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- Title
Who is the best coach of all time? A network-based assessment of the career performance of professional sports coaches.
- Authors
Erkol, Şirag; Radicchi, Filippo
- Abstract
We consider two large datasets consisting of all games played among top-tier European soccer clubs in the last |$60$| years, and among professional American basketball teams in the past |$70$| years. We leverage game data to build networks of pairwise interactions between the head coaches of the teams and measure their career performance in terms of PageRank centrality. We identify Arsène Wenger , Sir Alex Ferguson , Jupp Heynckes , Carlo Ancelotti and José Mourinho as the top |$5$| European soccer coaches of all time. In American basketball, the first |$5$| positions of the all-time ranking are occupied by Red Auerbach , Gregg Popovich , Phil Jackson , Don Nelson and Lenny Wilkens. We further establish rankings by decade and season. We develop a simple methodology to monitor performance throughout a coach's career, and to dynamically compare the performance of two or more coaches at a given time. The manuscript is accompanied by the website coachscore.luddy.indiana.edu where complete results of our analysis are accessible to the interested readers.
- Subjects
PROFESSIONAL sports; SOCCER teams; SOCCER coaches; BASKETBALL teams; OCCUPATIONS; CYCLING competitions
- Publication
Journal of Complex Networks, 2021, Vol 9, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2051-1310
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/comnet/cnab012