The trust of football club managers in coaches remains minimal. This follows from the CIES Football Observatory report. He recorded that two thirds of teams from various leagues changed their coaches during the past calendar year. The “threshold of tolerance” is relatively high in the strongest championships – English and Spanish. In the Russian Premier League (RPL) it is normal for modern football, that is, extremely low. The average duration of a coach’s work with one club does not reach one and a half years.
Research company CIES Football Observatory, a partner of the International Football Federation (FIFA), has published a study on the work of coaches, namely the credibility they receive in clubs. The authors studied the situation in 55 championships, including all the notable ones – in the top divisions, and also in some cases second in rank. The results of the study may seem shocking to someone not deeply immersed in the topic. CIES ranked the leagues by the percentage of teams that in the past calendar year (that is, for championships held, like the Russian and the lion’s share of European ones, according to the spring-autumn system, in fact, during the period covering the entire current season along with last year’s off-season) changed mentors. In total, if we take all the championships, there were not just more than half of them, but much more, almost two thirds – 65.2%.
But in fact, the figure only confirmed the current trend.
CIES published a similar report a year ago, and the figure was similar – 65.6%. So nothing pleasant has happened to the coaches’ credibility: it remains at an extremely low level.
At the top of the ranking (in this case this position can hardly be considered honorable) is the Cyprus Championship with an incredible percentage of teams that have experienced at least one coaching resignation since May 2025. There are 100% of them, all 14, performing in the elite division. The anomaly is at the very bottom of the hierarchy. In the Norwegian Championship, coaching is almost synonymous with stability. Only 18.8% of teams fired coaches. The Dutch championship, which is in the closest position – 54th – has an indicator that is more than twice as solid – 38.9%.
It is not difficult to identify certain trends in the research. For example, it indicates that the leading championships are still trying to give coaches the opportunity to work with the club longer. Among the “big European five”, the only exception is Italy. In its championship, three-quarters of the clubs fired coaches during the reporting period. The rest are located in the lower niche, in which the credibility of at least relatively high. And the two flagship championships – Spanish and English – generally surpassed everything in this sense except the Dutch and Norwegian: in them the “attrition rate” is 40%, and the average duration of a coach’s work with one club is close to 30 months. This is a huge figure by modern standards. Today’s norm, based on CIES data, is a year and a half or even a little less.
The Russian Premier League found itself in the middle of the ranking, in 35th position. And in it the “threshold of tolerance”, of course, is much lower than in England and Spain.
Over the past calendar year, 62.5% of clubs changed coaches, and the average length of time during which a specialist leads a team is 17.3 months – almost a year and a half short.
Details related to the current season indicate how difficult it is for a head coach in the RPL to maintain a position for a long period of time. In the summer of 2025, after the end of the previous Russian championship, new mentors appeared in five league clubs – CSKA, Dynamo Moscow, Krylya Sovetov, Akhmat and Paris Nizhny Novgorod. And none of them – neither Fabio Celestini, nor Valery Karpin, nor Magomed Adiev, nor Alexander Storozhuk, nor Alexei Shpilevsky – managed to retain their post until the end of the next championship: it finishes in mid-May.
Everyone has already resigned. In total, 10 out of 16 clubs changed their coach during the season. The position was retained by Murad Musaev (Krasnodar), Sergey Semak (Zenit), Mikhail Galaktionov (Lokomotiv), Andrey Talalaev (Baltika), Zaur Tedeev (Akron) and Jonathan Alba (Rostov). At the same time, only Galaktionov and Semak work in their clubs for more than three years (previously this period was considered the minimum for a coach to fully build a team). The history of the latter can be considered the same anomaly for Russia as the Cypriot and Norwegian approaches are for world football. Semak has headed Zenit since 2018.
