to 17 of the 20 cases of dismissal in our data period.
The trend continues. At the time of writing, there
have been eight more dismissals subsequent to our
data period and seven of the clubs concerned were
in, or close to, the relegation zone.
If relegation is the dominant cause of instigating
managerial change, it follows that the eectiveness

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

of the policy should be judged in terms of the shortterm impact on results and therefore the accumulation of points for survival. This we investigate in the
next section.
4. Impact of managerial change on subsequent results
We present now the results from an ordered probit model to account for match outcomes of Spanish
Premier League xtures played in the seasons from
20022003 to 20042005. The rst three rounds of
matches each season were excluded from the sample
because league positions were used as regressors
and these are likely to contain a lot of noise when
based on only one or two games played by each
team. Outcomes were ordered across three categories, from home win (2) through draw (1) to away
win (0).
Our focus variables were dummies to capture
recent managerial change. Controls included were
the current league positions, where 1 is top and 20
bottom, of the home and away teams and the most
recent home result of the home team, represented as
win = 2, draw = 1 and loss = 0 (the most recent
away result of the home team and the most recent
home or away result of the away team were insignificant in preliminary estimation). The two league
position variables attracted very strong coecients
of expected sign. More surprisingly, the coecient
on the most recent result of the home team was signicant and negative. This presumably reects the
apparent diculty in football of putting together
sequences of wins.
Like Audas et al. (2002) we represent recent managerial change with a series of dummy variables
according to whether a team was playing its rst
or second (and so on) match under new management. The particular managerial change variable
dened by Audas et al. took the value +1 if the
home team had a new manager and 1 if the away
team had a new manager. This imposed a restriction
that any impact on performance will be the same in
home and away matches. For our study of Spain,
we do not impose this restriction because we
hypothesise that the impact of managerial change
will work partly by inuencing degree of crowd support for the home team. Accordingly, we have separate dummy variables to indicate that either the
home or away team had a new manager. The variable HOMENEWONE indicates that the home
team in a match was playing its rst home xture
following a new appointment (this may or may

367

not be the rst game since the dismissal of the previous coach, depending on whether there is a delay
in announcing a replacement). Variables HOMENEWTWO to HOMENEWSEVEN indicate that
the home team was playing its second or third
(and so on up to seventh) home match since the arrival of a new coach. A similar set of seven dummy
variables captures similar information for the away
club (for example, AWAYNEWONE is equal to one
if the away team is playing its rst away game following regime change). We restricted investigation
to 14 rounds of matches (seven home, seven away)
because of the number of dismissals that occurred
with fewer than 15 matches remaining in the season.
Results are displayed as Table 2. We consider
rst the impact on the match outcome of the home
team having recently changed manager. The estimated coecients on the manager change dummies,
HOMENEWONE to HOMENEWSEVEN, are
positive in every case, indicating that the information that a home team is playing under a new coach
raises the probability that it will win the game. They
are statistically signicant in the cases of the rst
and second home matches under new management.
Thereafter, however, none of the coecient estimates is individually signicantly dierent from zero
at the 5% level. This may indicate that any positive
eect on home performance is short-term. On the
other hand, given the amount of noise in the outcomes of football games, it is unsurprising if no statistically signicant impact is identied when
attention is conned to the nth match in the tenure
of a new coach, particularly since some dismissals in
our data set occurred with as few as two home
games remaining (thus the number of cases where
the variable equals one falls below 20 from HOMENEWTHREE onwards). We therefore tested
whether there was any eect on performance in
the group of games from the third to the seventh
home match: a Wald test was employed to evaluate
whether the sum of the ve individual coecient
estimates was dierent from zero. There was some
indication albeit weak (p = .178) that a residual
eect from new management was still felt in this
run of games.
The crucial question to a club is whether a positive eect on performance emerges over the remainder of the season following replacement of the
coach. For home games, we seek to answer this
question by summation of the coecient estimates
on HOMENEWONE to HOMENEWSEVEN.
The sum here is +2.245. Whether this is signicantly

368

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

Table 2
Ordered probit results on match outcome (away win = 0, draw = 1, home win = 2)
Coecient
Home position
Away position
Result of home teams last home match
HOMENEWONE
HOMENEWTWO
HOMENEWTHREE
HOMENEWFOUR
HOMENEWFIVE
HOMENEWSIX
HOMENEWSEVEN
AWAYNEWONE
AWAYNEWTWO
AWAYNEWTHREE
AWAYNEWFOUR
AWAYNEWFIVE
AWAYNEWSIX
AWAYNEWSEVEN

0.077
0.062
0.103
0.649
0.600
0.171
0.151
0.168
0.369
0.137
0.438
0.458
0.118
0.146
0.166
0.224
0.235

Standard error
0.007
0.007
0.047
0.259
0.273
0.271
0.282
0.316
0.322
0.349
0.309
0.294
0.321
0.297
0.365
0.324
0.313

p
10.37
8.87
2.19
2.50
2.20
0.63
0.53
0.53
1.14
0.39
1.42
1.56
0.37
0.49
0.45
0.69
0.75

.000
.000
.029
.012
.028
.529
.593
.595
.253
.694
.156
.119
.714
.622
.650
.490
.453

Number of observations: 1050.

Pseudo-R2: 0.10.

dierent from zero may be evaluated by a Wald test.

In this case, the null hypothesis of no eect over
seven home matches is decisively rejected (p = .010).
The result is not dependent on the choice of seven
for the number of home games over which the
impact of managerial change was to be measured.
It was impractical to extend the horizon beyond
seven home games because of shrinking sample size
(the season lasts for 19 home games and some dismissals occur with more than 12 already played).
However, Table 3 shows the cumulative impact over
shorter runs. Whatever the time horizon considered
up to seven home games, there is an eect on performance that is signicant at about, or better than, the
1% level.
We tested the robustness of our ndings to a respecication that replaced current home and away
league positions with information on the teams performances over a full season, i.e., points gained over
their preceding 38 matches. Using an index of club
performances over a longer period than the season
to date might be argued to defend yet more strongly
than in the rst model against the possibility that
mean reversion eects (an improvement in results
following a poor run) could be misinterpreted as
real eects from dismissing the coach. Account
was taken of whether points were won in the current
or previous season and an adjustment made where
previous season points had been awarded while
the team was playing in the Second Division. Data
from the previous season have been found to be sig-

Table 3
Cumulative impact of a new manager (away win = 0, draw = 1,
home win = 2)
Coecient
HOMENEWONE
HOMENEWTWO
HOMENEWTHREE
HOMENEWFOUR
HOMENEWFIVE
HOMENEWSIX
HOMENEWSEVEN
AWAYNEWONE
AWAYNEWTWO
AWAYNEWTHREE
AWAYNEWFOUR
AWAYNEWFIVE
AWAYNEWSIX
AWAYNEWSEVEN

0.649
1.249
1.420
1.571
1.739
2.108
2.245
0.438
0.020
0.138
0.284
0.449
0.674
0.909

p
.010
.001
.004
.007
.011
.007
.010
.157
.963
.803
.659
.553
.425
.324

Number of observations: 1050.

Pseudo-R2: 0.10.

nicant in accounting for results in English football

(Dobson and Goddard, 2001). In analysis of the
English game, distance between the stadia of the
two clubs has also been found to play a role and
accordingly we also include this in our alternative
and more information-rich model.
Table 4 presents the results of the estimation.
HPTSCURR is total League points achieved by
the home club in the season to date; HPTSPREV
is total League points achieved by the home team
in its nal (38-n) matches of the previous season,

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

369

Table 4
Ordered probit results on match outcome (alternative model) (away win = 0, draw = 1, home win = 2)
Coecient
Distance
HPTSCURR
HPTSPREV
HPTSPREV * HPROM
APTSCURR
APTSPREV
APTSPREV * APROM
Result of home teams last home match
HOMENEWONE
HOMENEWTWO
HOMENEWTHREE
HOMENEWFOUR
HOMENEWFIVE
HOMENEWSIX
HOMENEWSEVEN
AWAYNEWONE
AWAYNEWTWO
AWAYNEWTHREE
AWAYNEWFOUR
AWAYNEWFIVE
AWAYNEWSIX
AWAYNEWSEVEN

0.0009
0.043
0.004
0.002
0.041
0.009
0.003
0.051
0.548
0.400
0.110
0.102
0.200
0.433
0.267
0.546
0.406
0.089
0.112
0.067
0.278
0.157

Standard error
0.011
0.004
0.005
0.003
0.004
0.005
0.003
0.046
0.260
0.270
0.274
0.284
0.319
0.326
0.352
0.311
0.223
0.318
0.297
0.366
0.330
0.318

p
0.01
9.56
0.78
0.57
9.58
0.02
1.03
1.12
2.10
1.48
0.40
0.36
0.63
1.33
0.76
1.76
1.38
0.28
0.38
0.18
0.84
0.50

.994
.000
.436
.570
.000
.986
.305
.264
.035
.139
.689
.720
.529
.184
.448
.079
.167
.779
.706
.854
.399
.620

Number of observations: 1050.

Pseudo-R2: 0.09.

where n is the number of games played so far in the

current season; HPTS PREV * HPROM is a slope
dummy to allow a dierent coecient for teams that
had been promoted from the division below at the
end of the previous season. Similar controls for past
performance by the away team are dened symmetrically with those for the home team.
The results from this alternative model indicate
that it is in fact less eective than our main model
in accounting for the set of match outcomes, with
distance and results from the previous season failing
to add statistically signicant explanatory power.
The lack of role for geographical distance between
the home bases of the two clubs is interesting in that
it contrasts with results from English soccer. The
explanation may be that absolute distances in Spain
tend to be much larger. Players in the top division
are likely to be transported by air so that fatigue
and disruption for visiting teams will dier little
according to the distance involved; and the presence
of travelling supporters, whose numbers may inuence performance on the eld, is much more limited
across the League than in a small country like
England.
As in the main model, we nd a positive eect on
home performance following a change of manager.
Estimated coecients on all seven home new

dummy variables are positive. While only the rst

is individually signicant (p = .035), the sum over
seven games is positive and signicant with a
p-value of .019.
In further experimentation, we repeated the analysis with an additional covariate, a dummy variable
set equal to one (minus one) if the home (away)
team nished the game with more players than its
opponent because of sending(s)-o. The variable
proved highly signicant in accounting for match
results though there is a problem of potential endogeneity if dismissals by referees are correlated with
the scoreline at the time of an incident. Therefore,
we do not report the estimates here but note that
the results on the managerial change variables were
essentially unchanged: the impact of a change in
manager measured over seven home games was
positive with a p-value of .003.
There is therefore robust evidence from these
three seasons of experience in the Spanish Premier
League that sacking the coach produced tangible
results at home in the following weeks. Note that
this does not imply that dismissal is a good option
for all clubs in urgent need of league points since,
if boards of directors possess even limited powers
of discrimination, the set of clubs that red the
coach will be biased towards those in a situation

370

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

where such an action was most likely to yield results

(for example, these were cases where the clubs
plight was least attributable merely to bad luck or
cases where fan support had been most dangerously
eroded). What is being tested here is rather whether
clubs that opted for a new manager acted wisely.
Our ndings were dierent in respect of away
performance. In both our main and our alternative
models, the coecient estimates on the dummy variables for a new away team manager indicated a negative eect on performance in the rst away match
though this was not statistically signicant; thereafter, signs point to a positive eect but none of the
coecient estimates was close to being statistically
signicant. We summed them to assess cumulative
impact over seven away matches. We found no signicant dierence in performance in this group of
away matches following management change
(p = 0.324; p = .541 in the case of our alternative
model) and this nding was robust to choosing
alternative lengths of sequence than seven (Table
3). A new coach appeared to have no eect on the
set of away match outcomes following his appointment. A caveat to this nding is that there was some
weak indication of improved away results if the rst
away game was excluded from consideration.
The contrast between the results for home and
away performance suggest that any gain in points
achieved by those clubs that red their manager
was not primarily the result of reversion to mean
eects or to technical improvements introduced by
a new coach. These factors would have been
reected equally at home and away. It is though
consistent with the hypothesis that, where a teams
run of results provokes fan disillusion, there may
be real eects from doing something if the fans
respond by supporting their team more enthusiastically at the home stadium.
Of course, the support a team receives at a home
match could depend both on the number of fans
attending and on how positive their attitude is. In
the present case, there is no evidence that more supporters purchased tickets when a new manager
arrived. Comparing the three home games before
and after the arrival of a new coach (two matches
where the dismissal was so late in the season that
only two home games remained), 10 clubs experienced an increase and 10 a decrease in attendance.
Further, in case these data were unduly inuenced
by which teams happened to be the visitors before
and after changes in coach, we also estimated a conventional attendance demand function for the whole

sample of 1050 matches, with new manager dummies included as additional regressors. Again, there
was no evidence of a relationship between attendance and the appointment of a new coach: none
of the coecients on the variables HOMENEWONE to HOMENEWSEVEN was signicant. Any
positive eects on home performance when a new
manager arrives appears, therefore, to be attributable not to crowd size but to crowd enthusiasm.
Evidence that crowd enthusiasm, as opposed to
crowd size or density, aects match outcomes is limited in the literature on home advantage, the issue
being hard to test because of the diculty in measuring the emotional atmosphere in a stadium.
However, Nevill et al. (2002) employed an experimental method. Senior English referees were shown
lms of incidents in games with crowd noise either
included or silenced. Their opinions were shown to
run more in favour of the home team when they
were exposed to the noise of the crowd and such
bias could of course inuence match outcomes.
The potential for ocials decisions, and perhaps
therefore match results, to be inuenced by the
crowd received further support from Dohnen
(2005). He found evidence of referee home bias in
German stadia without moats but not in stadia
where the crowd was set back behind a moat.
Whether or not performances of players themselves respond to an increased level of enthusiasm
from a crowd of a given size is an issue yet to be
resolved in the home advantage literature though
ndings that measures of home advantage at the
team-specic level are unstable are consistent with
the notion that fans can sometimes help and sometimes hinder their team (Smith, 2005). Football supporters certainly believe their behaviour in the
stadium is important. Wolfson et al. (2005) surveyed
461 English fans and established that by far the
most important factor behind the phenomenon of
home advantage was, according to those who attend
games, crowd support. On the other hand, in openended responses, many noted the potential of a discontented home crowd to harm their team, for
example, Home players in a poor team can suer
at home due to pressure of disgruntled supporters
and Home fans can in fact distil fear and show
frustration to their own team . . . home advantage
has gone and the players feel the pressure and tensions between their home supporters. Our ndings
are at least consistent with these fan beliefs. The
crowd is likely to be disaected when a team is facing relegation; but a new manager potentially repre-

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

371

bulk of the expected eect relates to the rst two

games). Note that the sum of marginal eects on
draw probabilities is not statistically signicant,
so we attribute no extra points from that source.
A gain of two to three League points is, of course,
modest but this is a typical margin separating the
last team safe from relegation at the end of the season from those below it. A gamble that a new
coach might save the team from relegation by
improving home results is therefore by no means
to be viewed as reckless.
We also computed (but do not report) marginal
eects of away team manager change on away win
and draw probabilities in the case where an away
team lies 18 in the standings (the home team was
assumed to be mid-table and to have had an average result in its last home game). The eect on win/
draw probabilities over seven away matches proved
to be far from statistically signicant. We therefore
attribute no additional points gain to managerial
change in respect of away xtures.
We investigated the sensitivity of our estimates of
expected gain in points earned at home to the
toughness of the schedule faced by a club. We recalculated marginal eects for the case where opponents were at the upper quartile (ap = 5.25) rather
than in the middle (ap = 10.5) of the League table.
With such a pessimistic scenario (and other assumptions as before), the point estimate of a home win is
.169 and that of a draw .270. In these circumstances,
there was a statistically signicant positive eect on
both the expected number of home wins and the
expected number of draws. Combined, these yielded
an expected gain in League points of 2.24 over seven

sents a new start and fans may rally behind him.

This could account for the improvement in home
performances identied by our analysis.
5. Marginal eects
In this section, we attempt more precise estimation of the benets that accrued to those clubs that
sacked their manager by calculating the marginal
eects from managerial change, evaluated at values
for variables that reect typical circumstances of
clubs facing the threat of relegation.
Table 5 presents estimates of marginal eects on
home win and draw from the main ordered probit
model whose results were discussed in the previous
section. They are evaluated with home position = 18, reecting the situation of a club which
is in the relegation zone. It is presumed only to have
drawn its last home game (result = 1) and to be
playing against a mid-table club (away position = 10.5). All managerial change variables are
set to zero. With this conguration of values of
the regressors, the point estimate of the probability
of a home win is .258 (and that of a draw .304).
The eect of changing manager on the teams
expected number of home wins in the following
seven home matches is given by the sum of the
seven marginal eects, which is +0.807. In Spanish
football, as is normal in Europe, three league
points are awarded for a win and one for a draw.
Change in manager is therefore expected to raise
the number of win points earned from this group
of games by approximately 2.42 points. This is
equivalent to 0.35 points per match (though the

Table 5
Marginal eects
On home win
dy/dx

On draw
se

dy/dx

se

Home position
Away position

.025
.020

.002
.002

15.02
7.99

.005
.004

.002
.001

2.85
3.52

Result of home teams last home match

HOMENEWONE
HOMENEWTWO
HOMENEWTHREE
HOMENEWFOUR
HOMENEWFIVE
HOMENEWSIX
HOMENEWSEVEN

.033
.241
.222
.058
.051
.057
.131
.046

.015
.102
.107
.096
.099
.112
.123
.122

2.20
2.37
2.07
0.61
0.52
0.51
1.07
0.38

.007
.014
.009
.008
.008
.008
.007
.007

.004
.028
.027
.008
.009
.009
.013
.012

1.80
0.50
0.34
1.06
0.83
0.93
0.53
0.59

Marginal eects, calculated from the ordered probit model reported in Table 2, are evaluated at: home position = 18, away position = 10.5, result of home teams last home match = 1 (draw), all other variables = 0.

372

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373

League matches. Our estimate of benet was therefore lowered only slightly for a quite extreme
assumption about the quality of opponents in
remaining matches.
6. Conclusions
Sport often oers a laboratory for the testing of
general ideas about business and economic behaviour. In the case of changes of management in a crisis, and whether they typically improve performance
or merely reect scapegoating, professional league
football is an appropriate setting for testing hypotheses: it is very public information when a manager is
red; given the typical circumstances, the aim of the
policy is very clearly dened; and the extent to
which the aim is met is readily measurable in the league standings.
Two previous studies of European football leagues found little evidence that clubs dismissing their
manager in mid-season beneted in terms of results
though, in The Netherlands in some seasons, change
of coach appeared to improve the extent to which
clubs exploited home advantage.
For the case of Spain, we have examined the
impact of changing coach on subsequent match
results. New coaches appear to have made a modest
positive dierence to match results in the shortterm; but this eect was derived entirely from an
improvement in results at the home stadium. No
change in away performance, measured over a run
of games, was detected.
We are mindful that evidence from a relatively
small number of seasons may not generalise to
lengthier periods (Koning, 2003); but our results
suggests that future researchers should distinguish
carefully between home and away results when
assessing the eects of manager dismissal. The
implication from our evidence is that a new coach
does not typically bring technical solutions to the
weaknesses of the team since away performance is
little altered. That home results nevertheless
improve suggests a role for crowd support in the
determination of match outcomes. Clubs typically
re the manager when faced with the threat of relegation and in those circumstances supporter morale
is liable to be low. Perhaps, to appease them, the
directors oer a scapegoat; but in this context
scapegoating may not be mere gesturing, still less
irrational, since, as discussed in the literature on
home advantage, support from the crowd can be
an input in the process of the team producing wins.

Our general proposition is, then, that scapegoating

can have positive eects if the goals of an organisation are capable of being inuenced by the stakeholders being appeased.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Oscar Callejo from Comite
Nacional de Entrenadores for providing very helpful information about managerial dismissals, to
three anonymous referees for incisive suggestions,
and to Ian McHale and Andy Tremayne for valuable comments on an earlier draft.
References
Audas, R., Dobson, S., Goddard, J., 1997. Team performance
and managerial change in the English football league.
Economic Aairs 17, 3036.
Audas, R., Dobson, S., Goddard, J., 2002. The impact of
managerial change on team performance in professional
sports. Journal of Economics and Business 54, 633651.
Bruinshoofd, A., ter Weel, B., 2003. Manager to go? Performance
dips reconsidered with evidence from Dutch football. European Journal of Operational Research 148, 233246.
Brown, M., 1982. Administrative succession and organizational
performance: The succession eect. Administrative Science
Quarterly 27, 116.
Cools, K., van Praag, C., 2003. The value relevance of forced top
management departures. Discussion Paper 03-051/3, Tinbergen Institute.
Dobson, S., Goddard, J., 2001. The Economics of Football.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dohnen, T., 2005. Social pressure inuences the decisions of
individuals: Evidence from the behavior of football referees.
Discussion paper 1595, IZA, Bonn.
Forrest, D., Simmons, R., 2000. Forecasting sport: The behaviour and performance of football tipsters. International
Journal of Forecasting 16, 317331.
Gamson, W., Scotch, N., 1964. Scapegoating in baseball.
American Journal of Sociology 70, 6972.
Goddard, J., Asimakopoulos, I., 2004. Forecasting football
results and the eciency of xed-odds betting. Journal of
Forecasting 23, 5166.
Groves, T., Hong, Y., McMilan, J., Naughton, B., 1995. Chinas
evolving managerial labor market. Journal of Political Economy 103, 873891.
Hudson, R., Malatesta, P., Parrino, R., 2004. Managerial
succession and rm performance. Journal of Financial
Economics 74, 237275.
Koning, R., 2003. An econometric evaluation of the eect of
ring a coach on team performance. Applied Economics 35,
555564.
Kuypers, T., 2000. Information and eciency: An empirical
study of a xed odds betting market. Applied Economics 32,
13531363.
Nevill, A.M., Balmer, N.J., Williams, A.M., 2002. The inuence
of crowd noise and experience upon refereeing decisions in

J. de Dios Tena, D. Forrest / European Journal of Operational Research 181 (2007) 362373
association football. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 3, 261
272.
Smith, D.R., 2005. Disconnects between popular discourse and
home advantage research: What can fans and media tell us
about the home advantage phenomenon?. Journal of Sports
Sciences 23 351364.
Warner, J., Jerold, B., Ross, L., Karen, H., 1988. Stock prices
and top management changes. Journal of Financial Economics 20, 461492.

373

Weisbach, M., 1988. Outside directors and CEO turnover.

Journal of Financial Economics 20, 431460.
Warzynski, F., 2000. The causes and consequences of managerial
change in Ukraine and the complementarity of reforms.
Working paper, LIKOS Centre for Transition Economics.
Wolfson, S., Wakelin, D., Lewis, M., 2005. Football supporters
perceptions of their role in the home advantage. Journal of
Sports Sciences 23, 365374.