Is it stupid how we judge managers?

Man City won the title this afternoon, and Manuel Pelligrini's first season in English football will go down as a reasonable success.

Now I'm not disputing that he's a good manager, I think he is. But let's suppose Steven Gerrard hadn't slipped against Chelsea. Liverpool would probably have got a point, they'd have probably won at Palace and they'd have won the title.

Each of those events is outside of Pelligrini's control yet they play a major role in how people judge the job he's done at City. If Liverpool hadn't cocked up, he'd be seen as a failure.

United once won the title on 75 points, and City fired Mancini last season for finishing 2nd on 78.

In principle, is it fair?

The Premier season is over 38 games, so things tend to even themselves out over that time.

Ok, Gerrard cocked up and City benefited but didn't Vincent Kompany cock up against Liverpool giving them the win.  Swings and roundabouts.

If Rodgers hadn't gone mad against Palace and took the win rather than go for more goals things may have been different - but he didn't.

It is not the 'best' team that wins the title but the most consistent team over the nine months.

More often than not you finish the season in the position you deserve to be in.

You also can't really judge one season to another - so many changes - players, managers, injury's, etc.

OK, forget City and Liverpool. Concentrate on the principle.

Two factors determine any Premier League club's finishing position; their points total and that of the other nineteen sides. And there's only one of those that any manager has considerable control over.

Assuming the same levels of resources and luck, which of these managers is better?

Manager a) guides team to the title on 75 points
Manager b) guides team to 2nd position on 90 points

If everything else is equal then it must be the manager who wins rather the manager that comes second.

QED.

It's quite plainly harder to get 90 points than it is to get 75. It's like how doing 90 kick ups is more difficult than doing 75. If you could know at the start of a season how many points you needed to win the league, you'd be happier if it was 75 than if it was 90.

If manager A wins less matches than manager B with the same team, does it make him the better of the two, that there happened to be 19 worse teams as opposed to the 18 in manager B's case?

Let me reiterate that this is about more than whether you'd rather finish 1st or 2nd. We all know that 1st is more pleasing than 2nd, regardless of the points total. How much credit is owed to the manager is a separate matter.

doffcocker wrote:OK,

Two factors determine any Premier League club's finishing position; their points total and that of the other nineteen sides.

Wrong.

Success in the prem is directly relative to how much money you throw at it.

Leagues don't get won in this day and age, they get bought.

doffcocker wrote:It's quite plainly harder to get 90 points than it is to get 75. It's like how doing 90 kick ups is more difficult than doing 75. If you could know at the start of a season how many points you needed to win the league, you'd be happier if it was 75 than if it was 90.

If manager A wins less matches than manager B with the same team, does it make him the better of the two, that there happened to be 19 worse teams as opposed to the 18 in manager B's case?

Let me reiterate that this is about more than whether you'd rather finish 1st or 2nd. We all know that 1st is more pleasing than 2nd, regardless of the points total. How much credit is owed to the manager is a separate matter.

You can't measure different seasons against each other - it is like comparing an apple to a pear.

For a start you have three different teams in the league each season - the weaker they are, the greater the spread of points in the league.

Teams will have bought and sold players, players have come of age or gone past their sell by date, have key players injured, or came back from injury. Different players will bring with them different attitudes and ethos - some good some bad, which have to be dealt with. Managers (and staff) will have left clubs and new ones arrived, thus different tactics and team selections, different backroon thinking and training regimes, etc, etc, etc.

In your premis above you state everything is equal apart from the managers performance, so obviously that being so a manager who wins the league (even with a low number of points) as no peer but a manager who comes second with many more points a following year as someone who had bettered him.

So all things being equal a peerless manager self-evidently must be better than one beaten by someone else.

QED

There is almost universal approval for what Gus Poyet and Tony Pulis have achieved this year and yet neither team set the world on fire points wise.
It goes to show that our perception of managers is determined by a wide number of factors other than results including resources, press coverage, perceived variations in player performance and a bunch of other stuff. But the key factor in both Poyet's and Pulis's situation was that fans expectations were very, very low indeed. We Brits really love it when an underdog comes through.

Which partially explains the attitude of many Bolton fans towards DF. We may have started the season with a bunch of overpaid ponces who considered themselves to be of Premiership standard but all it took was a couple of key injuries and a dose of bad attitude from the prima donnas for the wheels to fall off. Dougie may have delivered a superb set of results towards the end of the season but expectations were so high from the off that he was and is in a no-win situation.


We judge him on our expectations but we can't accept that our situation has changed to the extent it has so we expect instead of hope. That's why he will never be accepted by a proportion of our fans.

Sluffy wrote:

doffcocker wrote:It's quite plainly harder to get 90 points than it is to get 75. It's like how doing 90 kick ups is more difficult than doing 75. If you could know at the start of a season how many points you needed to win the league, you'd be happier if it was 75 than if it was 90.

If manager A wins less matches than manager B with the same team, does it make him the better of the two, that there happened to be 19 worse teams as opposed to the 18 in manager B's case?

Let me reiterate that this is about more than whether you'd rather finish 1st or 2nd. We all know that 1st is more pleasing than 2nd, regardless of the points total. How much credit is owed to the manager is a separate matter.

You can't measure different seasons against each other - it is like comparing an apple to a pear.

For a start you have three different teams in the league each season - the weaker they are, the greater the spread of points in the league.

Teams will have bought and sold players, players have come of age or gone past their sell by date, have key players injured, or came back from injury.  Different players will bring with them different attitudes and ethos - some good some bad, which have to be dealt with. Managers (and staff) will have left clubs and new ones arrived, thus different tactics and team selections, different backroon thinking and training regimes, etc, etc, etc.

In your premis above you state everything is equal apart from the managers performance, so obviously that being so a manager who wins the league (even with a low number of points) as no peer but a manager who comes second with many more points a following year as someone who had bettered him.

So all things being equal a peerless manager self-evidently must be better than one beaten by someone else.

QED

What does QED mean apart from "I am a twerp"?

This is all hypothetical talk. You don't have to look at it as two different seasons. Think of it as one season where you wind back the clock to July at the end and stick a different manager in. The circumstances (resources, injuries, quality of opposition etc) remain the same. You might say that in reality no two sets of circumstances are ever the same but that doesn't change the principle. It could even be that they were favourable to manager A in my for instance.

There's only so many variables any sports person can control in terms of being successful. I don't see how anybody can argue with that.

QED is the short form of the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum which means more or less 'which had to be demonstrated' and is placed at the end of a philosophical argument (which as you have said above already that the question is hypothetical) and is used to signify the conclusion of the proof, ie the validation of the conclussion.

The abbreviation is used most commonly in the in the academic world although not exclusively.

I apologise if the acronym seemed to have caused you some annoyance, that was not my intention.

As for your question.  It would seem to me that the object of the game is to finish top.  Therefore as long as you finish top it is irrelevant how many points you accrue, just as long as it is more than any of your rivals.

Therefore any manager that wins the league as attained the ultimate objective whilst a manager who accrues 10, 20 or a million more points BUT still finishes behind someone else, has not.

Therefore one manager is a winner and the other is a loser.

If everything else remains the same then clearly the first manager has beaten all his rival managers to the title- agreed?

However in the second scenario - remember everything else remains the same - then one of those rivals beaten in the first scenario, this time beats the manager into second place (although he accrued more points in the season than the first did).

If the first manager beats everyone and the second can not - everything else remaining the same - then clearly the first manager must be better.

What you're saying Sluffy is that success is a measure of quality, which is the point I've been disputing from the beginning.

If you judged a manager purely on whether or not he achieved his club's objective in winning the league (i.e. whether or not they accumulated more points than the other 19 teams), you'd only be seeing half a picture, because what the other 19 teams do is basically out of his hands. If a manager builds a great team, it's not his fault if another manager happens to build an even better one at the same time.

It's the same in any sport. You can't do anything about how good or bad your competition is. Just look at Andy Murray.

All I'm doing is simply trying to answer the question you set - which seems to change after everyone of my replies!

A number of years ago I was asked to consider a similar sort of question to the one I think you are trying to set namely which was the better manager, one who maximised a company's profit or one who minimised a company's loss?

In a growing market sector with unlimited resources most people could probably return a profit but in a rapidly declining market, with fixed overheads, long lead in times, cash flow issues, etc, etc, it takes someone special to minimise losses.

Most people will view a 'successful' manager as a good manager and a 'failing' manager as a 'bad' manager, when in reality it could be quite the reverse that is true.

Rightly or wrongly though that is how in our society people are judged, success is rewarded, failure punished.

If you applied this view to the current Premier season then I would argue that Pulis at Palace did a wonderful job, considering the position they were in and the resources he had to work with, than Pelligrini, Rodgers or Mouriniho achieved with their resources available to them. I would suggest if you had put Pulis in charge at City, Liverpool or Chelsea at a similar point in the season he would have led these teams also to the top three positions BUT I somehow doubt Messers Pelligrini, Rodgers or Mouriniho would have done as well as he did at Palace.

Is Pelliigrini the best manager because he won the title, or Pulis for keeping Palace up?

Not everybody can achieve the results even at the big clubs (Moyes) or with a raft of new mega million pound signings (Andre Villas-Boas) so Pelligrini, Rodgers and Mouriniho's managerial performances should be rightly acknowledged but so to should others who had a wonderful season considering the resources they had such as Mauricio Pochettino at Southampton and Roberto Martinez at Everton.

The thing though is that we don't measure the context, nor the inputs taken to win the Premier, we simply measure the (outputs) results.

Hope this answers your question.

Steve McLaren has been re-appointed Derby boss, 17 months after being sacked by them.

Will clubs never learn? McLaren is a walking disaster, has he ever done well at any of his many English clubs?

It seems clubs would rather go for an experienced manager with a history of failure than an untried manager. It's mental.

Back when football was slightly more sensible the players got the credit when they played well and won and they also copped the abuse when they lost or were particularly out of sorts, the manager / owner came under scrutiny after a sequence of poor performances. Supporters recognised that it was the players that most directly influenced the game and the management the overall strategy. At some point that has changed, probably since the Premier League started, now the manager takes some of the glory when a team wins and all of the shit when they don't, the players get off almost scot free when they are useless but as most managers seem to believe in their own cult of personality and that they are the single most important individual at a football club then it is difficult to have much sympathy.

Its apples and oranges to me..... how do you think Murhino or Pepe would have done at BWFC last season.  On the other hand would Neil Lennon do well at Barca or Man City with 100's of millions to piss away.
So you can't judge a manager just on results...a lot of it depends on his resources.  West Brom, Bournmouth and the like etc. will always struggle or be mid table. Not because their managers are worse than the big boys......but because they can't compete financially and get the players they want to build the teams as they see it.  That's the way of the world at the moment.

terenceanne wrote:Its apples and oranges to me..... how do you think Murhino or Pepe would have done at BWFC last season.  On the other hand would Neil Lennon do well at Barca or Man City with 100's of millions to piss away.
So you can't judge a manager just on results...a lot of it depends on his resources.  West Brom, Bournmouth and the like etc. will always struggle or be mid table. Not because their managers are worse than the big boys......but because they can't compete financially and get the players they want to build the teams as they see it.  That's the way of the world at the moment.

Leicester and Ranieri last season.

Didnt spend a lot
  Just spent well and obviously managed the team well

terenceanne wrote:Its apples and oranges to me..... how do you think Murhino or Pepe would have done at BWFC last season.  On the other hand would Neil Lennon do well at Barca or Man City with 100's of millions to piss away.
So you can't judge a manager just on results...a lot of it depends on his resources.  West Brom, Bournmouth and the like etc. will always struggle or be mid table. Not because their managers are worse than the big boys......but because they can't compete financially and get the players they want to build the teams as they see it.  That's the way of the world at the moment.

So Steve McLaren is a genius?

He's been at Newcastle where he spent £100m, and in the Championship with Derby and Notts Forest - both big fish in that league.

He's a crap manager, trust me.

y2j 3.0 wrote:

terenceanne wrote:Its apples and oranges to me..... how do you think Murhino or Pepe would have done at BWFC last season.  On the other hand would Neil Lennon do well at Barca or Man City with 100's of millions to piss away.
So you can't judge a manager just on results...a lot of it depends on his resources.  West Brom, Bournmouth and the like etc. will always struggle or be mid table. Not because their managers are worse than the big boys......but because they can't compete financially and get the players they want to build the teams as they see it.  That's the way of the world at the moment.

Leicester and Ranieri last season.

Didnt spend a lot
  Just spent well and obviously managed the team well

Leicester last season was a freak situation and very unlikely to happen again any time soon, all the big clubs were in transition and underachieving and Leicester had momentum after a remarkable turnaround at the end of last season by Pearson.
Every now and then football throws up these freak seasons/results but overall the status quo is maintained and money buys success.
In terms of managers and how they are judged the problem is players and their agents hold far too much power and they can force a manager out because the path of least resistance is to sack one man and replace him with another rather than selling a squad and buying another.
The players all being big spoiled kids who throw their toys out of the pram first time anything goes against them is why this situation is in place and I can see it getting worse before it gets better.
The fact that most clubs now are a billionaires version of a Football Manager game doesn't add any stability either.

Natasha Whittam wrote:

So Steve McLaren is a genius?

He's been at Newcastle where he spent £100m, and in the Championship with Derby and Notts Forest - both big fish in that league.

He's a crap manager, trust me.

He has doctored his CV. Apparently there are two four year gaps in it where he said he was working for his Dad. Thats why he got job.

Owen Coyle is  another example. How on earth does he still keep getting selected?