Generally speaking, the people who matter most in football aren’t managers but players. The market in footballers, unlike the market in managers, is frighteningly efficient. It’s easy to judge players, because they do their jobs in public, sometimes in front of millions of judges. In Soccernomics, Szymanski showed that players largely earn what they are worth, judged by their contribution to their teams’ performance. He found that the size of each English club’s wage bill (taking data from 1978 to 2010) largely explained where the club finished in the league. The club that paid the highest wages typically came top; the club that paid least came last. The correlation between players’ wages and league position was about 90 per cent, if you took each club’s average over about 15 years. As Sturrock says, “Money talks, and money decides where you finish up in the leagues.”
If players’ wages determine results, it follows that everything else – including the manager – is just noise. Most managers are not very relevant. In the long run, they will achieve almost exactly the league positions that their players’ wages would predict.
Still, there is an important caveat. Players’ wages don’t explain everything – merely almost everything at most clubs. That leaves room for a few good managers to make a difference
