The manager sack race game

Abstract

This article applies game theory to explain why football clubs have a ten-dency to sack their managers when relegation is a realistic option. As opposedto coach succession literature, which typically reports contradiction between the-ory and practice, this article produces credible explanations for this “problem”. Inaddition, observations indicating accelerated manager replacements in modern pro-fessional football are also easily explained. Derived Nash equilibria are also quiterobust to parameter assumptions and hence the possible variations.