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Has changing a manager in the premier league this season improved results ?

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There was an interesting thread a while back on whether changing a manager made any difference to a teams results.

With the help of statto.coms custom table thingy - http://www.statto.com/football/stats/england/premier-league/2013-2014/custom-table - I''ve had a look at before and after this season.

columns (which will no doubt get mullered by the forum software) are

played, won, drawn, lost, clean sheets, failed to score, goals for, goals against, goal difference, points, and points per game.

Sunderland - Gus Poyet - 8 October 2013

before : 7 0 1 6 0 2 5 16 -11 1 0.14

after : 14 4 4 6 5 7 14 18 -4 16 1.14

Palace - Tony Pulis - 23 Nov 2013

before : 11 1 1 9 1 7 6 21 -15 4 0.36

after : 10 4 1 5 4 4 7 10 -3 13 1.30

Rene Meulensteen - Fulham - 1 Dec 2013

before : 13 3 1 9 2 5 11 24 -13 10 0.77

after : 8 3 0 5 1 1 11 22 -11 9 1.12

Tim Sherwood - Spurs - 16 Dec 2013

before : 16 8 3 5 7 6 15 21 -6 27 1.69

after : 5 4 1 0 2 0 11 4 +7 13 2.60

O.g. Solsktaer - Cardiff - 2 Jan 2014

before : 20 4 6 10 5 10 15 32 -17 18 0.90

after : 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 2 -2 0 0.00

Pepe Mel - WBA - 9 Jan 2014 Steve Clarke left on Dec 13, caretaker period used

before : 15 3 6 6 4 5 17 21 -4 15 1.00

after : 6 1 3 2 1 2 6 7 -1 6 1.00

Most notable is the resurgence of Sunderland and Crystal Palace. Poyet has Sunderland scoring more goals, Pulis as you would expect has tightened things up at the back. Meulensteen has managed to get more wins despite maintaining a similar goals for / against ratio. Anything after Fulham is probably too early to take anything meaningful from.

Good site that statto.com.

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The Palace one is the only one I''d put much weight on.

Sunderland - Di Canio was especially bad. Fulham, again, Jol just didn''t look interested, and they''ve had a fairly easy run since Muelensteen has taken over - give him another 5 or 6 up to 13 each and see if there is still much of a difference. Sherwood (and Pep Mel) you nede to give more time, you can''t compare 15 games to 5/6.

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Fair points aggy, you''d probably need to go back a few seasons to see if anything makes that much of a difference. Of Sunderland / Palace / Fulham, I''d say Fulham are most likely to go down on the basis of the records above.

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To be meaningful you need to compare teams that had a bad run but didn''t change manager, because teams on a bad run tend to see there results improve in any case. I read about a study on this in Dutch football which found that on average there was an improvement whether or not there was a change if manager.

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Those stats say to me that in the short term at least changing manager gets you more points per game...just what we need!

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You''d have to compare over a longer time period to be meaningful. Changing MOL for DiCanio didn''t do much good, ditto Reading, QPR, Wolves and countless others.

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In the case of Sunderland and Palace the figures are totally meaningless unless you expected them to continue through the rest of the season with the same form. In which case Sunderland would have had 7 points by May and Palace would have had 14 points. However a short term dip in form does not a season make.All we see is a reversion to their expected mean average of close to a point a game or less. Both are likely to end up in the low thirties at best.

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[quote user="ricardo"]In the case of Sunderland and Palace the figures are totally meaningless unless you expected them to continue through the rest of the season with the same form. In which case Sunderland would have had 7 points by May and Palace would have had 14 points. However a short term dip in form does not a season make.All we see is a reversion to their expected mean average of close to a point a game or less. Both are likely to end up in the low thirties at best.[/quote]That is not the point. The point is whether Sunderland would have reached anything like what you claim is their expected mean of around a point a game (given their finances it would be much higher than that) if they had carried on with di Canio for the whole season. And the same with Palace with Holloway for the whole season. Granted they would not have finished as low as 7 and 14 points respectively. But it is hard to see either with those two in continued charge getting to 30. They were not suffering a short-term dip. They were underperforming because neither manager was any good and if left in place those teams would almost certainly have continued to underperform. The arrival of competent managers has given them a chance of staying up. I know it is a neat phrase but this idea of reverting to the mean has very limited usefulness, and does not apply in these cases.

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[quote user="PurpleCanary"][quote user="ricardo"]In the case of Sunderland and Palace the figures are totally meaningless unless you expected them to continue through the rest of the season with the same form. In which case Sunderland would have had 7 points by May and Palace would have had 14 points. However a short term dip in form does not a season make.All we see is a reversion to their expected mean average of close to a point a game or less. Both are likely to end up in the low thirties at best.[/quote]That is not the point. The point is whether Sunderland would have reached anything like what you claim is their expected mean of around a point a game (given their finances it would be much higher than that) if they had carried on with di Canio for the whole season. And the same with Palace with Holloway for the whole season. Granted they would not have finished as low as 7 and 14 points respectively. But it is hard to see either with those two in continued charge getting to 30. They were not suffering a short-term dip. They were underperforming because neither manager was any good and if left in place those teams would almost certainly have continued to underperform. The arrival of competent managers has given them a chance of staying up. I know it is a neat phrase but this idea of reverting to the mean has very limited usefulness, and does not apply in these cases.[/quote]I am not arguing the case for Di Canio but a cardboard cutout of Brian Gunn would have improved on Sunderland''s  early form.Pullis has no doubt organised the Palace defence to give them a better chance but  they look no less relegation candidates than they did before.

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[quote user="ricardo"][quote user="PurpleCanary"][quote user="ricardo"]In the case of Sunderland and Palace the figures are totally meaningless unless you expected them to continue through the rest of the season with the same form. In which case Sunderland would have had 7 points by May and Palace would have had 14 points. However a short term dip in form does not a season make.All we see is a reversion to their expected mean average of close to a point a game or less. Both are likely to end up in the low thirties at best.[/quote]That is not the point. The point is whether Sunderland would have reached anything like what you claim is their expected mean of around a point a game (given their finances it would be much higher than that) if they had carried on with di Canio for the whole season. And the same with Palace with Holloway for the whole season. Granted they would not have finished as low as 7 and 14 points respectively. But it is hard to see either with those two in continued charge getting to 30. They were not suffering a short-term dip. They were underperforming because neither manager was any good and if left in place those teams would almost certainly have continued to underperform. The arrival of competent managers has given them a chance of staying up. I know it is a neat phrase but this idea of reverting to the mean has very limited usefulness, and does not apply in these cases.[/quote]I am not arguing the case for Di Canio but a cardboard cutout of Brian Gunn would have improved on Sunderland''s  early form.Pullis has no doubt organised the Palace defence to give them a better chance but  they look no less relegation candidates than they did before.

[/quote]My point exactly. Neither team had much hope of getting near their financially-based mean (especially in the case of Sunderland, which is probably close to 50 points) if they had stayed with what they had. An early change to a competent manager has given them the strong likelihood of improvement over the season.That is all I have ever argued can be achieved by a change to competence early enough. I have never mentioned some kind of guarantee of staying up. Palace are and always have been in my bottom three. But as  Kenneth More says in Sink the Bismarck! after a torpedo has hit the German ship''s steering gear, they now at least have a chance.

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I agree with you CP and you know that I don''t so that lightly. One of the reasons that a team will always revert to the mean is that they will change managers any players if they are underperforming the mean. NCFC have outperformed their mean in the last 2 seasons which has created false expectations. We are reverting to our mean this season which is the reality but hence the fans disappointment and frustration but unlikely that a manager will improve the situation long term unless you can find an outperforming mgr. PL and CH were but arguably only Fergie and Moyes have done it long term and we are unlikely to attract such a mgr. Style is a personal subjective preference which I can''t argue with.

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As I have pointed out on another thread on this topic - the research that shows that the net effect of changing a manager is zero is an aggregation of many instances of this happening. This is an AVERAGE, but within that average there are individual instances of changing a manager bringing about better results and other individual instances of changing a manager bringing about worse results.

An interesting case study in what can happen when you keep a manager when the team is struggling comes from none other than our old friends at Aston Villa last season.

At the end of December they had 18 points from 20 games and had endured a catastrophic run of games during that month when they lost 8-0 away followed by 4-0 and 3-0 home defeats, the last of which was to Wigan.

They kept hold of Paul Lambert and ended up staying up fairly comfortably with 41 points from 38 games.

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[quote user="T"]I agree with you CP and you know that I don''t so that lightly. One of the reasons that a team will always revert to the mean is that they will change managers any players if they are underperforming the mean. NCFC have outperformed their mean in the last 2 seasons which has created false expectations. We are reverting to our mean this season which is the reality but hence the fans disappointment and frustration but unlikely that a manager will improve the situation long term unless you can find an outperforming mgr. PL and CH were but arguably only Fergie and Moyes have done it long term and we are unlikely to attract such a mgr. Style is a personal subjective preference which I can''t argue with.[/quote]Er, T, if I am CP I am not sure that is entirely what I said! That teams will always revert to the mean. I am not saying they never will but that phrase is highly problematic. Its careless use has muddied the debate rather than elucidated it.I doubt either of us has time now to go into this, but it raises all sorts of questions as to what is meant by the mean. Over how long? Is the mean purely financially based? If so, on what? Even player wages can be misleading. A team of underpaid young talent will do better than some overpaid geriatrics. I think that is called the Finidi George Syndrome. Does the manager form part of the norm?What, having studied this a bit, I AM sure of is that the old mantra about changing managers never working simply isn''t true. It has a basic flaw in that it assumes the underperformance of the sacked manager is temporary. When often it is far from that. And when it is not temporary then a change has a good chance of working, because there is likely to be a reversion upwards to the mean the old manager was never going to achieve.

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