Who should replace Arsène Wenger? Part 2 — Brendan Rodgers
On April 20th 2018, Arsène Wenger announced that this would be his last season as Arsenal manager, after 22 years at the club. It was a pretty emotional day and football fans and players emerged to give respect and gratitude to the manager.
In part one of this series, I discussed the type of manager I’m searching for. Setting out four benchmarks:
- Promote and play young players
- Be younger than 50
- Historically improved teams
- Play attractive football
I’m starting out with seventeen managers. There are a few possibilities missing due to lack of data and therefore not being able to match them to the criteria. These are all managers I’ve seen linked with Arsenal through several mediums.
Patrick Viera and Michael Arteta are both long term options that will be missed out due to lack of data and experience.
Eliminating the Elders
The first criterion I addressed was age. I’m looking for a young manager with a bright future that can build a legacy at Arsenal. Arsène Wenger was 46 when he joined the Gunners for example.
This eliminated six of the seventeen coaches I outlined. Leaving eleven young managers to consider.
The six managers that I eliminated are more the sort of managers that could come in for a short stint to steady the ship and give security post-Wenger. But, they wouldn’t stay long enough for any sort of legacy.
Next Step
There are three more benchmarks to meet. I think the best course of action is to look at each manager individually and eliminate them one by one. So in the rest of this article I’ll look at one coach. Then continue the series looking at more managers.
Brendan Rodgers
Rodgers has spent the last two years in Scotland in charge of Celtic. He’s currently on course for his second Scottish title. They also did decent in Europe and were unfortunate to get narrowly knocked out by Zenit in the Europa League.
First off let’s look at his historic performance at clubs. For this I’m using ELO data from ClubELO. Rodgers started off with short stints at Reading and Watford which aren’t worth looking into much. He joined a struggling, young Reading side in the Championship and was taught a ‘harsh lesson’.
He took Swansea from the Championship, got them to the Premier League where they became an established club. He improved them substantially, as you can see from the increase in ELO.
He quickly made the step up to Liverpool. Liverpool finished 8th and had won the League Cup, qualifying them for the Europa League. Rodger’s Swansea had finished just five points behind Liverpool, in 11th. And as you can see in his ELO graph, this actually wasn’t that large a step up in terms of quality.
His first season at Liverpool saw little change, finishing 7th and not qualifying for any European football. Whereas Swansea won the League Cup and got Europa League football.
The next season on the graph shows a meteoric rise in ELO. This was their great season where they narrowly lost out on the title. The next season saw a massive decline back to the ELO when Rodgers joined.
This suggests a regression to the mean and the initial improvement being unsustainable and they struggled to recover when Suarez left and Gerrard and Sturridge’s minutes declined.
So, overall I wouldn’t go as far to say that Rodgers has a history of improving teams. His improvement of Liverpool was unsustainable, and Swansea was under a very different scenario in a lower league. Therefore I’m ruling out Rodgers for not meeting this benchmark.
