Dead Cat Bounce

Taking a ride on the managerial carousel

Swansea City had us going there for a while, huh?

The Swans had been languishing in League Two up to the 2004–05 season, but by 2011 had entered the Premier League after nearly a three decade absence. They’ve sat anywhere from 8th to 12th since then, playing attractive small-club football and showcasing talent like Michu, Wilfried Bony, and Gylfi Sigurdsson. In an era where Leicester City were champions, Southampton became a hot-ticket selling club, and Crystal Palace somehow did well enough to start a Pardew-to-Real-Madrid rumor, smaller clubs like Swansea looked set for success and stability.

Since last season, though, they’ve had anything but, thanks to a trend of treating managers as doorstops for revolving door jobs. While they didn’t exactly have a Wenger-esque fixture on the touchline, they had steadiness. Swansea may have felt like they were running in place, but they still gave managers at least a little time to adjust and impose their style on the team, as well as making a change or two.

Hiring and firing managers more often than a 14-year-old girl watches the latest Twenty One Pilots video may seem to let a team try different approaches and attempt to rescue their season through the “new manager bounce,” but all it provides is the possibility of a short-term “boost” and a level of volatility & fluctuation that benefits nobody except the team’s competitors.

Garry Monk, who had given Swansea over a 36% win percentage in his nearly two years of managing, was axed in mid-December 2015. He was the man who led them to 8th place the previous season, to anointments of the next big small club, and to a short but oh so torrid affair with my co-host Patrick. Monk was also sixth in a line of managers given at least a year in Wales, with all but Paulo Sousa given over a year and a half to test their mettle. That’s not a long time by any means, but when the average sacked manager’s tenure is barely over a year, that’s not bad.

Since then, the team has decided to try a pu-pu platter of managerial talent: Alan Curtis as caretaker manager for 8 matches, Francesco Guidolin on board for 25 matches in 2/3rds of a year, Bob Bradley for a mere 85 days and 11 matches (with no transfer window either, mind you), and now former Bayern Munich assistant Paul Clement after another brief Curtis stint. The outcomes have not been Michelin Star-worthy, to say the least.

This is a running theme with quite a few teams in the top levels of British football, and the ignominious list of clubs that subscribe to this notion of management have put in some equally ignominious results as a result:

• Wigan Athletic’s downfall came in the wake of Roberto Martinez fleeing to Everton in 2013, after somehow winning the FA Cup and being relegated at the same time. Replacement Owen Coyle, though, lasted merely 23 matches and didn’t make it to 2014. Uwe Rösler also couldn’t make it a full year under tenure, and Malky Mackay lasted not even half of one. It looked like they had settled on a man in Gary Caldwell, a former captain of the club, especially once he brought them back up to the second tier… and then he was sacked last October while the Latics still linger in the relegation zone.
• Was Paul Lambert giving Aston Villa solid results? A sub-30% win percentage says no. Was hiring Tactics Tim Sherwood and his magnificent beach bod the right move after Lambert’s stint? Literally every piece of evidence says no. But after that, the Villans left Remi Garde with even less time than Sherwood got, and in 23 matches the Frenchman could do nothing with the patchwork French-tinged squad he’d inherited but go down to the Championship with that sinking ship.
  
  …except, Villa decided to keep rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, sacking Garde for Champions League winner Roberto Di Matteo, last seen in a brief stint in Germany with Schalke. Finally, a man with a proven track record, who can stabilize this team and bring them back — oh, no, he got fired after 12 matches. For Hull City castoff Steve Bruce.
• Speaking of Hull, Steve Bruce was the man that had led them to the Premier League for the second time in their history. Hell, he even kept them there for an extra season, and while they got relegated in year two, the Tigers bounced right back up to the top division in the following season. They looked to be a fixture as a yo-yo club, which for a team that had only made their first PL appearance in 2008 has to be incredibly appealing (at the very least financially). Then, Bruce’s relationship with the board tanked and he resigned, and interim manager Mike Phelan got hired permanently… before being sacked not three months later. Marco Silva could very well see himself become this year’s Remi Garde, taking up a lame-duck post for a team near-certain for relegation and taking a gut-punch to his reputation as well.
• Three words: Queens Park Rangers. I don’t need to say more.

So what’s the right way to do it? Well, look at Hull before the Bruce resignation. He led them to the Premier League, and when they got knocked back down, he boosted them right back up. The same can be said for a pair of other clubs, one of which has taken on a recent path parallel to Hull: Burnley. Yes, the Clarets love their Ginger Mourinho, but after he got them to the Premier League (and saw them relegated), the team regrouped without key players like Danny Ings and got promoted again on the first try. Right now they sit mid-table and sit pretty with the paychecks, with a team that’s built for the current yo-yo grind and has serious potential to hang around for at least an extra season thanks to their patience with Sean Dyche.

Shockingly, Newcastle United can also currently be noted as a model of managerial stability amidst relegation strife. The team had a fantastic get with Champions League winner Rafael Benítez, but despite his best efforts last year the Toons still fell to the second division. Now, SportsDirect FC could have made like Aston Villa with their UCL-winner and given him the boot in favor of a much less accomplished manager in hopes of getting some kind of spark. Instead, the former Liverpool and Real Madrid man went down to the Championship with the struggling team, and quickly found a groove that has them also looking comfortable and ready to re-enter the Premier League upon first asking.

This kind of anecdotal, empirical evidence is one way to argue a simple point: the managerial carousel is not the answer for teams in need of a spark. Constantly hiring and firing managers is the kind of destabilizing force that can throw a team into flux and throw the players’ performances into disarray. Even if managers are hired according to similar criteria (such as Swansea’s predilection towards more attractive football), their varying player preferences and training methods still affect the squad massively, and can turn former key cogs into underutilized role players. Hell, some managers don’t even get a transfer window to bring in any preferred personnel, and in every case a new hire gets to work with a squad that’s essentially a patchwork quilt of former managerial favorites and youth products. Do you think Bob Bradley ideally wants Fernando Llorente as his be-all end-all striker option?

There’s one big argument made towards taking a ride on the carousel, especially for relegation-threatened teams, in the “new manager bounce.” The theory goes that just by having a new manager on-board, the team will pick up a few more points than average thanks to a spark of energy, players trying to play their way into the new manager’s graces, etc.

The extent of this bounce has been debated, and clearly there can be outliers on both sides. However, the general data seems to suggest that any gains are purely short-term, and by that I mean a few games maximum. From the 2008–09 season to the 2013–14 season, the managers that came in to replace a sacked one did provide a 1.3 point boost over the first three matches. That point or two can absolutely mean the difference between Premier League payments and parachute payments.

But that effect fades quickly into a dead-cat bounce, and can actually be easily explained by a statistician’s favorite phrase: regression to the mean.

Essentially, if you’ve got a top-flight manager at the helm and he goes through a bad streak of games, that doesn’t mean the man on the touchline with a Champions League trophy has suddenly become a middle schooler playing FIFA Ultimate Team (unless he’s Manchester United in the post-Fergie era). It means just that, a slump in form, and that form should be expected to rise back to the manager’s standard soon. Or, on the other hand, you get the Pardew effect, where a team with a new manager can look deceivingly good at first, before tumbling down to their proper standard of play with nary a Pards Shimmy in sight. It doesn’t make Alan Pardew a terrible manager nor the next man up at the Bernabeu, it just means there’s a lot of variation in form for any manager.

When Jose Mourinho was fired from his post at Chelsea and Guus Hiddink brought the team back to a mid-table position by season’s end, the implication there was that Chelsea were legitimately a lower-table team under The Special One at that point. Given the chance to play out the whole season under Jose, Chelsea very likely would have finished in about the same spot once they regained their form and regressed to the mean standard of performance under Jose. And, other than learning about Hiddink’s judo expertise, we would have seen far better pressers from Stamford Bridge as well.

Not only is jumping the gun on manager shuffling harmful on the pitch, it does cost money too. All sorts of fees and compensatory payments come into play when a manager is fired, and by paying both the old manager and the new one at the same time for a very temporary potential bump in the table, teams are essentially taking the least efficient, least cost-effective way possible of generating points.

So Swansea fired Monk, fired Guidolin, fired Bradley, and said “Meh” to Alan Curtis twice. Fine, it’s their funeral. But when the Swans’ form starts to dip below the standard Paul Clement set up to that point, the managerial turnaround in form they could be looking for could come from… Paul Clement.

Will Clarke is co-creator of The Challengers Podcast, a soccer website and podcast that discusses the Premier League, the Bundesliga, and La Liga. Listen to their show on iTunes, like them on Facebook, and follow them on twitter — @ChallengersPod.