Longevity differences in the tenures of American and foreign Major League Soccer managers

We examine correlates of tenure length for professional soccer managers. Using 521 managers from Major League Soccer (MLS), Spain’s La Liga, and the English Premier League (EPL) whose tenures occurred between 2000 and 2015, we assess the association between both performance-related and non-performance variables, and manager duration. Performance variables include measures of a team’s ranking (or position) and relegation/promotion indicators. Non-performance variables include manager nationality and age, the timing of a manager’s hire, and the team’s wage bill. We employ survival analytic methods, including Cox’s proportional hazards model, to explore the effects of fixed and time-dependent covariates on coach tenure length. We find that La Liga managers have shorter survival, as do managers who were older when they were hired. Furthermore, finishing with a better ranking and, more importantly, improving on previous team performance yields longer survival. Most strikingly, however, we find a significant disparity in the comparison of domestic and foreign managers within a league. While the difference in longevity between domestic and foreign managers in La Liga and the EPL was minimal, American managers in MLS survived significantly longer than their foreign peers.