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Wonderstar Awards S112: Manager of the Season (11/04/2014 17:52)

 "I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one."

- Brian Clough


Welcome to Season 113 everybody!

It's been a hectic finish to Season 112 for me, but I'm now back in the country and starting to power through the analyses for last season - so if you've got one ordered, expect it before the first league game. Thanks everyone for being patient! Next month should be a lot easier. In the meantime, let me congratulate everyone who had a successful season, especially those who've signed up for Wonderstar Match Analytics. Of the 15 such teams who began in the top division of their league:


14 finished in the top 6
10 finished in the top 3
5 won their national league title
2 more won the league cup (and 4 others reached the final)
Almost all - 13 out of 15 - outperformed their Q and teamstats


Very, very impressive! Of course, the type of manager who buys credits and signs up for extra detail about their team is often already ahead of the pack - and certainly some of my clients are among the most respected managers in the game - but it is nice to see the attention to strategy paying off so impressively. Well done everyone, and also to those who gained promotion from further down the league ladder! The Wonderstars also outperformed their modest Q this season (11th highest in the department), finishing 3rd and taking home the Department cup. They even unexpectedly won their first Player Cup and promptly followed it up with two more in quick succession - life is fun down here in the lower divisions too!

This got me thinking - which managers have managed to wring the best out of their teams? So that's what the inaugural Wonderstar Manager of the Season aims to reward.


 

Wonderstar Manager Of The Season

To work out the Manager Of The Season, I calculate a Manager Rating. This reflects how much each team has over- or under-performed relative to their basic team properties: The quality of their players, and their total teamstats. Everything else - finding players who outperform their Q, designing tactics that give you an advantage, training the right balance of teamstats for your strategy etc. etc - these factors will all help improve the manager rating. I have posted the details further down, but roughly speaking here is how it works:

 

- Your Strength (based on your lineup quality and number of teamstat stars) is calculated and compared to the teams you played.

- Your Performance (based on goal difference, points, and bonuses for winning silverware or finishing in better positions) is also compared to your opponents.

- This is done for both domestic and international contests then combined, and a Manager Rating is calculated which reflects how high your Performance was relative to your Strength. Low Strength, High Performance gives you a good Rating!

- This means your player Q, injuries/suspensions, total teamstats and opponent strength are all taken into account.

 

So in total, there are 33 League Managers of the Season (one for each national league of course), one International Manager of the Season (best Manager Rating from their Champions League or Super Cup campaign) and one overall Wonderstar Manager Of The Season! Below I'll list the top-10 overall, the top 5 international, and the top 2 from each league, but if you'd like to know what your score is just message me. Remember that only teams finishing in the top 12 of the first division will have a score though. 


 

Results

Without any further ado, here are the top managers of Season 112. Congratulations to our overall champion, the Season 112 Wonderstar Manager Of The Season:

 

1MilanFan of MilanAC, Germany

 

1MilanFan finished ninth in Season 111, but despite a decrease in team quality - only the 10th best in the league on paper - in Season 112 they fought Kamu FC all the way to end, finishing second by just a single point. Twenty-three consecutive seasons in the top division is an impressive achievement too, in a game where aggressive rebuilding is often considered crucial to build an elite side. Don't underestimate them in the Champion's League this season! 1MilanFan will get a full complimentary team analysis for last season as a prize - though of course the prestige and respect of fellow managers is the real award :-) Here's the full top ten, representing the very elite of managerial talent last season:

 

 

 

Imparaveis capped their 12th consecutive top-flight season with their third league title, and performed stronger than expected in a tough SuperCup group. JustinLaFieber have made rapid progress since promotion three seasons ago, and took the domestic double in the Netherlands - their first ever national trophies - along with a creditable SuperCup performance. Raccoon City Team dominated the Italian league, also winning the double, and reached the quarter finals of the Super Cup - winning a group featuring Vagabonds, Blest and Zi Huha. Las Leonas dominated the Argentinian league and made an unexpected run to the Champion's League final. Fishing Club missed out on the Thai title by just a point, but had a much better goal difference and won the League Cup instead, while Northcountry Timberwolves held off a ferocious challenge from theoretically-stronger River City to win their 12th consecutive Canadian title by goal difference, adding the League Cup too - finally toppling FlirtyBee will take more than just higher quality and teamstats. Harcipocok FC took the 11th strongest team in Hungary to 3rd place, and FC Vegan won the Danish league with the 5th strongest side. Rounding out the top ten, Klaebs Kings' dedication to hidden stats earned their modestly-strong side victory in both the Australian league and a tough Champion's League group. And just missing out on the top ten - but worth mentioning - Cork Hibernian broke Connemara's stranglehold on the Irish title, and the two top Belgian teams also surprised a few people - Bruges Blues won four of their seven Champion's League games, and DansendHert proved last season's MLCL run was no one-off with another romp to the Semi-Finals.

And looking just at performances in the Champion's League and Super Cup, it was Klaebs Kings who outperformed their strength most impressively, beating 6 stronger sides to win their Champion's League group and ultimately reach the quarter finals. Congratulations! The rest of the top five were as follows:

 

 

Both Champion's League finalists AKNEO and Las Leonas are on there, reflecting the slightly surprising nature of that match-up in what was a very strong field this season. Ewing United reached the knockout stages of the Super Cup, while Zi Huha put up a stronger than expected fight in one of the most competitive Super Cup groups, demonstrating that their recent appearance in the CL final was built on more than just a strong squad. 

Finally, the Wonderstar Manager of The Season for every league (based on both domestic and international scores) is listed below:

 

 

  

Congratulations to everybody listed. There will be another set of awards at the end of this season, and also be a "running total" type contest, rewarding those managers who skillfully and consistently stay in the upper echelons. Good luck! Meanwhile I'm off to run some analyses, but look out for our other Wonderstar Award soon: League Of The Year.

 

- Belizio

 


 

Manager Rating Details

Here are the details (this is subect to revision year-on-year but gives you a good idea of how the scores are calculated):

 

1. The Manager Of The Season is open to Division 1 sides only. But if you're a top manager, you should find yourself in the elite soon enough! Furthermore, to be eligible your team must have finished in the top 12 of your National League, i.e. avoided outright relegation. That gives us 396 teams from 33 National Leagues.

2. The Manager Rating is calculated from the difference between Performance (how well your team did) and Strength (how good your team is on paper relative to your opponents). It is converted to a 100-point scale which is roughly linear (meaning there are about as many teams with score 50 as there are with score 70, or with score 10). A weaker team who perform well should end up with a high Manager Rating, a team performing about as expected should get around 50.

3. Manager Ratings are calculated separately for a) domestic performance, and b) Champions League (CL) or Super Cup (SC) performance, then combined. Sides not in international competition just use their domestic score, those in international competition get 80% of their score from their domestic performance and 20% from performance in the Champions League or Super Cup. In theory, the way it is set up, being in the CL or SC should be neither an advantage nor a disadvantage: If you perform well in both contests it will improve your score compared to someone who performed the same as you domestically, but didn't play internationally. On the other hand, if you underperform internationally it will drag your score back down. In practice, teams who outperform their Strength in the league also tend to outperform their Strength internationally, so 20 of the top 25 managers came from teams in CL or SC last season. But this does mean that if you want a high Manager Rating, you need to take the CL or SC seriously.

4. Your Domestic Strength score is calculated from two factors: Your average lineup quality and your total teamstats (in stars). Lineup quality is the actual quality you put out on the field in league matches, not your team quality - it is calculated from the number of appearances each player made, so if you suffered from injuries and suspensions all season, don't worry - that's taken into account. Your lineup quality is then compared to that of the other top-12 teams in your league - the bottom four teams are ignored as these can sometimes include bot teams, sides deliberately getting relegated, or just weak opponents. Next, teamstats are measured sometime during the middle of the season and the total number of stars added together - this is also compared to your top-12 domestic rivals and combined with quality to form your relative strength (i.e. how good your team is compared to your domestic rivals). A stat which is at 0.5 stars is counted as zero, since 0.5 stars can mean anything below 56, not just 51-55. The formula for combining teamstats and quality is determined by a regression analysis which will be refined year-on-year, but lineup Q is roughly 5-6 times more important than teamstats for predicting performance.

5. Your International Strength score is calculated in the same way, but this time comparing your lineup quality and teamstats to the other teams in your CL or SC group (but ignoring the side who came 8th since sometimes they have given up). Impotantly, your lineup quality is based on your league lineups - so if you play a B squad in the Champion's League or Super Cup your manager rating will be damaged! That's deliberate, part of being an elite manager is rotating your squad effectively to be competitive in every match.

6. Your Domestic Performance score is calculated by comparing your goal difference to the other top-12 teams in your league, comparing your points in the same way, combining those two factors equally, and then adding increasing bonuses for finishing in the top 5 or winning the League Cup. Winning the title and the league cup both get you the largest bonus (though winning the title also means you got more points, so in practice that's worth more to your performance score even though the bonus is the same). Because points and league position both improve your score, winning games is the most important factor - but goal difference does help too, so losing 3-2 instead of 3-0 will still be better for your performance rating.

7. Your International Performance score is calculated by comparing your goal-difference and points to the other teams in your group (ignoring the side who came 8th). Bonuses are then added for finishing position in the group, as well as progression through the competition - obviously winning the whole thing gets you the biggest bonus!

8. The Super Cup and Champions League are weighted equally, and domestically all leagues are also weighted equally. But because your opponents are likely to be stronger in the Champion's League, or in a tougher league, the same team would have a lower Strength score when playing in those tougher contests (because of harder opponents), so they'd get a higher Manager Rating for the same Performance. In other words, a Q92 team finishing 2nd in Norway would get a much higher Manager Rating than if they finished 2nd in Thailand.

9. Finally, Strength score are deducted from Performance scores to give Manager Ratings, the domestic and international components are combined, and everything is converted to the 100-point scale.

10. The exact formulae for calculating Manager Ratings may be tweaked season-on-season. There are also no guarantees of accuracy - in particular, large volume sales or purchases of players at a particular time have the potential to impact the strength ratings, and therefore the manager ratings (for example, a team sells all its good players just before I download all the player data, making their strength seem lower than it really was during the season). I'll carefully check the teams who finish very high, but with ~500 division 1 teams per season I can't check them all! The good thing is these effects are self-limiting, i.e. they can't last for multiple seasons so shouldn't have much of an effect on the overall Manager Table. And while I can't guarantee perfect accuracy or unchanging formulae, I do guarantee that no changes are made to benefit any particular team over another.

 

 

 

  

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