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

Abstract

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 PageRank centrality. We identify Arsène Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson, Jupp Heynckes, Carlo Ancelotti and José 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.