Disproving the myth that experience of managing in England is important for a manager to be successful in the Premier League
The English Premier League is the best league in the world. That's not an opinion, that's a fact, with England's top division unseating La Liga as the number one division in the world according to the UEFA Coefficient rankings, the best and most official ranking we have to determine league strength.
But sometimes, the importance of having experience of competing in a certain league or nation to be successful in said nation is vastly overstated - football is football, at the end of the day.
One of the biggest myths relating to this is that a manager isn’t suitably prepared for a job in England’s top flight purely because they have no experience of the league, or the country for that matter.
We remember the uproar surrounding Hull City's appointment of Marco Silva a few years ago among a couple of English media pundits - before Silva went on to take Hull to an extraordinary relegation survival attempt, coming much closer to maintaining Hull's Premier League status than anyone thought possible.
And, if we take a look at a selection of managers with no experience of the English game who took over directly after coaches who had at least some experience of coaching in the country, we can see that there are several occasions where this suggestion that you need to know the league first-hand to be successful simply doesn’t hold true.
In the graph below, we assess the win percentage of managers experienced in the English game during their time managing a top flight club compared to the record of a manager brought in immediately afterwards that at the time had no prior experience of coaching in England. Looking at this, we can see that in many cases, the percentage of games won frequently increases with the non-experienced coach, in some cases quite considerably too.
Unsurprisingly, with the win percentage being higher for each of the selected inexperienced managers, the points per game (PpG) ratio is also higher in each case. The following graph shows the same information as above but with the PpG added in:
This isn’t always the case, of course. Certain managerial appointments are a considerable gamble, and it doesn’t always pay off. But their lack of experience of the English game is likely only a small reason for why they didn’t prove successful, as so many fellow inexperienced managers have proven that you can make it work even with the handicap of never having operated in the country.
The graphs above are notably only assessing very specific managerial situations, whereby experienced English-based managers are directly succeeded by inexperienced ones. If you simply look at the last 5 Premier League winners, they were all coached by managers who were in their first job in the English game - Antonio Conte, Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola. They all won the ultimate prize in England without having any experience of managing in the country before they landed their respective jobs.
Plenty of others have had similar success in recent years, be it Carlo Ancelotti at Chelsea, Roberto Mancini or Manuel Pellegrini at Manchester City - Jose Mourinho at Chelsea, of course, several years before that.
