How the Coach World Ranking Works
1. What it is
The Coach World Ranking rates football managers on one question: did their teams do better or worse than expected? Every result is weighed against the strength of both teams and the venue. A manager who keeps winning with a team everyone expects to win gains little. One who beats stronger sides gains a lot.
We rate 292,142 matches since July 1995 and publish a new ranking every Monday, with every week back to January 2005 kept as it was published.
2. How a match moves the ratings
Every team's strength is the sum of three parts: its league's level, the club's own standing in that league, and its manager's coach rating.
The result is 1 for a win, 0.5 for a draw and 0 for a defeat, after 90 minutes. Extra time doesn't count and a penalty shootout is a draw. The goal margin multiplier is 1 for a one-goal win, 1.5 for two goals and grows slowly after that. The home side gets 100 points of home advantage.
The change is then split. 20% goes to the manager when we know who it is, and the rest goes to the club. In a European match, 50% of the club's share moves its whole league's level instead, so one upset nudges every club of that league. When the manager is unknown, the club takes the whole change.
Two corrections
- New season. Each club is pulled 20% of the way back toward its league's average at the start of a season. Squads change over the summer.
- New manager. Clubs usually sack a manager at the bottom of a bad run, which makes the club look weaker than it is. When a new manager takes over, the club is pulled 50% of the way back toward its average over its last 60 matches, so the newcomer isn't credited with the bounce back.
3. Which matches count
76 competitions, so a club's European opponents are rated too:
- 54 European top divisions and 5 second divisions (Championship, LaLiga 2, Serie B, 2. Bundesliga, Ligue 2)
- the Champions League, Europa League, Conference League, UEFA Super Cup, Club World Cup and Intercontinental Cup
- the domestic cups and super cups of England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France
League and European matches count in full. Cup matches count 60%, because sides are often rotated, and only when both clubs have played at least 30 rated matches. A club seen for the first time starts just below its league's bottom three.
4. Who is listed
- Ranked from 30 rated matches. Below that a manager is rated but not listed. Under 60 matches they're marked "provisional".
- Active in the last 52 weeks. A manager stays in the weekly table while they have a rated match in the last 52 weeks.
- Caretakers. Caretaker matches count toward the rating, but a manager who has only ever been a caretaker isn't ranked.
- "last club: X" marks a manager whose club's latest match was led by someone else - also when an assistant stood in for a single match. The ranking's default view lists managers at a club now; "All ranked" shows everyone.
5. The five tables
- Coach rating - the career rating, ranked. The main table.
- Last 12 months - how much each manager's coach rating changed over the last 52 weeks.
- 2026 so far - the change since 1 January.
- Month - the change in one calendar month, for managers with 3 or more rated matches in it. Published on the first Monday of the next month.
- Final table of the year - the change over the whole calendar year.
The gained tables measure form, not level. A manager can top the 12-month table with a modest career rating because they climbed out of a hole. Every published table is frozen: a later correction to a result changes the live rating, never a week that's already out.
6. Why big-club managers can rank low
A strong team is expected to win. When it does, its manager gains little; when it drops points, its manager loses more than one at a small club would. So the coach rating rewards doing more than the squad suggests, not winning the most. Mikel Arteta is 7th on the coach rating (+142) but 259th over the last 12 months (+11.9): Arsenal's rating already expects them to win.
7. Does it predict results?
We replayed every match from 1995 in order, forecast each one before it was played, and scored the forecasts for the ten seasons from 2016/17 to 2025/26. The settings were tuned on earlier seasons only. Lower log-loss means better forecasts.
The tests also found the "new manager bounce": teams beat their expected result in a new manager's first 10 matches (+0.021 a match on the 0-1 result scale) and fall below it from match 21 (−0.014).
8. Every number we use
These come straight from the rating engine, version 2. When one changes, the version goes up and the change is listed below.
9. Known limits
- Ratings drift upward over time. The new-manager correction adds a little rating each time a club changes manager, so the average club rating creeps up over the years (now about 1,543 against a starting 1,500). Compare numbers within one week, not across decades.
- Missing managers. We know both managers in about 95% of top-league and European matches since 2015, fewer in smaller leagues and earlier years. Matches without a known manager count for the club only.
- Managers before 2015/16. In 21 competitions our source doesn't name the manager for every older match, so we take it from the manager's dated spell at the club. Checked against seasons where the source does name them, that's right about 98% of the time. The misses are mostly caretakers.
- Neutral venues (finals, some super cups) still get home advantage.
- Strong home favourites are slightly over-rated: when we give the home side 75%, it wins about 67% of the time.
- No squad values. The rating can't tell a manager's work from a big summer of spending, beyond what the results show.
10. The old ranking (2011-2017)
From 2011 to 2017 this site ran a points table: 3 points for a win and 1 for a draw over the last 52 weeks, multiplied by match importance, league strength and a "match equalizer" for league size, plus a separate star rating and a national-team ranking. It rewarded the managers of the clubs that won the most.
The new ranking keeps the weekly table and its archive and drops the points. Match importance, the equalizer and the star rating are gone, and national teams aren't covered.