Which former professional football players become successful professional head coaches?

ABSTRACT

One of the potential avenues for former professional football players to pursue their career is to become a head coach of a club’s first team. An important question is how to best prepare for such a reconversion. This letter is the first in the academic literature quantifying the association between success as a professional head coach and prior experience of former professional players as a youth coach, player-coach, head coach at a lower division, assistant coach, in other staff positions and in club management positions. Our regression analyses, based on unique coach career data, show a significant positive association for the jobs of assistant or youth coach.

KEYWORDS:

• Football
• coaching
• education
• regression analysis
• sports management

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C210
• L830
• Z220
• Z260

Highlights

• After their playing career, football players can become a professional head coach.

• We consider ex-professional players who obtained their coaching licence in Belgium.

• We quantify the association between success as a head coach and prior experiences.

• A positive association is found for experience as an assistant or youth coach.

• No significant association is found for experience as a head coach in lower divisions.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Simon Amez from Ghent University, Trevor Heaver from UBC Sauder School of Business and Koen Landsheere and Kris Van Der Haegen from the Royal Belgian FA for their support, help with the data acquisition and understanding and their suggestions to improve this letter’s previous versions. We are, moreover, grateful to coaches Raúl González Blanco, Roberto Martínez, Sven Vermant, Yves Vanderhaeghe and Ariël Jacobs for sharing their practical insights. All remaining errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).