🏉 Is Leinster's recent dominance of European club rugby a story about coaching?
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Welcome to the 10th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If any organisation is set up to sustain the loss of an influential head coach — as their men’s team will this summer — it is Leinster Rugby: they have developed an efficient and coherent system that would likely measure up against any other club or franchise across the world of professional sport. But as Stuart Lancaster’s tenure at the province draws to a close, it’s interesting to consider just how much of an impact he’s had on the field since joining in 2016 — and, in turn, what they are set to lose when he departs.
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Is Leinster's recent dominance of European club rugby a story about coaching?
It’s right, I think, to be instinctively sceptical1 about the prospect that one professional coach or manager in a given sport will do a significantly better job than any other.
It’s incredibly difficult in most cases to separate the impact of one individual in such a position of responsibility out from that of other contextual factors: the players at their disposal, the other staff working alongside them, the peers they are competing against and — over the often short periods of time in which these assessments are made — luck.
Occasionally, however, enough evidence stacks up that you can be pretty comfortable assessing that certain people have a reliably positive impact on the on-field performance of the athletes they oversee.
One of my favourite examples of this is current Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp.
At each of his three stops2 as a professional football coach — Mainz, Dortmund and Liverpool — he has been in charge for over 250 competitive matches. And, each time — at least according to the ClubElo model we discussed with reference to Brighton last time — he has overseen a clear and obvious improvement in performance in short order.
At this point, however, rugby coach Stuart Lancaster — formerly head coach of England’s men’s national team, now ‘senior coach’ at Leinster — is pushing him close.
The only World Cup he contested — in 2015 — in charge of England ended in a group-stage exit, but he left behind a team that was stronger overall than the one he inherited in 2011.
In his current post at Leinster — working underneath Leo Cullen as director of rugby, but understood to be driving much of what the team does technically and tactically — his impact appears even more obvious.
The province’s defensive performance has been remarkably consistent for a long period of time, conceding far fewer than 20 points per game on average since the late 2000s.
But, when Lancaster came in in September 2016, their attack was languishing. At the end of the 2015-16 season, they were averaging around 19 points scored per game3 — having been as high as a 28-point mark as recently as 2013-14.
What happened next was remarkable.
Leinster’s attacking performance has exploded under the oversight of Lancaster. They reached the 30-points-per-game mark4 before the end of his first season in charge, and have spent almost the entirety of his tenure above that elite level.
Over their last 30 games — the most recent of which was Saturday’s 35-5 victory in the United Rugby Championship quarter-final — they have scored 36.1 points on average.
Their attacking output has, in effect, nearly doubled since the appointment of Lancaster.
As with Klopp, there are a number of important contextual factors to consider. The German football manager was fortunate to be working in concert with an excellent recruitment team whose transfer business for a couple of seasons was almost faultless; Lancaster sits atop an extraordinarily aligned and well-resourced development pathway which produces a steady stream of skilled, physically adept athletes.
But the scale and immediacy of Leinster’s improvement on the attacking side of the ball should give us the confidence to assert that Stuart Lancaster is truly an elite rugby coach.
And, while the province will rue his departure from Dublin, the coming change will provide outside observers with a couple of interesting natural experiments to keep an eye on.
Firstly, we’ll get the opportunity to see Lancaster take on another major job in a very different context — in charge of French club Racing 92 in Paris — and attempt to repeat the same process of improvement.
Secondly, arriving in his place in Dublin will be another highly regarded operator from elsewhere in the rugby world: current South African men’s national team head coach Jacques Nienaber.
Nienaber’s specialty is defence — and it will be fascinating to see whether he is able to have as clear an impact on the opposite side of the ball to Lancaster.
Leinster is a stable organisation, and he should be given sufficient time for his coaching methods to generate returns; we should, in other words, be able to see their rate of points conceded trend down in years to come, just as their rate of points scored has recently trended steeply upwards5.
But it’s fair to say that this is far from a given. Coaching ’skill’ is famously hard to pin down; Stuart Lancaster is one of the few — across all sporting codes — who we can be pretty sure possesses it in abundance.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
John Muller has just written a piece for The Athletic titled ‘Do football managers matter?’, which I’d encourage you to read.
Muller: “If we could really measure managers’ skill levels independent of their team, we might expect it to follow them around from job to job.”
On a 30-game trailing basis.
Again, on a 30-game trailing basis.
It will also be worth closely tracking Leinster’s attacking numbers without Lancaster in charge.
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