Title: The contribution of coaches in the playing style of football clubs

Authors: Thadeu Gasparetto; Anna Shrainer

Addresses: College of Applied Human Sciences, West Virginia University, 375 Birch Street, Morgantown, WV, USA ' Department of Management, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Kantemirovskaya Ulitsa, 3a, 208, 194100, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation

Abstract: This paper aims to identify the playing styles of football clubs and their influence on the clubs' performance. K-means clustering algorithm was applied to all the passes distributed among the football teams to get the unique z-score and recognise the most outstanding coaching contribution. The Russian Premier League - from 2017/2018 to 2019/2020 - is the setting inspected. The calculated score for each club shows that FC UFA under the guidance of Sergei Semak in 2017/2018, FC Krasnodar with Igor Shalimov in 2017/2018 and Magomed Adiev with FC Anzhi in 2018/2019, in the greater extent, differs from the other clubs that participated in the league over the researched period. The empirical findings reveal that playing experience of a coach has a positive effect on the outcome of a match, while coaching tenure has a reduced negative effect. This study contributes with new insights regarding coaching style identification on professional football.

Keywords: head coach; passing; playing style; professional football; statistics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPM.2025.145874

International Journal of Business Performance Management, 2025 Vol.26 No.3, pp.322 - 342

Received: 20 Sep 2022
Accepted: 28 Jun 2023
Published online: 30 Apr 2025 *

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