Ahhh, the old Premier League manager merry-go round, struggling to keep track of who works where when the same old faces show up in new places? You may not be alone. The Premier League is once again in full swing and just as interesting as the results, it would seem, is the speculation around which manager will lose their job first. Before the poor fellow is even out of a job people are already excitedly debating who should replace them. It can’t have escaped the attention of anyone that Premier League football clubs replace their managers at an alarmingly high,...
I know it sounds like the beginnings of a joke, but in 2010 an octopus hit the limelight through successfully “predicting” the results of the football World Cup. When the next World Cup rolled around in 2014 there were a plethora of other animals jostling for the honour of following the octopus’s metaphorical (and wet) footsteps. The success or otherwise of these animals’ ability to predict results shows that predicting football results, particularly in the football World Cup is rather tricky. Chance may do similarly well as experts. If anyone was able to predict football results with regularity the game...
David Moyes and Sam Allardyce have both been relieved of their duties after only 6 months in charge of their respective teams. Neither team was relegated, Everton finished 8th in the Premier League. So what is the meaning of success for these clubs? Are their chairmen and boards ever satisfied with what they achieve? Employment and sacking of managers is in the hands of the team’s chairmen or leadership groups, these days either super rich individuals or business men with football as part of their portfolios. Perhaps dissatisfaction is in the nature of elite individuals. How else would they be...
This year’s Wimbledon final was fought out between two players, both of whom have a former superstar player as their coach. It seems obvious to think any individual who has reached the pinnacle of their sport, like Lendl, must understand it to great depth. This may well be true in certain cases. But there are clear examples that contradict this. I will use Tennis and Football as two examples to make a case for why “super-coaches” can both succeed and fail. The premier leagues most successful clubs mostly have managers who were average players, think Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger,...
Why are predictions so hard in sport? The capture of the Premier League title by Leicester City has been cited by many pundits as the greatest shock in sporting history. Is this grand claim little more than evidence of a cognitive bias? ‘Who could have known?’ Certainly not the same pundits who had almost unanimously predicted Leicester’s relegation. Exaggerating the scale of the surprise doubles as a kind of cognitive – and reputational – protection: ‘We were so wrong, yes, but we were right to be.’ I am not trying to argue that the result is not a statistical anomaly,...
