http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1361d6f6-bdbc-11e2-890a-00144feab7de.html#axzz2TZVSAqsh
I began thinking harder about football managers in 2007, when I met the sports economist Stefan Szymanski at a conference in Istanbul. Over beers in the Istanbul Hilton, and later while writing our book Soccernomics together, I realised that Stefan brought an almost unique quality to football talk: everyone had opinions but Stefan could back his up with data. He’d calculated that most managers barely mattered. Far more telling was money: typically, the more a club paid its players, the higher it finished in the league. Perhaps 90 per cent of managers added no value to the wage bill and might as well be replaced with stuffed teddy bears.
