Are There Any Differences Between Male And Female Soccer Coaches?

This week, AFC Wimbledon in England’s third tier of soccer, known in name inflationary terms as League One (below the Premier League
PINC
and Championship), have been linked with the head coach of top Women’s Super League team Chelsea, Emma Hayes.

AFC Wimbledon are searching for a new manager, and conventionally, all the candidates for the job would be men. It’s men’s football, after all, and there hasn’t ever been a female head coach or manager for a men’s team.

Conversely, there are plenty of men working in the women’s game, including the recently departed head coach for the English Women’s national team, Phil Neville – who has moved to take up a role at Inter Miami in the MLS. Indeed, of the 9,269 women’s matches with data on coaches on Worldfootball.net, fully 5,271 of them involved two male coaches and just 622 involved two female coaches.

But no women managing in the men’s game.

This patriarchal relationship between the men’s and women’s games is rather similar to the rather colonial relationship between developed footballing nations, and developing ones, as Thomas Peeters, Brian Mills, Enrico Pennings and Hojun Sung found when looking at the coaches of men’s national teams. They found there was some bestowing of wisdom from developed nations when a coach went to manage a developing country’s national team, although that was somewhat mitigated by cultural distance. That is, an English manager would do well in a former British Colony, but not in a former Spanish colony, say.

Men can help women to play better, but as yet, women can’t help men, it would seem. This is an argument Andre Carlisle makes forcefully here. Phil Neville had no previous managerial experience in the men’s game, yet was suitable to coach the women’s national team. Whereas Emma Hayes at Chelsea has in twelve years built up a formidable outfit, currently sitting atop of the Women’s Super League and currently unbeaten for a record 33 games.

This has, naturally, been a topic in the academic literature, as well as much more broadly as the goal of gender equality has been continually, and elusively, sought.

A recent paper by Austrian economists Rene Boeheim, Christoph Freudenthaler and Mario Lackner of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, and presented online here, adds to a literature on the differences between male and female coaches, asking whether risk taking varies between them. The authors argue that in NCAA basketball games, they find evidence that teams coached by men are five percentage points more risky, as measured by the amount of three pointers those teams attempt. The argument is that in addition, these risks are on average successful ones, and hence it could be that there is some scope for greater risk taking by female coached teams.

There seems to be a notable lack of evidence empirically examining male and female coaches in football, despite a growing abundance of data. What a cursory glance at that worldfootball.net data can tell us is that there is no discernible difference between match outcomes when coaches are male or female. While we won’t know for some time yet how women coaching men’s teams at the elite level compares to men, there is plenty of data available on the performance of men and women in the women’s game. A fruitful area for future research, and hopefully another corrective moving us towards more gender equality in football.