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Ranking Premier League managers by how they'd transform a midtable team

Managers don't matter. Just ask the best manager in the world.

"I will tell you a secret," Pep Guardiola said in October. "The main thing is the quality of the players." He went on: "I try to figure out things, but at the end the players ... the success we had is because we have top players. This is the secret, no more than that."

Now, "managers don't matter" is a bit of a rhetorical overstatement. Manchester City wouldn't have won as many points last season if you were managing the team. Meanwhile, Chelsea probably wouldn't have finished higher in the table had they given you the reins rather than Frank Lampard after firing Graham Potter. Rather, what Guardiola is suggesting is that talent is the main driver of team success. Framed another way, player skill overwhelmingly decides what wins games. In fact, the authors of the book "The Numbers Game" found that player skill (as represented by wages paid) accounts for 70% of team performance. Somewhere in that remaining 30% sits the effect of the manager, along with other factors like, say, the random, and flummoxing bounce of the ball.

Managers do matter -- just way less than we think. And the limited impact makes that impact even harder to measure. In a league without a salary cap, and with massive team-to-team financial inequality and vastly differing team-building ideals, we can't just look at where a team finished and say, "The best manager finished first, the worst manager finished 20th."

Instead, we have to try to control for all of the other factors that influence winning. We can't do that with anything resembling precision because of all of the unknown factors that influence winning -- for example, is a player great because he's inherently great or because the manager deployed him in a way that made him great? -- so we're going to try a slightly different exercise.

And so, I've ranked and tiered all 20 Premier League managers by how confident I'd be that they would improve the 10th-richest team in the Premier League.

No-doubt improvers

Among the 20 managers in the Premier League, there are only two who I'm sure would improve the 10th-best team in the Premier League beyond their talent level. And those are the two best managers in the world: Pep Guardiola (Man City) and Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool). This exercise requires a ton of projection, and I really only have a small degree of confidence in all of the other tiers, but there's really no argument that anyone else belongs in this tier.

That said, such is the shape-shifting nature of managerial influence that there are some arguments against both of these coaches being in this tier.

With Pep, it's simply that we've never seen him do it. He's by far the most successful and most influential modern manager in the world. The ClubElo coach ratings also rank him as the best coach -- by a combination of how good his teams were and how much they improved after he arrived -- in the history of the sport. It's just that, well, he first had maybe the greatest player and the greatest midfield in the history of the sport at the same time, at Barcelona. At Bayern Munich, well, they have so much more money than everyone else, and they've won every league title since he left. And at Manchester City, he has the near-unlimited funding of a sovereign wealth fund.

I raised this idea to a former Premier League manager a few months ago, and he ... completely rejected it. Guardiola is easily the best coach we've ever seen at maximizing top-level talent, but as he suggested, so many other teams farther down the table have adopted some of his principles, too. If Brighton can play possession soccer and succeed with it, you can't really say that Pep Guardiola wouldn't do a great job at Brighton.

Klopp, meanwhile, has never coached the richest team in his own league. He's the last manager to beat Bayern Munich and Manchester City across a full domestic season. And he did a fantastic job at Mainz before Borussia Dortmund, too. Last season was probably his "worst" season as a manager -- he didn't really seem to figure out how Liverpool should play until the last couple of months -- but on the whole, he's just fantastic. One of the all-time greats. He's probably the best culture-builder in the sport, too.

These guys both now have decade-plus track records of success across multiple leagues, multiple countries and multiple tactical eras. No one else on this list comes close to that.

Failed at PSG -- but succeeded (almost) everywhere else

Mauricio Pochettino (Chelsea) and Unai Emery (Aston Villa) are sort of the anti-Guardiolas. Like every other manager in Paris since Qatar took over, they both flamed out at PSG. But the rest of their careers have mostly seen steady improvements at lesser-resourced clubs.

Pochettino was fine with Espanyol; then he seemed to transform Southampton into one of the most exciting teams in the Premier League, and then he seemed to transform Tottenham into one of the most exciting teams in the Premier League. We've already seen him succeed with two teams right around the realm of resources we'd be restricting him to in this exercise.

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So why am I not more confident? Well, Ronald Koeman was quite successful for Southampton right after Poch, and this was during the club's golden age of recruiting. Then: How much credit should he get for coming in at Tottenham right when homegrown Harry Kane was blossoming into a superstar?

Emery, meanwhile, failed at Arsenal, but it's not like Mikel Arteta immediately did much better; they were awful the following season, too. Plus, taking over for Arsene Wenger was a near-impossible job, given that he was the last remaining capital-M manager, the kind who had a say in everything major that happened at the club.

Outside of that, Emery has overseen improvements at Almeria, Valencia, Sevilla, Villarreal, and now Aston Villa. The latter featured an incredible in-season turnaround last year -- but how much credit should he get for it?

I'm pretty confident that neither Emery nor Pochettino would make our hypothetical team worse. I'm less confident in just how much they'll improve the performance.

It all comes back to Everton

These next two guys have nothing -- and everything -- in common.

There's pretty clearly a ceiling on how good a David Moyes (West Ham) team can be. He has a distinct vision of how his teams should play and what skill sets he wants for each position on the field. That's why his teams usually play well eventually -- it's easy to scout for, and the players know what to do -- but it's also why he has never succeeded at the top end. His ideas just don't really allow his players to generate enough goals.

All that said, we've seen so many games from him and such sustained long-term improvement at both Everton and West Ham that I feel way more confident in projecting his managerial performance than most of the other coaches listed here. He'd probably make them slightly better than the average coach.

At the other end of the spectrum is one of his former players, Mikel Arteta (Arsenal). He has one of the wider ranges of outcomes for any coach on this list. We've only seen him coach one club, and it's one of the richer clubs in the world, who have completely overhauled the team to his specific liking. Also, we really hadn't seen any true overperformance until this past season.

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He too has a clear vision for what he wants to do -- you better be able to complete 85% of your passes, buddy -- and it worked really well last season. At the same time, it was just one season, amid a down year for many of England's big clubs, and it coincided with the arrival of two starters from Manchester City (Gabriel Jesus, Oleksandr Zinchenko) and a world-class center-back in William Saliba. On top of that, Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli, and Martin Odegaard are all at ages when we'd expect them to improve.

It's impossible to know how much credit Arteta deserves for that ... so he's in a tier with David Moyes.

Could be higher, pending this season

Based on the very rough estimations from the site FBref, Brighton and Newcastle had the 19th- and the ninth-highest wage bills, respectively, in the Premier League last season. And based on the best metric we have to judge team performance, Brighton and Newcastle were the fourth- and second-best teams in the Premier League last season.

Given how tactically distinct both teams were, I think we have to give a good deal of credit to both Roberto De Zerbi (Brighton) and Eddie Howe (Newcastle).

On the aggregate, Howe did an incredible job at Bournemouth, bringing them from the brink of relegation out of the Football League pyramid entirely and then all the way up to the Premier League. And Newcastle have simply been one of the best teams in the Premier League from the moment he took over midway through the 2021-22 season. Of course, his takeover coincided with the takeover by the richest owners in all of professional sports, and you can't separate those two elements.

The other ding against Howe is that he doesn't seem to be a very good recruiter, and yet insists on being a recruiter. His signings at Bournemouth didn't help keep the team up, while all the recent signings and rumored signings at Newcastle -- Anthony Gordon from Everton, Sandro Tonali from Milan, and Harvey Barnes from Leicester City -- don't really fit a team that's going to be in the Champions League next season. Strangely, because I'm not impressed by the players they're adding, another good season from Newcastle this year would make me feel more confident in Howe's coaching ability.

De Zerbi, on the other hand, suffers in my confidence rankings from Brighton potentially being the anti-PSG, a place where any coach can succeed. The club absolutely did improve when he took over for Potter, but Potter also guided Brighton to a number of really impressive xG-table finishes. Before Brighton, De Zerbi was at Shakhtar Donetsk for a year, which is a write-off from our perspective. Sassuolo got a lot better while he was there, but his previous two jobs ended in relegation and a midseason firing.

Brighton are better at recruiting than anyone else in England -- and maybe the world -- so he's also benefitting from a team whose players are significantly better than what their wages suggest. That said: another good season with Brighton and he moves up a tier or two -- and probably to one of the biggest clubs in Europe.

The "I don't think it'll be a disaster, but I also don't really know for sure" tier

This tier is a combination of coaches I think might be quite good but don't have a large track record of success, one chaotic guy who has been successful if you ignore results, and one guy who is the complete opposite of that guy: Thomas Frank (Brentford), Erik ten Hag (Man United), Marco Silva (Fulham), and Roy Hodgson (Crystal Palace). What unites them is that I feel pretty confident that they would all be able to get something like a 10th-place finish out of the 10th-richest team, and then really have no idea what they'd be able to do beyond that.

We'll start with Frank, whose Brentford sides have both massively overachieved their expectations in his two seasons managing the club in the Premier League. They have the lowest wage bill in the league, and they finished in the top half of the table:

Both Brondby in Denmark and Brentford have improved significantly under Frank. The reason he's not higher is that Brentford can rival Brighton's quality of recruiting and are constantly finding undervalued players who fit a style that's very analytically friendly: only take good shots, only concede bad shots. They're like an NBA team that only shoots threes and layups and only allows midrange jumpers.

Frank deserves credit for helping implement that, but there's a much larger, data-fluent infrastructure that he's a part of. Plus, the Brentford style feels like it probably has a ceiling, so I don't know exactly how far up he could push our hypothetical club.

Ten Hag is, obviously, the coach of Manchester United. He also reached the Champions League semifinals with Ajax. However, both of those clubs have massive financial advantages compared to the average teams in their leagues, and Ajax, in particular, produced a golden generation of talent when he was with the club. Yes, United just finished top-four, but they were sixth in xG and goal differential, which isn't overachievement for one of the richest teams in the world.

Man United certainly were better than the year before -- and he deserves a lot of credit for showing Cristiano Ronaldo the door -- but I need another year of steady improvement before I'm confident that Ten Hag is capable of producing a Premier League team that outperforms its talent.

For Silva, the Elo rating of six of the seven clubs he has coached has improved -- and the seventh was Everton, where the team significantly underperformed their xG numbers, something a coach has almost no control over. His teams have been somewhat volatile, though, so something like seventh- and 13th-place finishes in back-to-back seasons wouldn't surprise me.

Hodgson, meanwhile, is the opposite. He's probably just guiding this team to 10th-place finish after 10th-place finish until the club gets bored, fires him, hires someone else, inevitably does worse, and then watches Hodgson take another job somewhere else and do what he always does. We know what we're getting from Roy, more than perhaps any other coach on the planet.

Anything can happen

The two most interesting managerial hires of the summer comprise this tier: Bournemouth's Andoni Iraola and Tottenham's Ange Postecoglou.

Bournemouth got rid of the seemingly successful Gary O'Neil and replaced him with Iraola. I don't want anyone to lose their job, but from a cold-blooded, we-want-to-win-games perspective, they fired a coach whose team won games despite producing terrible underlying numbers and replaced him with a progressive manager from Spain who finished 11th with a team that had the smallest wage bill in the division.

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Iraola has really interesting ideas. He could be an awesome coach. He could also be a total flop. We just haven't seen him do it at this level, or in this country, yet.

The same goes for Postecoglou. The best team he's coached is Celtic, who currently rate as the 96th-best team in Europe, (per Elo), but I think there's plenty of signal to suggest that he's a good coach. Unlike so many of the nepo-baby former-star-players who get fast-tracked into top gigs despite almost no experience, Postecoglou genuinely had to prove himself, over and over and over again. He has coached in Greece, Australia, Japan, Scotland -- and now he'll do so in England.

The fact that he has been successful doing that makes me more confident that he'll be a good manager than anything about his specific approach. It's just that, like Iraola, this is still a massive leap up. I'd love to see it all work out in the Premier League, but we still haven't seen it work out at this level yet, so there's a good deal of downside risk, too.

The Burnley Boys

All of the teams coached by Sean Dyche (Everton) have improved. The problem, for our purposes, is that he's never really coached a team with a baseline of the 10th-best team in the league. Were we talking about taking over the 17th-richest team in the league, I'd bump Dyche up a couple tiers, but it feels like there would be diminishing returns on Dyche-ball the higher you raise the bar.

Meanwhile, Vincent Kompany took over Dyche's relegated team -- and immediately turned them into the Manchester City of the Championship. After years of eschewing possession and committing moving the ball up field at a breakneck pace, Burnley moved the ball more slowly (direct speed, or meters/second the ball moved up the field) and controlled more final-third possession (field tilt) than anyone else in the second division:

That's promising, but that's also only one season and it's with a team getting parachute Premier League payments that give them a huge financial advantage over the rest of the league. We need to see a lot more from Kompany before we have any kind of confidence in what kind of manager he actually is.

Everyone else

Neither Paul Heckingbottom (Sheffield United) nor Rob Edwards (Luton Town) has coached in the Premier League, and their track records aren't particularly impressive. They could be good, they could be bad, they could be fine. I don't think we can have any real confidence in either of them yet.

Steve Cooper had to manage an ever-changing squad of approximately 4,000 different players last season at Nottingham Forest, and he did avoid relegation, but as the xG chart above shows, they really were quite poor last season. And then there's Julen Lopetegui, who hasn't really done a standout job at any of the teams he's coached, including Wolves, who had terrible underlying numbers after he took over last season. I don't think he's the worst coach on this list, but I'm more confident that he isn't going to improve our hypothetical team more than anyone else on this list.