When results are bad, the noise generated from fan and media interest can make it hard for decision makers to separate between opinion and fact. It becomes easy to overreact, look in the wrong places, or both.

Here’s two examples:

1. Manchester United’s ownership have correctly identified a need for change. But our analysis indicates that changing a head coach rarely makes a meaningful difference to results, and that a new coach is much more likely to replicate the results of his predecessor than the results on his CV. The core problem appears to remain organisational dysfunction.

2. England’s cricket team lost heavily again in Australia, but many analyses of their failure start with the scoreline rather than the underlying metrics. By one measure they closed the gap by 50-75%; the question is what drove this, and what tweaks might close it further still?