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Introduction
Williams (2012) noted that sport and professional sport leagues in particular are unique in nature due to the fact that individual teams, whilst seeking a dominant position in a winner takes all scenario, require competitors to provide opposition, entertainment and commercial possibility. As such, professional sport can be a lucrative business, presenting many opportunities for revenue generation (Madichie, 2009). However, generating revenue often necessitates a rise in cost, which is frequently in the form of player recruitment and salaries for professional sport teams, and with this comes an increasing pressure to deliver results with a degree of immediacy (Flint et al., 2016).
In professional team sports such as football, this pressure falls mostly on one person, which is most often the manager. Indeed, it is widely regarded that the role of the football manager is one of chronic insecurity (e.g. Flint et al., 2014). Most organisations encounter changes in leadership at some point, but there is normally a natural time for such a change (de Dios Tena and Forrest, 2007). For example, a political party may change their leader following an unsuccessful election campaign, or a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) may be changed when a contract reaches a natural expiration point or when that person reaches a certain age. However, in the context of professional football, very few changes are the result of a natural process of time. There are some confusion regarding the differences between a leader of an organisation (in general business) and the manager of a football team (sport business) which is summarised perfectly by Hughes et al. (2010). In their paper on the English football industry, they liken the football manager to a senior operating officer. An operating officer is typically a CEO’s greatest asset; whilst CEO’s focus on external and strategic activities, an operating officer focuses on internal operating matters, solves workplace problems, detects early signs of marketplace change and nurtures talent (Hambrick and Cannella, 2004). From here on in, we use the term manager exclusively to denote the football manager in charge of team affairs.
Our paper examines the effect of managerial change in the English Football League (EFL) and provides two main contributions to theory. First, our paper updates the work Audas et al....