Coaching for Survival: The Hazards of Head Coach Careers in the German “Bundesliga”

This article analyzes how long head coaches survive in the clubs of the first German football league (“Bundesliga”), where the dismissal of a presumably weak coach is a generally adopted procedure in case of a poor sporting performance of the team. We use duration models for repeated events to accommodate the correlation within individuals. We find that the head coaches of successful teams and those working during the more recent “three points rule” period are more likely to survive in the Bundesliga. Moreover, the head coaches of clubs with relatively high team wage bills are likely to survive for shorter periods of time.