The manager sack race game

Abstract

This article applies game theory to explain why football clubs have a tendency to sack their managers when relegation is a realistic option. As opposed to coach succession literature, which typically reports contradiction between theory and practice, this article produces credible explanations for this “problem”. In addition, observations indicating accelerated manager replacements in modern professional football are also easily explained. Derived Nash equilibria are also quite robust to parameter assumptions and hence the possible variations.