With England under-21s in tournament action, we look at the statistical relationship between under-21 performance and the subsequent success of their senior National sides in major tournaments.

Germany won last year’s World Cup, having won the under-21 tournament in 2009, and with several players progressing to the senior side. But is this representative? We originally looked at this in a full research report a couple of years, ago, and have updated some of the analysis here.

First, we look at the European winners of the major tournaments (ie the World Cup or Euro Championships), and see whether they won any of the preceding under-21 tournaments – see the left-half of the below chart.

Whilst only one in four (25%) of European major tournament winners had won the under-21 in the past 8 years, the striking element here is that almost two thirds of winners (ie 64%) won an under-21 tournament in the previous 12 years.   Put the other way around, only 1 in 3 European winners of major tournaments did so without winning an under-21 tournament in the preceding 12 years.

If we look at whether senior winners reached the semi-final of an under-21 tournament (right half of the chart), less than 1 in 5 European winners (18%) of a World Cup or Euro Championship did so without reaching the semis of preceding under-21 tournaments.  Similarly, 6 out of 10 (58%) reached the semis in the previous 8 years.

England’s tournament performance and prospects

The below chart records a 5 for winning a tournament, 4 for reaching the final, 3 for the semi, 2 for the second round or last sixteen, 1 for reaching the group stage or 0 if the team did not qualify.

*Note that after 2006, the under-21 tournament was put back a year to odd years. In the chart 
 these appear against the previous year (ie the 2009 under-21 tournament is charted as 2008)

England’s 2009 under-21 final appearance stands out as the only recent foray into the last four of that tournament since the 1980s. The 2009 side contained a number of current England internationals including Joe Hart, James Milner and Theo Walcott. The under-21 wins in 82′ and 84′ were followed by two of England’s stronger performances in Italia 90′ and Euro 96′ – although as our full report shows, those senior performances only featured 3 players from the winning under-21 teams.

So, in summary then, it’s rare for a national team to win a major tournament without having reached at least the semi-finals in one of the previous six under-21 tournaments.  History suggests England’s 2009 under-21 final appearance may still has some relevance to the performance of the senior team – and the progression of players in the 2009 group to the senior team appears higher than in the 1980s.

Having emerged the other side of the hectic winter fixtures list, the premier league table now gives a good indication of who’s likely to finish where. Whilst much of the discussion in the press focuses on races for the title and European spots, the battle at the bottom of the league rumbles on.

In terms of avoiding relegation, it’s often said that 40 is the ‘magic’ number of points. Since the Premier League reduced in size to 20 teams in 1995/6, 40 points has only been insufficient to keep a team in the league in 3 out of 19 seasons: Sunderland and Bolton were relegated with 40 points in 1996/97 and 1997/98 respectively whilst West Ham famously succumbed to the drop with 42 points to their name in 2002/3.

Given changes in the number of teams in the Premier League, simply looking at points attained is inappropriate, if you want a picture of how ‘survival’ has evolved since the Premier League began back in 1992. So, for the clubs in the bottom places, we calculate the % of the total points available they won. This is shown in the chart below, for every Premier League season.

A few things jump out:

(1) over time, we find a small downward trend in the points won by the club which finished above the bottom 3. In other words, in general, clubs need marginally less points to stay up than before. Based on the trend line, a club now needs around 2 points less to stay up compared to 10 years ago.

(2) but there is considerable variation in points won by relegated clubs from season to season; particularly for the bottom club.

(3) apart from a period in the late 1990s, it has usually been the case that the 3rd bottom club and the first safe club are very close in terms of points won i.e. at least one relegation place is decided on the last day of the season.

So what might explain the downward trend in the points required to stay in the league? Perhaps, there’s has been a decline in the performance of teams in the bottom half of the premier league, relative to those in the rest of the league. Such an explanation fits with the ‘stylised fact’ that the premier league has become less competitive over time and/or the premier league has split into performance ‘tiers’. See Football Economics’ previous work on league competitiveness here http://www.footballeconomics.com/a-new-equilibrium-in-premiership-competitiveness/

But if you want  bite-size pieces of information to go away with, then since the Premier League adjusted to 20 clubs:

• the 40 point mark isn’t a bad guide – achieve that and based on history you have an 85% chance of staying in the league.
• drawing every game and reaching 38 points gives you a 68% chance of survival.

We’ve a number of ideas on how to extend the analysis, perhaps by looking over a longer-time horizon, comparing with Europe’s top leagues or making a comparison between the old Division 1 and the Premier League – but that’s for another post. If you have any queries or questions, or would like to sponsor some of these further analyses, please do get in contact with us.

Grant Davies – Football Economics

An excellent day today at the annual LMA conference which included a range of inspirational talks on leadership with fascinating insights from a range of speakers including Sir Alex Ferguson. Here we draw out our themes and conclusions from the day:

Manager development and support – Richard Beven (Chief Exec of the LMA) highlighted the ongoing challenge of massive turnover in club managers. He suggested that 50% of dismissals are of first-time managers, and 50% of those fail to ever get another job in management – a world away from the Wengers and Mourinhos. In the quarter to end October, LMA’s new stats show 17 managers had been dismissed – a 10-year high.  Manager development remains an issue for clubs, as our research on managers’ club experience also shows.

Diversity – Lord Herman Ouseley (chairman of Kick it Out) set out the diversity management challenge, looking at experience and skill, rather than expectations. Steve Bradbury’s recent research on BME representation has brought the issue into sharp relief – just 3.4% of senior coaching positions in the 92 football league in 2012 were filled by BME coaches, compared to 6.4% of those with a UEFA Pro Coaching License, 14% of the wider population, and 25% of professional players.

Evaluating impact – the Premier League has spent £350m from 2012-2015 on the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) – apparently similar to expenditure by team GB – to improve the 38% of the Premier League’s talent which is home-grown, versus 50% in the Bundesliga and 72% in La Liga.   Credit to the Premier League for establishing measurable targets, which should enable this programme to be independently evaluated, assessed and focussed.

From data science to insight – we heard from Rasmus Ankerson on interpreting big data in football with his company 21st Club and from Steve McClaren and Alec Stewart on how player data has transformed football and cricket. Still, it’s clear that there’s further to go in actually making sense of data for decision-makers, and for new feedback to be fully accepted alongside ‘gut instinct’.

To conclude then, an inspirational day with leadership insights for all, and challenges ahead for managers and football in general. Of course, at Football Economics, we see that research and analysis have a big role to play in each of these areas – turning data into information, and then practical insight to help football develop its approach to meet the challenges it faces.

In this article, we look at the extent to which top-flight clubs still look to former players to manage their club.

There are recent high-profile examples of former players taking over the managerial reigns at the top level – notably Tim Sherwood at Tottenham and Ryan Giggs at Manchester United. Still, as our analysis will show, these two examples are very much against the general trend.

Of course, managers that have a successful history at a club usually enjoy at least a period of goodwill from fans – and along with a familiarity with the clubs set-up and area, could make a manager more likely to return.

Graeme Souness, George Graham, Peter Reid…

We start our analysis at the end of August 1992 and look at five year intervals. In 1992, 9 of the 24 managers (the league shrinks to 20 in all other data points) had played for their club they managed. Examples include George Graham at Arsenal, Peter Reid at Manchester City and Graeme Souness at Liverpool (see below for link to report and data table).

Charting the decline in ‘managers with previous’

Five years on, in 1997, this had shrunk to 7 out of 20 (35%). In 2002, it had fallen further to 4 (20%), and in 2007 it was a 5 (25%).

Of course, a key trend over this period was the significant increase in foreign managers which followed the -influx of players from overseas.

In 1992, all managers were from the UK and Ireland, whereas in 2012, 7 out of the 20 were from elsewhere.We intend to return to the topic of manager nationality in future analyses.

At the start of the Premier League, there was only a small pool of overseas players that had played at a club but, by the end of August 2012, the only two Premier League managers that had played for their clubs – Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea and Roberto Martinez at Wigan – were themselves part of the overseas influx. The full report looks in more detail at other potential drivers.

Rock bottom

In 2013, for the first time ever, no manager in the Premier League had played for their club previously. We compare end August in each year, but the drop to one occurred as Di Matteo left Chelsea in November. The figure fell to zero when Wigan were relegated with Roberto Martinez and were replaced by Cardiff (Malkay Mackay), Hull (Steve Bruce) and Crystal Palace (Ian Holloway) – none of whom had played for the clubs they managed.

Outlook and Conclusions

For the start of the 2014/15 season, Garry Monk is the only Premier League Manager to play for his club and at 40-1 to be sacked next, his outlook is relatively healthy.

Does this decline matter? It’s not clear whether fans value having a manager with playing pedigree, nor whether that would lead to a higher level of success. These could be questions for further research. Still, seen as an indicator of progression from playing to managing at the top level of club football, it suggests that  for  the vast majority of clubs, former players have not been developed sufficiently to take over the managerial reigns.

For fuller analysis and conclusions,  thoughts on related research questions and detailed tables of managers, see the full report in our publications section.

Notes for Editors

If you’d like to cite this analysis, please cite the source as “Football Economics”, or see the full report for contact details for the media.

In this article, we look at World Cup predictions based on economic variables and evaluate their success.  We also offer some insights on potential alternatives. First we ask whether England’s high dependence on the domestic league for squad selection is a weakness. Second we consider the representation of major European leagues in the latter stages of the tournament.

Before the tournament started, Frontier Economics put out a small bulletin looking at predicting World Cup 2014.  This is available on their website http://www.frontier-economics.com/news/against-the-odds-frontier-bulletin-on-the-value-of-teams-at-the-world-cup/

More accurately, Frontier’s analysis looked at the economic value of the major teams and compared this with bookmaker odds of winning the tournament. What we want to do in this blog post is to see how it stood up, now the World Cup is over, and to get some other ideas floating around out there for metrics to explain performance.

The Frontier hypothesis is simple: the more valuable the team, the better players you have and therefore the more likely you are to win the tournament.

A summary of Frontier’s analysis is shown in the chart below.

Source: Football Economics analysis of Frontier Economics data

Frontier draw attention to the fact that the pre-tournament odds from bookmakers did not exactly mirror the economic value of teams. Brazil, installed as pre-tournament favourites, came out 4^th in terms of value. Obviously there are a number of things going on here such as home-advantage and distortions caused by one key star player – such as in the case of Messi for Argentina and without him, Argentina would drop to ninth in terms of value.

How accurate was economic value in predicting performance?

Well, clearly there is some predictive power in the economic value of team. 3 out of the 4 semi-finalists were from the top 4 countries in terms of value and indeed the final was played out between the 2^nd and 3^rd most valuable teams in the tournament.

That said,  Spain, England and Portugal (even Italy) are noticeably out of kilter with the predictive power of even a cohort –type analysis ; first-round exits for all of them. This could just be ‘noise’ given that we are only examining one tournament or there could also be something more interesting going on.

Other ideas for explaining performance?

One hypothesis is that it can it can be ‘bad’ to have too many players in a squad playing coming from the respective domestic league. Why? Well, two reasons. Firstly, it means your players tend not to be exposed to the different styles of football played around the globe and secondly,  if taken as a signal, it could mean your players are not wanted by other top clubs.

How does this idea  fare? The following chart gives the proportion of each major squad that comes from the respective domestic league (i.e. for England this chart shows the % of players in the squad that play in the English league).

Source: Football Economics analysis of FIFA data

Of the nations shown, Germany – the eventual winners – are the only team to progress to the knock-out stages with more than 50% of the squad sourced from their domestic league.  Indeed, nations with very high percentages – Russia, England and Italy –  all performed poorly.  England’s figure of 96%, and Italy’s 87%,  are noticeably higher than their German and Spanish counterparts who both have strong domestic leagues.  (The very low figures for Brazil and Argentina are more a reflection of the strength of the European leagues compared to their South American equivalents).  Of course, this analysis certainly does not suggest that the Premier Leaugue is ‘bad’…

In general, the Premier League was better represented in the quarter-finals of the World Cup than the two main continental competitors with 22% of players coming from Premier League clubs against 9% and 14% for La Liga and the Bundesliga.

Source: Football Economics Analysis

So, summing up. We can reason that:

• Squad value was a reasonable predictor of performance – 3 of the top 4 in the tournament came from the top four most valuable teams. But in this World Cup, economic value was left wanting in explaining some early exits
• The teams with the very high proportions of players from their own domestic leagues fared poorly. Russia, England and Italy all had proportions in excess of 85%.
• The Premier League exhibited the strongest national share, in terms of player representation, in the latter stages of the tournament.

There’s plenty more analysis to be done on explaining National Team performance – for example how under-21 performance and progression matter; whether the number of club games affects performance; how investment affects player quality  – and these insights should help national Football Associations enhance that performance.