Culture
How do you know if a football manager is actually good at their job?
An important thing to remember about Andre Villas-Boas is that he had ridiculously good hair.
You don’t spend a record-shattering €15 million (£12.9; $16.3m) fee to sign a rookie manager away from Porto unless you’re pretty sure you know what you’re getting, and one thing Chelsea knew for certain, back in the heady days of 2011, was that the man with a swirling, fox-red side-parting looked impossibly cool getting tossed in the air during trophy celebrations.
Villas-Boas at Porto in 2010 (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Hair like that had sexy new ideas — a philosophy, perhaps. It had the sort of rakish sweep that could command a press conference, smouldering volcanically above the jagged peaks of an unbuttoned collar. But when the 33-year-old prodigy conducted his first interview as the world’s most expensive manager, all of the glamour quickly drained away.
“Don’t expect something,” Villas-Boas warned gently, “from one man.”
True to his word, he was sacked by March.
Villas-Boas to Chelsea might have gone down as a historic blunder if not for all the other managers teams have squandered transfer fees on in the last few years alone: Marco Rose to Borussia Dortmund (€5 million up front for one lacklustre season); Adi Hutter to Borussia Monchengladbach (€7.5 million, ditto); Julian Nagelsmann to Bayern Munich (€25 million for 19 months); Graham Potter to Chelsea (let’s not talk about it). These were the cream of the crop, the head coaches clubs couldn’t afford to wait around for, yet in their new jobs they had the shelf life of a bunch of bruised bananas.
How do we know if a manager is good? The question sounds almost too obvious to ask — anyone down the pub will be happy to explain it to you loudly over a pint — but professional organisations with millions at stake whiff on it every year. Apparently the answer isn’t great hair. It can’t be trophies, either, since those are pretty much only available to managers already at top clubs. If the study of up-and-coming coaches can be called a science, it remains a largely theoretical one.
“We’ve done work with football clubs and leagues, actually, around what predicts head coach success and it’s very, very hard,” says Omar Chaudhuri of the sports consultancy 21st Group. “There are very few strong predictors.”
Everyone loves a winner, so it makes sense that employers would start by looking for coaching talent toward the top of the table. But we also know that in the grossly unequal world of European football, wage bills are destiny for most teams, no matter who’s in the technical area. The managers we admire most are the ones who find a way to punch above their weight.
To pick out those overachievers, we can start by modelling the relationship between squad strength and success using crowdsourced “market values” from Transfermarkt, which are a decent proxy for player quality when you don’t have wages handy. We’ll average this season’s values with last season’s, where available, to give coaches some credit for player development, then weight the values by minutes played to account for absences.
For the performance side, we’ll use a 70/30 blend of non-penalty expected goal difference and actual goal difference, which captures team strength pretty well and puts more emphasis on the parts of the game coaches are likely to have some influence over (creating and denying chances) than the parts they probably don’t (finishing, saving shots, successfully lobbying for penalties by doing the VAR rectangle thing with their fingers).
The results are striking. Over the last seven seasons across Europe’s top leagues, our simple player quality model can explain around 80 per cent of teams’ success.
But what about the remaining 20 per cent — who should get credit for that?
When we look at the outliers on the chart above, it seems fair to say that Gian Piero Gasperini’s freewheeling style helped elevate Atalanta’s mid-budget squad into a Champions League contender a few years back, and the whole platoon of head coaches and interim guys who oversaw Schalke’s disastrous 2020-21 campaign probably weren’t so hot at their job. Maybe performance over squad value is a fair measure of what a manager brings to the table.
Reassuringly, this season’s list of top teams for adjusted goal difference over expected is a veritable who’s who of coaching legends and the game’s hottest up-and-coming managers.
Xabi Alonso has turned down overtures from Bayern Munich and Liverpool to stay at German champs-in-waiting Bayer Leverkusen, while Brighton’s Roberto De Zerbi, whom no less an authority than Pep Guardiola called “one of the most influential managers of the last 20 years,” remains a strong contender for both jobs.
In Catalonia, Barcelona have been making eyes at Girona’s Michel. Sebastian Hoeness, Paulo Fonseca, Thiago Motta and Will Still have flocks of admirers, and maybe we should all be paying more attention to whatever Eric Roy’s got cooking at Brest.
So is that it — have we cracked the not-so-secret formula to finding Europe’s next top manager?
Well, hang on a second.
One important trait for a good sports stat is stability, or how much it varies from season to season. If last year’s performance can’t predict next year’s because the number is too sensitive to context, you probably don’t want to make it the sole basis for any expensive hiring decisions.
By that standard, our manager metric is a bust. For head coaches who change jobs, there’s no correlation whatsoever between the previous year’s performance above or below expectations at their old club and their first season at their new club. Even though goal difference added seemed pretty good at identifying this season’s hottest managers, it has zero predictive value for new hires.
When Chelsea spent £21.5 million to sign Graham Potter, he was coming off one of the best runs by any head coach in the last seven years: in 2020-21 and 2021-22, Brighton finished 22 and 13 adjusted goals better than expected. His seven months in London went, er, not quite as well.
Brighton, meanwhile, signed Roberto De Zerbi even though his final season at Sassuolo had been about average compared to their squad value. He’d had a pretty good season the year before that, and a respectable stint outside the top five leagues at Shakhtar Donetsk in between, but nothing that might have hinted that his first season at Brighton would be the fourth-best out of hundreds in our dataset.
What can explain the difference between these two very different hiring stories? Maybe there’s a clue in how Brighton’s famously analytical owner Tony Bloom explained his process. “I am confident,” he said of the De Zerbi hire, “his style and tactical approach will suit our existing squad superbly.”
De Zerbi (facing camera) and Potter in 2022 (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
Smart clubs don’t just hire successful managers in hopes that they possess some innate knowledge of how to win. They’re careful to match a coach’s tactics to the players they already have, knowing that changing styles will cost them money and time.
“I don’t want to have to replace 15 players or something like that over two years,” says one veteran analytics consultant, who requested anonymity to protect client relationships. “Because then it becomes a project of just kind of cycling through players and hoping things work out.”
Not every club is as careful about this step as Brighton. Chaudhuri explains that searches often start with a “performance piece” to determine whether managers are making the most of their current squad, but “then you have a playing style piece, which clubs generally tend to be quite vague on how they want to play. They say, ‘We want games to be attractive and exciting,’ whatever that means. And then you go, ‘Okay, tell us what you think that looks like.’”
The other consultant agrees. “I had this meeting yesterday, I gave five candidates, like, ‘What do you think of these five?’” he says. “And he was like, ‘Well, I like these four.’ But I said, ‘One of these four is actually not the style you said you want.’”
Figuring out which managers have exceeded expectations is the easy part. You can watch their players flinging them into the air at a trophy celebration and envision your club doing the same next season. But success, on its own, is fickle. It also tends to be expensive. The right question isn’t “How do we know if a manager is good?” but “How do we know if a manager will be good for this group of players?”
The secret ingredient in hiring the right coach is style — and not just the kind that comes with really good hair.
(Header photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)
The Athletic recently profiled six of European football’s most innovative up-and-coming managers.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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