The Impact of Managerial Changes on Performance of Football Clubs in Iranian Premier League

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of managerial changes on the performance of football clubs in Iranian premier league. The statistical population of present study contains all clubs which participated in 12 seasons of Iranian football clubs premier league from 2001 to 2013. The whole data was extracted from the archive of premier league organization and Foolad Mobarakeh Sepahan sport club. Improvement or degradation of football clubs in each season compared to the previous season based on managerial changes or stability has been investigated. The data was analyzed with one way ANOVA with Gabriel post hoc test, and independent sample t test in significant lower than 0.05. Results revealed that managerial stability had significant effect on improvement of the performance, and successive changes of executive managers had significant impact on degradation of performance. Results showed that managerial changes caused a 2.48 decline in their rank on the league schedule, and managerial stability caused a 1.00 improvement in their rank on the league schedule. Generally analysis of results supported the hypothesis that managerial stability provides enough time for implementation and realization of long term and short term goals and final improvement on clubs performance.