Record of every head coach in MLS history

It’s the offseason, which means it’s the perfect time to do some quirky projects and put my Microsoft Excel skills to use.

Below is a link to a sortable Excel spreadsheet with the record of every head coach to ever roam the touchline in MLS history. Toggle between the two sheets at the bottom to filter by an individual coach’s total record, or to see every single coaching spell in MLS history.

VIEW HERE

Part of this project involved “fixing” the 1996-2003 MLS results. For the first four seasons, matches that were level after 90 minutes went to a shootout, using the same rules found in the original NASL. In 2000, the rules were changed to allow for draws, but only after a 10-minute “golden-goal” extra time was played.

For this project, I decided to eliminate all of that, and render every match that was level at full time a draw, complete with 1 point in the PPG calculations. This gives a much fairer comparison (in my opinion) across different seasons.

Two of the columns, W% and L%, refer to a coach’s winning and losing percentages. Winning percentage here is calculated just as the number of wins divided by number of games played. This is standard in much of the world, although MLS prefers to treat draws as half the value of a win. Losing percentage is calculated the same; losses divided by games played.

The Teams column in the Career tab indicates which teams that particular coach has coached in order from oldest to most recent. The column labeled “I” indicates whether that coach was an interim hire. “I” means the coach only ever coached in an interim capacity, while “(I)” means that only part of a coach’s career was interim. These interim spells can be found with the same column in the Single Team tab.

This will be updated for the new coaching hires and 2019 results as the season progresses.

Follow John on Twitter: @JohnMLTX.

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