The Contribution of Coaches in the Playing Style of Football Clubs

This paper aims to identify the playing styles of football clubs and their influence on clubs’ performance. K-means clustering algorithm was applied to all the passes distributed among the football teams to get the unique z-score and recognise the most outstanding coaching contribution. The Russian Premier League – from 2017/18 to 2019/20 – is the setting inspected. The calculated score for each club shows that FC UFA under the guidance of Sergei Semak in 2017/2018, FC Krasnodar with Igor Shalimov in 2017/2018 and Magomed Adiev with FC Anzhi in 2018/2019, in the greater extent, differ from the other clubs that participated in the league over the researched period. The empirical findings reveal that playing experience of a coach has a positive effect on the outcome of a match, while coaching tenure has a reduced negative effect. This study contributes with new insights regarding coaching style identification on professional football.