Who was the best (and worst) head coach in the Bundesliga this season?

Gegenpressing is back with its Bundesliga power rankings to score every head coach in the German top-flight this season.

Following Bochum’s heroic comeback against Fortuna Düsseldorf last night, which confirmed their place in next season’s German top-flight, we can now finally draw a line under another fascinating Bundesliga campaign. The champions have been celebrated, the European contenders have given themselves a pat on the back and the teams that succumbed to relegation have finally accepted their fate. 

As such, now seems like the perfect time to take a look at our head coach power rankings for the Bundesliga to see which manager (or “trainer”) has out performed all others this season and which ones have unquestionably not done enough over the course of the league campaign. Using our own power ranking points system, we’ve put together a timeline of each head coach that took part in the Bundesliga this season and ranked them based on their final score. So let’s take a look at who finished above all others.

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The Methodology 

Our power rankings system has been designed to accurately gauge how well a football manager was 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 have 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 underperformed, overperformed 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 did 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 takes a closer look at which head coaches are really out-performing the expectations placed on them and which head coaches are struggling to match the demands that their teams and resources expect of them.