The Bundesliga head coach power rankings | A look at the scores after six games

We're only be six games into the new Bundesliga season, but that seems to be enough to show which head coaches hit the ground running and which ones fell flat on their face at the first hurdle

Unless you’re a fan of largely inconsequential games or holidaying in October, the international break is a real pain for just about any fan of European football. Just when things are starting to get interesting, the entire continent hits pause on its domestic leagues so that UEFA can pass around the begging bowl and kindly ask everyone to watch made-up games for their made-up competition. Once upon a time, these games were all friendlies which we could happily ignore in peace. Now they’re vital qualifiers in the Nations League. None of it is important. And, crucially, it’s distracting us from the real football.

However, if the break does offer us one positive, it’s an opportunity to take stock of how things stand in the Bundesliga and perhaps even draw some conclusions from how each club has started the new season. After all, every head coach in the German top flight will be using this downtime to review the last six games and figure out what went wrong or how to prolong an exciting run of form. So it only makes sense that we do exactly the same thing and pull together the first Bundesliga head coach power rankings of the 24/25 season.

The Methodology

Our power rankings system has been designed to accurately gauge how well a football manager is doing in his job, based on more specific metrics than fan sentiment or current form. In our opinion, a manager (or head coach) should be judged on the perception of how well they do from one game to the next. Rather than looking at how many games his team has won in the last 10 weeks or other intangible factors like their relationship with the boardroom or the fans in the terraces, a head coach should be judged on one thing: what were the expectations placed on their team before a match, and did they underperform, overperform, or match those expectations perfectly? As such, we took that idea and built a system around it.

Taking the pre-match odds of any given game to determine which result was “expected” and then awarding points based on how both teams performed in that game gives us a points system that can be seen in the table above. Here, we can see that a team that was expected to win but lost a game would be deducted three points, while a team that was expected to lose but won would be awarded three points. Then, naturally, a team expected to win but drew their game would lose two points, and a team expected to lose but drew their game would be awarded two points.

Using pre-match odds, we are also able to add a dynamic rating system that is always up to date. This then takes into account teams that have quickly improved from one season or transfer window to the next and are very quickly expected to win games they may have been expected to draw or lose a few months earlier. As such, the system adapts to the rise and fall of specific teams and their head coaches.

While this may seem like a convoluted way of recontextualising football games that already have a tried and tested method of ranking a team’s performance — three points for a win, one for a draw, and zero for a loss — these power rankings essentially turn the orthodoxy of football’s golden rule on its head and instead take a closer look at which head coaches are really outperforming the expectations placed on them and which head coaches are struggling to match the demands that their teams and resources expect of them.