Resumen de Decision taking with external pressure: evidence on football manager dismissals in argentina and their consequences

Ramón Flores, Juan de Dios Tena, David Forrest

• The paper focuses on the scapegoat hypothesis in the context of the dismissal of managers of football clubs. It captures the role of external pressure from stakeholders, such as fans of the team, in a principal-agent model which shows the potential for decisions to be irrational in the sense that dismissals may actually worsen team performance. It tests for such negative effects by studying twenty years of match results in Argentina, where differences from Europe in the design of the league competition are associated with much higher frequency of dismissal of managers. It detects a tendency for a change of manager to be followed by deterioration in team performance, with adverse effects concentrated in results of matches played away.