Performance Expectations of Professional Sport Teams and In-Season Head Coach Dismissals—Evidence from the English and French Men’s Football First Divisions

Authors

ROCABOY Yvon PAVLÍK Marek

Year of publication 2020
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Economies
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Economics and Administration

Citation
Web https://doi.org/10.3390/economies8040082
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/economies8040082
Keywords coach dismissal; Monte Carlo simulation; team performance; payrolls; expectations
Attached files
Description The goals of this paper are first to identify why professional football clubs replace their head coach and, second, to investigate the effect of coach dismissal on team performance. To do that, we propose a new method for assessing the performance expectations of professional sport teams using Monte Carlo simulation. We apply our method to the English Premier league and the French Ligue 1 football teams over the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 seasons. We find that coach dismissal is the result of a drop in the average expected performance compared with the performance expectations at the beginning of the season. We also show that dismissing a coach may enhance performance only if the team under-performed before the dismissal. There is no obstacle to using the same method for professional teams in other sports. The method is easily reproducible and does not require much information in order to be applied.

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