EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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2461. Should he stay or should he go? Head Coach turnover and cultural disparities in the market for managers - Empirical Evidence from European Professional Football

Invited abstract in session TD-16: Performance and scouting in football, stream OR in Sports.

Tuesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 19 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Felix Sage
Mercator School of Management, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract

When a football team is experiencing a sporting downturn, there are limited short-term options available from the club's management perspective. Building a better-performing squad in the short run is not feasible. Another potential adjustment is to change the team’s head coach. This analogy can be transferred to leaders managing any organization. We focus on the question of which characteristics are attributed to a successful long-term leader. The paper investigates the impact of team performance and individual characteristics of the coach on the coach’s tenure. For this purpose, we use various data from the top five European leagues (first and second division) from the 2012/13 to the 2022/23 season. In order to adequately analyze this impact, we use elaborate competing risk models to identify the effect of cultural differences on various reasons of coach dismissals. The data is gathered at the matchday level and thus obtained a dataset covering 43,985 matchdays. To our knowledge, we are the first to simultaneously examine these effects across ten different European leagues over a decade. Just like the modern cooperation, most football teams consist of employees (players and head coaches) of different cultures producing language barriers which can particularly lead to communication and transaction costs. The unique dataset allows us to include these cultural and linguistic effects that could impact team performance, coach's performance, and ultimately, the coach's tenure.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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