Coaching Carousel
October 19, 2009
In one respect, the 2009-10 season has been typical of recent Bundesliga campaigns. Four teams - Mainz, Hanover, Bochum and Hertha Berlin - have parted ways with their head coaches. And of the four, only Mainz has significantly profited from the move.
As money has come to play an increasing role in the German league, so has the pressure to achieve short-term goals. Thus, clubs have become far quicker to axe coaches. In the first ten years of the Bundesliga's existence, there was an average of five mid-season coaching changes per campaign. The average is now almost nine.
“Last season, it looked as though the culture was improving, but we've returned to the old method of hire and fire,“ Horst Zingraf, the President of the Association of German Football Teachers, complained in a recent interview with dpa news agency.
In fact, nine coaches have involuntarily vacated their posts in the only past six months, meaning that half of the Bundesliga clubs have been forced to swallow unwelcome costs.
But a look at the statistics suggests that teams might well have saved their money.
Motley record
Empirical studies have shown that a change of coach by no means guarantees a team's performance on the pitch will improve.
In a dissertation for the Academy of Sports in Cologne, sports scientists Sonja Bick and Daniel Mahnken examined the 455 coaching changes in the German first and second division between 1981 and 2005. They found that the teams concerned only improved on average by one-half of a position in the table in their first four games under a new regime.
That picture of inefficiency is supported by a dissertation written by Markus Rothermel at the University of Munich looking specifically at the 2004-5 season. Of four teams that made early coaching changes, Hamburg and Schalke benefited, while Moenchengladbach and Hansa Rostock failed to improve or even got worse.
A study of the Spanish first division by researchers Juan de Dios Tena and David Forrest tells a slightly different tale. According to their statistics, teams with new coaches did tend to improve in the immediate short term - but only at home.
That's probably due to improved support from fans.
“Appeasing fans can have on-the-field benefits,” Tena and Forrest concluded. “It is consistent with the importance attributed to crowd support in the literature on home advantage in sports.”
In other words, switching coaches may be a way of creating short-term optimism and grabbing a few extra points, but it won't solve fundamental flaws in a squad. Bick and Mahnken concluded that significant improvements in the table were only achieved after new coaches had worked with players for twenty games or more.
Still, grabbing a few points is a powerful argument for club managers staring into the abyss, and teams usually contend that in their own specific situation, they had no options. So is a particular type of coaching change the answer?
The Doll factor
Clubs often try to shake things up by promoting coaches of their amateur or development sides to the top job. Of the four firings this season, three - Mainz, Bochum, and Hanover - fall into that category.
The clubs' respective managers no doubt hope that their new coaches will replicate the success of Thomas Doll with Hamburg a few years back.
In 2004, the former coach of the Hamburg amateurs took over a side in last place, having earned only 6 points in eight games. His youthful enthusiasm caught on, and he led them to an eighth-place finish in May and a spot in the Champions League one year later.
But teams can also survive by standing pat. In 2006, Bochum were in the drop zone 14 rounds with only 12 points. They stuck by Marcel Koller, the coach they chose to fire this season, and he also ended up in eighth - arguably a better rescue job since Bochum is a far smaller club than Hamburg.
This season, Mainz's Thomas Tuchel has inspired his squad to some big wins, most notably over Bayern Munich. But there's little reason to think he's a long-term cure-all.
Even if their teams stay up for a season, former amateur coaches usually find themselves quickly back in the relegation zone. In fact, in recent years, no former amateur coach has established himself in the first division.
Thomas Doll, for instance, is currently employed in Turkey.
Firemen to the rescue
The other type of new coach teams tend to hire is what Germans call a “firefighter,” i.e. a veteran who's brought in to puncture the egos of over-performing divas and restore discipline and tactical competence. Hertha have taken this route with Friedhelm Funkel.
The prototypical fireman is Hans Meyer. The 66-year-old has saved not one, but three teams - Hertha, Nuremberg and Moenchengladbach - from relegation in the past five seasons.
The problem is that there's only one of him. The other coaches usually considered firemen - Peter Neururer, Joerg Berger and Funkel himself - have all failed in the past in their appointed short-term missions.
Of the fifteen teams that have gotten relegated in the past five seasons, only five of them decided against a mid-season coaching change. Conversely, that means that ten potential saviors did not get the job done.
That's in part because there's a limit to what a coach can do to compensate for a squad's inadequacies - as Hertha's Friedhelm Funkel knows. He took over an unmotivated team, forced to rely on a 19-year-old goalkeeper who is clearly in over his head. And in his first two matches in charge, the results were two bad losses, including a 3-nil drubbing last weekend by lowly Nuremberg.
"You're never absolutely helpless, but you do have your eyes opened in the odd situation," a rattled Funkel told reporters after that match. "You see exactly what considerable improvements have to be made. We'll be doing that in the coming weeks."
Or, as history would suggest, perhaps not.
Author: Jefferson Chase
Editor: Michael Lawton