Football’s ‘tinker men’ bosses told: It makes things worse

Academics looked at 12 seasons in the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga and discovered that throwing substitutes on when teams were heading for an upset loss had negative consequences.

Bookies’ favourites that made offensive changes after falling behind worsened their goal difference on average by 0.3 and were also 0.3 points down.

Teams failing to live up to their billing were 85 per cent more likely to receive a card for violent conduct and 43 per cent more likely to be booked for dissenting with the referee.

Meanwhile, cards for time wasting by the team with its back to the wall fell by 75 per cent, while bookings for failing to properly stand back from a set play went down 74 per cent.

The study was seeking to test a “reference dependent behaviour” model which states that people do not always act rationally when an expected outcome fails to come true.

Dr Leif Brandes, one of the authors, said: “This is exactly what we see with football teams when they are the favourites to win. Our research shows in real life how people are affected by expectations.

“After all, these players and coaches are paid huge sums of money to play each week in front of a massive audience, and this shows they can experience psychological distress and act irrationally by taking too much of a risk when expectations are not being reached. Previously this has only been seen in a controlled environment, but our study of football teams reveals it happens in a real-life situation.”

The study by experts at Warwick Business School, the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Mainz in west Germany looked at 4,560 games.