Follow Paul Harvey and check out more of his work at Old North State Soccer Analytics, where this piece was originally published.
In soccer, do coaches really matter?
That’s been a “fun” little debate that’s been had back and forth across the internet, with proponents of the more extreme views squaring off in the public square. The “no” position sits well as an inflammatory statement, generating engagement from the people who clearly feel like the man at the top means something to the way the game is played out. And those instincts cause a gut level reaction that makes it hard not to respond. And the wheel of content grinds on.
The actual answer lies in the middle, and doesn’t really drive engagement (the singular currency of the internet era) the same way.
Coaches matter — that’s why they’re paid so much — but they matter a whole lot less than the players. After all, soccer happens on the fly. Coaches don’t get to call timeouts to work up elaborate plays like they do in basketball, and they definitely don’t have a defined playcalling system and script like they would in American football. The most significant influence they have is in changing the players through substitutions, and with only 5 of those that influence is fairly limited as well.
The Twitter Tacticos don’t want you to believe that.
They want everything to be a chess match, a battle of wits with increasingly intricate movements determined by bald headed psychopaths with furrowed brows watching hours and hours of tape. The “Great Man” theorists believe that these managers are born for their positions, the stars aligning in beautiful symmetry as they make their debut on the planet.
Those same Tacticos also are notable in that they don’t seem to have any real belief in luck. Everything is deterministic, rock will always beat scissors, and every loss is underpinned by a failure. Nowhere is this more obvious than the threads you will get about body language in the wake of a penalty shootout (notably — never analysis before the shootout).
The point being, you can’t trust these people. They are hucksters. Luck is real, player differences drive outcomes over the long haul, and coaches are really there to get blamed and fired to save the sporting director their job.
The argument looks even more ridiculous when you see the amount of cheerleading that happened for B.J. Callaghan and Anthony Hudson — two well meaning but ultimately fairly inconsequential interim managers. The same voices that demanded better coaching were placated by chair fillers carrying out the same style with the same players in the same competitions. How much could coaching matter really?
What about international management?
Now, managing a club team is a totally different approach than managing a national team.
You have a budget, and your sporting director acquires and pays players within that structure. Having more money is usually a path to having better players, but of course there are many ways to squander that money. If, as a manager, you want a player — let’s say a defensive midfielder — you can in theory sign tens of thousands of players. That might be constrained by work permits, or budget, but even then you can get a working shortlist of thousands of players to look through.
Scouting is paramount, and being able to filter through large numbers of individuals accurately is a huge part of the job.
