Football clubs in Europe’s most competitive leagues consistently dismiss managers for the wrong reasons, according to new research by Professor Emeritus Jan C. van Ours of Erasmus School of Economics and the Tinbergen Institute. His latest paper, 'For What It’s Worth: Outcome Bias in Managerial Decisions,' demonstrates that clubs routinely conflate short-term match outcomes, often heavily influenced by chance, with managerial competence, leading to decisions that are both inefficient and misguided.
Improvement after a sacking: chance, not change
Drawing on all within-season managerial changes between 2017/18 and 2024/25 in the Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga, Van Ours shows that dismissals overwhelmingly follow disappointing results, even when the team’s underlying performance was strong. Measures such as expected goals (xG) and bookmaker-based expected points reveal that the quality of play immediately before a dismissal had little or no impact on the likelihood of a managerial change. Instead, clubs reacted to results alone, falling victim to outcome bias: the tendency to judge decisions solely by their outcomes rather than by the quality of the processes that led to them.
The study further finds that the apparent 'bounce' in results often observed after a managerial change is simply a statistical regression to the mean. Teams that had underperformed in the matches leading to a dismissal tended to improve in subsequent matches regardless of whether a manager was replaced. Conversely, when managers were dismissed after periods of overperformance (a far rarer occurrence), results generally did not improve. Across all five leagues, clubs that chose to replace their managers finished the season with cumulative performance levels that were just as disappointing as on the day the dismissal occurred. By contrast, clubs that retained their managers typically ended the season with positive cumulative results.
Pressure from fans and media shapes inefficient choices
Van Ours suggests that executives may be driven not only by internal assessments but also by pressure from supporters and the media, who focus exclusively on match outcomes and ignore underlying performance metrics. In this environment, replacing a manager can appear to be the safest course of action, even when evidence points in the opposite direction. As he explains: ‘Replacing a manager often seems the dominant strategy. If results improve, clubs are praised for decisive action; if they do not, management can at least claim it tried. But keeping faith with a manager after a run of bad luck is frequently the more rational choice, even if stakeholders do not see it that way.’
Because professional football provides frequent, transparent, and high-stakes performance data, the sport offers a rare opportunity to examine decision-making under uncertainty. Van Ours’s study adds to a growing body of research showing how easily decision-makers can be swayed by outcomes that do not accurately reflect performance.
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Read the full study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, 'Outcome bias in managerial decisions' here or download the study above (In English). For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, +316 53 641 846.
