This week, we spoke to Alex Farnell, an economics researcher at the University of Lancaster looking into labour markets and issues to do with personnel, specifically using data from professional sports to illustrate. We focused on his work investigating the contribution of Head Coaches to the success of football teams, and whether changing coaches brings the desired change to performance. His other research includes looking at discrimination in the market for NFL coaches and looking at how fatigue and multi-tasking contribute to the in-game decline in performance of baseball pitchers in MLB. His collaborative paper on head coaches is titled ‘Special Ones? The Effect of Head Coaches on Football Team Performance’ and it can be found online at www.iza.org. We’ll be back next month with another interesting guest, but until then, make sure you subscribe to this podcast, rate and review it, and check out all the content that is going out from Analytics FC on our Twitter account @analyticsfc. Goodbye!

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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