Celtic-Inter 1967 Champions Cup final was heavily decided by Stein's tactics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_European_Cup_Final Inter sat back and bunkered, as was the key to the catenaccio and its man-on-man markings. Celtic brought in his fullbacks forward and that screwed up Inter's assignments, so pretty much every Celtic player was running around free with only minor overlaps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenaccio
So you guys think that Guardiola can go into Belgium and make Standard Liege become kings of Europe? Because I believe he can't. You can have all great tactics and schemes available, but it comes down to players to execute them. If you don't have the players you will lose.
Half a goal a game can make them champions. Speaking of Belgium, when the ex-Villarreal coach Juan Carlos Garrido was appointed in late November, Club Brugge's GD was -1 (12 matches played, 15 points). Since then, they +15 (8 matches, 18 points). GD ~ 0 under the fired Georges Leekens, ~ +2 under Garrido. PPG 1.25 under Leekens, 2.25 under Garrido.
LOL ... truth hurt huh? Like England NT made Capello the MOST EXPENSIVE coach ever in history (>10mils ) - just to make England lost in knock out WC10 4-1 to Germany and then qualified to Euro12 witha TIE (Montenegro) LOL Like Real paid Mourinho to become the most expensive coach in the leagues (10mils) just to win 1 (lucky ) liga and 1 copa delRey, following a disastrous lost (6 games ) to their rival Barca!
What? Did you read an example above of a 2-goal per game swing in the Club Brugge's coaching carousel?
I don't think he could make Standard Liege kings of Europe, but they're currently fourth in Belgium and if he made them into regular participants in the Champions League Group Stage that would be a significant improvement.
There is an unwarranted assumption here that the other 15% is all due to coaching and I don´t think you can defend this claim. There are many other factors that can influence a result that a team has absolutely no control over like home field advantage or plain dumb luck (in other words, no correlation at all). You are assuming that there is a way to get to a 100% correlation between two different variables and this is almost impossible in any real world application. I would be very surprised if you can get a correlation as high as 95% between any set of variables (salary, coaching, home field advantage, etc.) and wins. Going by this 85% figure, I don´t see a way that the correlation between coaching and winning surpases 5% (and I think I am being generous with this figure). The problem with analising the importance of coaches is that it is very hard to establish causality. In my opinion, the best way to analize this is to step back and look at a large sample size of data, instead of individual examples.
It appears to me that everyone is talking about the manager function rather than actual coaching. Regardless, generally speaking when you are talking about employees of top professional teams, they will all be well-qualified and experienced appropriately for their positions. So there is no instance of "good" and "bad" managers or coaches at the same club at that level. And if all the managers in the EPL for instance were "good" coaches, then you would expect that changes in managers would not have a statistically significant impact on match results. That you would expect would be determined by the ability of your players. Better players will result in better results. Indeed those assumptions are what makes "Moneyball" economic theory work. And yes "bad" coaching and management can lose games. But games are won by the players. The object of coaching and management is to induce the best performances from the club's players.
now THIS matters a whole lot more than coaching. This makes bad teams into good teams. I agree with this, a coach can impede a team, while a good coach stays the hell out of the way and allows the players to showcase their skills.
The player movement doesn't explain a two goal swing (from flat to +2) in Garrido/Brugge situation, since it was done pre-transfer window. Or, how about this - Sparky Hughes at QPR earned 4 points from 12/13 matches or 1/3 PPG. Under Harry Redknapp, they earned 12 points from 11 matches, with new transfers only now appearing for QPR. Is .8 PPG swing entirely accidental? I don't think so. PS. None of you also bothered to respond to the coaching changes on the national teams. Les2 friends.
Because there are more coaches which are not influential at all, so when it happens it's a big deal. If you compare the number of coaches that have influenced a team vs the number of coaches that don't influence you'll find that number to be minimal. Also Harry Redknapp was sacked from Tottenham, relegated southampton, almost got porthsmoth relegated until they gave him more money (which ties in nicely with wins)
Not a phenomena, it's the norm, coaches don't matter. And then they change teams and matter again because the teams do well. Other factors involved with teams doing better when a coach comes in, is the money spent on extra players.
The thing is that you are cherry-picking extreme examples, which shouldn't be confused with the average. As was explained by others before, while those cases are real they are offset by the dozens of cases in which changing managers didn't make any difference at all. And the examples you chose do not necessarily survive the test of time (Garrido was sacked from Villarreal due to poor results that ended up in the team being relegated last season while Leekens was the next big thing after his stint in Mouscron in the late 90's). This said, a couple of years ago I made a statistical analysis for mexican site MedioTiempo.com about the suitability of changing coaches at mid-season. I used only the Mexican League as a sample but went back 10 years. What I discovered is that there is indeed a discreet but significant statistical benefit for a team that changes coaches at mid-season, but only in the short term. After ten matches things tend to even out. Mexican tournaments only last 17 matches so a team that hasn't achieved what they wanted after around 11 has the statistical backing to change coaches. What are the reasons behind the improvement? Difficult to say, you could say they are motivational, or that the team becomes less predictable for their rivals maybe. Extrapolating Soccernomics' stats and the fact that there have been indeed coaches that have completely change the culture of their teams (Ferguson, Guardiola, Wenger...), it's safe to say that in MOST cases coaches don't account for much in the long term. Player quality will always be the most important factor in a team's success or failure, but there are extreme cases (especially negative ones) in which there will be a meaningful difference.
The Mexican league has an infamous coaching carousel, so it's literally garbage-in-garbage-out. And no one has yet opined about the international teams. PS. Garrido also coached Villarreal into the Champions League in La Liga. In their relegation season, they were decimated by injuries and he was fired half way through anyway. A prima facie fallacy. I'll leave it at that.
International teams, ok Brazil has coach in and coach out, the team still performs at about 63winning % and doesn't lose 77% of their games. Regardless of coach. Germany Semi Finals how many times? How many coaches? And Garbage in garbage out is not an acceptable response. Because you wouldn't be able to name any of the garbage.. which means you don't even know they are garbage. Mexico like Brazil has a very low tolerance for failure on their National leagues. The Vasco coach was sacked last year after winning 65% of the points in play for over a season and a half, and not falling below 4th place in the competition for a record time in the brasileirao. But.. he was sacked because his team lost 4 x 0 during a 3 game losing streak. This of course was after Vasco had a fire sale on their roster. Next coach that came in, tied a game, won a game.. lost 5 in a row and was sacked. You can't lose 60% of your starting line up and still be a quiet genius that gets 65% of the points in play that breaks records of time spent at the top of the league.
So basically coaches don't matter a lot of the time, but sometimes they do, if I may ask if that is what the anti-coach faction is arguing?
Actually I'm saying that coaching has very little impact at all, Managing has an impact. And what has an even bigger impact, which almost always dictates the quality of the team is money going into players.
Sometimes BS looks like it's stuck in some twilight zone... How does the "coaches don't matter" faction explain Mourinhos tenure at FC Porto?
Internal friction, locker room problems, bustups with Casillas, Ramos, bad form, injuries to key players at crucial moments. Take your pick. Last season they surpassed a better team on paper to win La Liga and get to the semis of the CL, where they were beaten by Bayern on penalties. You yourself say a coach can sometimes negatively impact a team through his incompatibility with said team. Here's a prime example.
There are so many things that can negatively affect a team and undermine a good coaches work that I fail to see how important that is to this discussion.
Argument here is simple... Things out of his control will determine the outcome of games. He was compatible the year before he even but his compatibility started to disappear when caused him to lose games, and when you lose games you get upset when you're upset it creates That's usually when they sack the coach for a new one, to try and give the players somebody else to blame other than the coach, that's why great coaches get sacked. That's why sacking initially works. It increases player confidence who doesn't like to be on a winning side of a fight? if the person you were having problems with got fired, who won that argument? But the high morale only takes you so far, if the team doesn't improve and the injuries continue, they will revert back to the way they have been playing. In Real's case, they might revert back to a Champion. Just by sacking the coach.