Fixed up the mistakes and the tables have been updated, tells pretty much the same story. See below,
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It is fairly obvious that the Carlton Football Club will soon be on the lookout for the next CFC premiership coach (if they haven't already).
A lot of discussion has taken place about what attributes might be needed for a future coach. I decided to have a look at the history of it all and see if a couple of factors may make a difference.
I got a list of every VFL/AFL coach from 1980 onwards. Took out all the caretaker coaches so we were only left with those that clubs specifically chose to bring them greatness.
Next I had a look at whether each of these coaches were at one stage captain of a VFL/AFL club or if they every were a member of a VFL/AFL premiership team. Then I split them all up according to these criteria, and the results are below.
Firstly, lets look at all the coaches from 1980 who neither captained a VFL/AFL or played in a VFL/AFL premiership. The table is below. As you can see it is an eclectic bunch, the number down the bottom gives the premiership strikerrate which is basically out of all the coaches in this category, how many actually managed to win a premiership as coach. As you can see the strikerate is 17% with some legendary names in Jeans and Hafey, some would say the right person at the right time in Joyce and the career coach in Pagan. I know there are some interstate people here who played many games for SA and WA leagues but only VFL/AFL matches are counted. A lot of 'experiments' in this list, most of which failed.
The next category is those who never captained a VFL/AFL club but did play in a premiership team. The strikerate here is only 11%. Tony Jewel and Mick Malthouse are the only people in this category to manage a premiership. This list is very interesting because it contains quite a few 'nice' guys whose reputations were not fierce on the field.
The next list is those coaches who captained a VFL/AFL club but never played in a premiership side. A rather small list but a strike rate of 38%. Again, an interesting bunch.
The final category is those coaches who both captained an VFL/AFL team and also played in VFL/AFL premiership as a player. A much larger list indicating these types are more prized and with good reason, because the strikerate is at 38% for premiership coaches in this category. However, there is another factor that should be taken into account.
Often club legends who are past captains and permiership players for a club are given the job of coach of the club where they made those achievements. More often than not this had not worked out. If we take those players out of the table we get the table below. There you have it coaches who are captains and premiership players who have coached firstly at a different club have a 50% strikerate of premiership success!!!
Out of the five who did not get there two of them got to a grand final as coach and one (Mark Thompson) looks very likely to join the other six and make the strikerate 60%!!!
Of course these factors are not the be all and end all of coaches, but I would suggest that the data shown is pretty convincing that these factors are important at least as a base. They also suggest that out of captain and premiership player being a captain is more important.
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