Jared Wesley

Well, I think part of the reason is, is that from a sports standpoint, sport becomes a part of our everyday conversation, right?

Whether it's a medium like radio, like this, television, internet, things like that.

Sports is all part of everybody's conversation.

And with that, a lot of times when they're not performing well, at the end of the day, people start looking at the coach or they may start looking at the general manager.

And at the end of the day,

Fans may think somebody has to pay the price with their job for the lack of performance.

Well, part of it is, is it's not necessarily just protection, but you may have excessive media pressure.

Like I said, with the description from above the conversation, especially in that local community.

may become excessive enough that the team is going to have to relieve that media pressure.

Because if the coach is not the fall guy, then people start looking at maybe the front office, maybe the owner, things like that.

And so what we were finding is that the coach is the easier one to, let's say, let go to sort of relieve that pressure.

But there's going to be other things that are going to be involved there too in terms of there could be

Politics within the club, there could be just a lack of an overall strategic plan, expectations that don't match performance, those sorts of things as well.

Well, I think you just mentioned it.

Even in comparison to other sports leagues around the world, it's not just North America, but if we think about Europe, Asia, and Australia, we see a lot of turnover within the coaching profession.

And so with my co-authors, one of which had good connections within Brazilian football, we felt that this would be a good place to study this phenomenon that occurs all over, but it occurs at such...

higher rate than what we generally observe in other parts of the world that putting those two things together we thought this would be a really good context to study with the hope that at the end of the day what we find there could be generalized to some of these other places much closer to maybe our home but also other places in the world.

So there's two things I think we need to think about.

First of all, when a coach is fired or resigned or whatever, it creates some instability within the organization, right?

And in these cases that we're examining within Brazilian football, the instability is from generally coaches getting let go, right?