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The New Manager Phenomenon

Does the online soccer punter place too much emphasis on what has been termed the New Manager Phenomenon ( NMP )?

Do we have an increased tendency to back or 'swerve' selections because we expect an immediate improvement in results ( within the 'Honeymoon Period ' ) due to the fact that a new manager has recently been appointed? If this is the case, is there any real merit in including the NMP within our selection criteria ? Initially the 1st place to start would be to assess how prevalent a consideration the NMP actually is amongst the soccer betting community. To assess this footy4cast posted threads on a variety of on line soccer betting forums relating to 82 appointments of new managers from 11 leagues in Europe ( between Sept 02 and Nov 02 ). The messages were posted immediately prior to the initial matches of the new manager and simply asked for opinions and predictions about the game, at no point did I mention the new manager or give my prediction of the games. To cover the entire 'Honeymoon Period' this process was repeated for the fourth game and 8th game of the newly appointed manager. Out of the total of my initial 126 posted threads, the comments of 421 replies were collated to give the following results.

( A ) 80.15% of the initial 126 threads received at least one reply which included the NMP as a primary factor within the match analysis.

( B ) 57.24% of all of the 421 replies gave the NMP as a primary factor within the analysis.

( C ) Of the above 57.24% approximately 41.25 % appeared to give the NMP as the sole reason for backing a team or 'swerving' a selection ( in fact over 90 % used the NMP as a reason to 'swerve ' rather than back )

Whether you, as an individual, would admit that you personally place any importance on the NMP, the above results would definitely appear to suggest that, in general the punter is placing massive importance on the power of the New Manager Phenomenon. However are they correct? .

Comparison of NMP Teams in Relation to General Industry Standards

Is a team with a new manager any more likely to win any given game than a team who retains the same manager ? The previous section would obviously seem to suggest that many punters would obviously believe so. To assess whether this is correct we made a comparison between the following.

( A ) The overall % of homes / draws and losses that occurred within the first four homes + first four aways ( hereafter knows as the 'Honeymoon Period' ) for 82 teams who had appointed new managers. This subject matter was taken from all of the four English leagues, both German Leagues and the Dutch 1st. The managers were selected for the period between July 00 and Nov 03 and did not include managers with interrupted honeymoon periods ( i.e managers whose record did not include four homes and four aways prior to the start of a new season ).

In total the overall amount of games assessed was 656. The results of these were then compared to percentages for ( B ) listed below.

( B ) The percentage of homes / draws / aways across all of the leagues listed in (A) between the period of July 00 and March 7th 03. This is hereafter knows as the 'Industry Standard' ( IS ). The total amount of games to assess the industry standard was 8005 and produced the following;: HOMES = 46.92% DRAWS = 26.23% AWAYS = 26.85%.

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