Who is the best coach of all time? A network-based assessment of the career performance of professional sports coaches

TL;DR

This paper introduces a network-based method to evaluate and rank the career performance of top-tier European soccer and American basketball coaches using game data and centrality metrics, providing dynamic and historical insights.

Contribution

It develops a novel network analysis approach to assess coaches' performance, including dynamic career monitoring and decade-specific rankings, across two major sports.

Findings

Identified top coaches in European soccer and American basketball.

Established rankings by decade and season.

Provided a methodology for real-time performance comparison.

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 network centrality metrics. We identify Arsene Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson, Jupp Heynckes, Carlo Ancelotti, and Jose 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.