Within-season dismissals of football managers: evidence from the French Ligue 1

There have been many studies of the impact of manager turnover on club performance, especially in European leagues. The methodology used and the measures for performance do not seem to affect the results of the different studies. However, studies using a control group have generally had inconclusive results (Scelles and Llorca, 2019). Our paper examines the impact of within-season manager change on club performance using information from the French Ligue 1 over the period 1998-2018. The clubs that change their manager have different characteristics from clubs that do not. Some may be observed (as points before dismissal), and others remain unobservable in the data. We use an empirical method that takes observable differences between clubs into account (through exact matching) and corrects for unobserved characteristics (through difference-in-differences). Our results show that the overall effects of a change of manager on team performance are insignificant, except in the short term where they are positive and statistically significant for the majority at the 10 % level. Decomposing between home and away games, the effect is only positive and significant for home games, suggesting that this would be more the consequence of fan pressure (through satisfaction with a board decision) than any difference in quality between the old and the new manager.