Contribution of a Coach in Playing Style of a Football Club: The Case of the Russian Premier League

This paper aims to identify the playing styles of football clubs participated in the Russian Premier League in 2017/2018, 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 seasons. Furthermore, the study focuses on the comparison of head coaches based on the passes performance their clubs provide. K-means clustering algorithm was applied to all the passes distributed among the football teams to get the unique z-score and recognize the most outstanding coaching contribution. The calculated specialization score for each club shows that FC UFA under the guidance of Sergei Semak in the 2017/2018 season, FC Krasnodar with Igor Shalimov in the 2017/2018 season and Magomed Adiev with FC Anzhi in the 2018/2019 season in the greater extent differ from the other clubs participated in the league in the period considered by the performance of the passes. In addition, the goal difference estimation is provided to get, which coaching features influence the outcome of a match. It is revealed that playing experience of a coach has a positive effect on the winning outcome of a match. Besides, coaching tenure in a club has a very small negative effect on the goal difference in a match. Overall, this study contributes with new insights into the way of coaching style identification in the most prestigious Russian football league.