When MLS Cup kicks off on Saturday at Banc of California Stadium in Los Angeles, two very different managers will be patrolling the touchlines.
Jim Curtin, head coach of the Philadelphia Union, is a Major League Soccer lifer. He played for the Chicago Fire and Chivas USA before joining the Union’s nascent academy in 2010, getting a promotion to first-team assistant two years later, then becoming permanent head coach in November 2014.
On the other side is Steve Cherundolo, longtime right-back for the U.S. men’s national team and a man nicknamed “The Mayor of Hannover” for his 16-year playing career at the German club. Following his retirement in 2014, he joined as an assistant in the team’s coaching ranks, spending five seasons there before stints with VfB Stuttgart, the U.S., Germany‘s U15 side and the USL’s Las Vegas Lights. In January, he took over at LAFC, replacing Bob Bradley, and won the Supporters’ Shield in his first season.
Two different paths yielding the same result: a chance at MLS Cup 2022. Fans of the teams must be pleased with the performances, but do the men in charge of MLS teams matter? How much impact does a head coach really have?
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The first thing to note is that the answer to that question is really difficult to reach. Soccer is an extraordinarily complex and random game with nearly infinite variables. Extracting the value of a manager from all that noise represents an exercise in near futility, but some experts have tried — with interesting results.
The general findings reveal that most managers do not make much of a difference, with a small percentage producing consistently above-average results and a small percentage leading to net-negative. And then there’s the wonderfully titled paper, “The Survival of Mediocre Superstars in the Labor Market,” in the November 2022 issue of “The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.”
Thomas Peeters, Stefan Szymanski and Marko Terviö report the following: We argue that liquidity-constrained firms face strong incentives to hire experienced, but low-ability workers instead of novice workers with higher upside potential. Using four decades of high-frequency information on worker performance in a “superstar” labor market allows us to estimate the revealed ability of experienced workers at the time they are hired by a new firm. More than one fifth of these hires are “substandard” in that the revealed ability of the hired experienced worker lies below the mean ability of recent novices.
Translation: Teams are more likely to hire experienced, bad coaches than they are to choose an inexperienced manager with great potential.
In general, clubs are risk-averse, ownership opting for the known-known than the unknown-unknown, even when the known-known will produce worse results. When it comes to hiring, stability is greater than variance — that said, MLS is a strange league with esoteric rules and idiosyncratic regulations, and there’s a sense that having prior coaching experience in the league leads to success. But Twenty First Group, a soccer consultancy, looked into this narrative and found it wasn’t true.
“Having prior MLS experience as a head coach is not a predictor of your ability to have success as an MLS coach and your next tenure,” AJ Swoboda, managing director of the Americas, said. There’s no statistical relationship between a good stretch managing one MLS team, followed by positive results at the next job.
Twenty First Group looked into another area and made a revealing discovery: coaches with previous MLS experience had shorter tenures in their next MLS job than managers with no previous MLS experience. To Swoboda, that indicates that many mangers who are new to the league are being hired to oversee a project rather than simply filing a spot at the top of the coaching tree. There’s potentially value in that type of hire.
“The value of the coach hire isn’t necessarily their tactical genius, but more how do they integrate into the broader strategy and direction of the club itself,” he said. “I would posit that the strength of a coach can materially change the outlook of a season, but a coach alone isn’t going to make all the impact. It’s more of an opportunity for a club to make the most of all of their other investments.”
