Manager to go? Performance dips reconsidered with evidence from Dutch football

This paper examines whether the forced resignation of managers of Dutch football teams leads to an improvement in the results. We find by analysing 12 years of football in the highest Dutch league that forced resignations are preceded by declines in team performance and followed by improvements in performance. However, the improvement in performance after appointing a new manager does not exceed the seasonal average of both the old and new manager. More importantly, using a control group, it turns out that when the manager would not have been forced to resign, performance would have improved more rapidly. We conclude from this that sacking a manager seems to be neither effective nor efficient in terms of improving team performance. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: J24