Plus is proud to bring you a brand new regular feature: the Plus sports page. This will be regularly updated with stories exploring the maths in sports, from analysing scoring statistics to planning the perfect strategy.
We start off by looking at — what else? — football. Being the manager of a Premier League football club may seem like one of the most glamorous jobs in the world — with the fame comes fortune and the opportunity to travel (well, to Hull, Wigan and Portsmouth anyway). However, as far as job security goes, football managers live on the edge. Their terms can be terminated almost on a whim by their club's owner, and they live and die by their team's results.
It would seem that there is no way to predict how long their tenures will be. However, a collection of researchers from the UK, Singapore and the US have found that there may be a strong mathematical trend underlying how long football managers stay in their jobs.
Labels: sports
posted by Plus @ 11:59 AM 
1 Comments:
- At 8:28 AM,
said... -
Really interesting results and an enjoyable article. I think an interesting sideline could be the relationship between the chairmans length of tenure and the managers. Clubs also have a reputation; take the Newcastle United fiasco recently. Did the researchers find a link between the prior success of the club under the previous manager, with the length of tenure of subsequent managers? i.e., when Alex Ferguson leaves Manchester United, will his successor last as long?