Win-stay lose-shift strategy in formation changes in football

TL;DR

This study analyzes football team formation changes and finds that teams tend to stick with formations after wins and change after losses, but such changes do not statistically improve match outcomes.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of win-stay lose-shift behavior in football management and assesses its impact on match results.

Findings

Teams exhibit win-stay lose-shift behavior.

Formation changes do not significantly improve subsequent match results.

Managers tend to stick with or change formations based on match outcomes.

Abstract

Managerial decision making is likely to be a dominant determinant of performance of teams in team sports. Here we use Japanese and German football data to investigate correlates between temporal patterns of formation changes across matches and match results. We found that individual teams and managers both showed win-stay lose-shift behavior, a type of reinforcement learning. In other words, they tended to stick to the current formation after a win and switch to a different formation after a loss. In addition, formation changes did not statistically improve the results of succeeding matches.The results indicate that a swift implementation of a new formation in the win-stay lose-shift manner may not be a successful managerial rule of thumb.