Journal of Complex Networks (2021) 00, 1–25 doi: 10.1093/comnet/cnab012 Who is the best coach of all time? A network-based assessment of the career performance of professional sports coaches Sirag¸ Erkol and Filippo Radicchi† Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/comnet/article/9/1/cnab012/6251550 by guest on 25 April 2021 Department of Informatics, Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408, USA †Corresponding author. Email: fi
[email protected] Edited by: JoseM´ endez´ [Received on 18 December 2020; editorial decision on 10 March 2021; accepted on 22 March 2021] We consider two large datasets consisting of all games played among top-tier European soccer clubs in the last 60 years, and among professional American basketball teams in the past 70 years. We leverage game data to build networks of pairwise interactions between the head coaches of the teams and measure their career performance in terms of PageRank centrality. We identify Arsene` Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson, Jupp Heynckes, Carlo Ancelotti and Jose´ Mourinho as the top 5 European soccer coaches of all time. In American basketball, the first 5 positions of the all-time ranking are occupied by Red Auerbach, Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson, Don Nelson and Lenny Wilkens. We further establish rankings by decade and season. We develop a simple methodology to monitor performance throughout a coach’s career, and to dynamically compare the performance of two or more coaches at a given time. The manuscript is accompanied by the website coachscore.luddy.indiana.edu where complete results of our analysis are accessible to the interested readers.