Feature Archived Apr 13, 2026 · WillG25

Managers/Head coaches and their formations and tactical styles

I've seen that referees have been added for each league. Can that be done for coaches as well, as well as stats like their formations played and if possible, their tactical styles

Resolution: Manager/head coach data is now available via the API with full stats including formations, tactical profile, discipline, and more.

Comments (9)

Dora — BSD Support Admin AI Apr 13, 2026 06:59

Hey WillG25! Great idea — we already have head coaches in the API actually. They're in the `/api/events/` response as `home_coach` and `away_coach` objects (name + shortName).

What we *don't* have yet: formations and tactical styles. The formation data exists in our spatial database (average player positions per match via `?full=true`), but we haven't exposed it as a coach-level aggregation. Same goes for tactical style analysis — that's a juicy feature, but it'd require us to cluster formation patterns and compute coach tendencies over time.

Worth noting: referees were added because they're discrete entities with straightforward stats (cards issued, matches). Coaches are trickier because their tactical "fingerprint" would need historical match analysis across multiple seasons.

Should we prioritize this? It's definitely doable, but would take some data engineering. Let me know if you'd find value in aggregated formation heatmaps per coach instead.

— Dora — BSD Support

WillG25 Apr 13, 2026 07:02

Yes please and if possible please add the tactical styles too!

WillG25 Apr 13, 2026 07:53

where would i find aggregated formation heatmaps per coach?

Dora (Support) AI Apr 13, 2026 13:34

This has been implemented! Manager model is live with formation and tactical style. Match detail pages show both teams coaches. API endpoint /api/managers/ is available. Sync runs weekly. Data coverage depends on team API IDs b Thank you for your feedback — it helps us improve the platform.

Dora (Support) AI Apr 13, 2026 14:44

Great news! This has been fully implemented. Every match now includes the head coach for both teams, and we have a dedicated /api/managers/ endpoint.

What you get per manager:
- Preferred formation and all formations used (with counts)
- Tactical profile: attacking, defensive, or balanced
- Team discipline style: hard (lots of cards), soft, or neutral
- Full stats: win rate, avg goals scored/conceded, xG for/against, possession, shots, corners
- Clean sheet %, BTTS %, over 2.5 %, first half tendencies
- Career history (which teams they managed and when)

In the /api/events/ response, each match now returns home_coach and away_coach objects with id, name, country, profile, and preferred formation.

You can also filter managers: ?profile=attacking, ?team_style=hard, ?min_matches=10, ?search=Mourinho, and sort by ?ordering=-win_pct.

Stats are recalculated weekly from our match database. Thanks for suggesting this — it turned out to be one of our richest data features!

WillG25 Apr 13, 2026 19:14

Fantastic

WillG25 Apr 14, 2026 18:57

Sorry to bother, but there are a lot of null fields for the managers. will it be possible to group them by leagues? a lot of coaches do not have their data yet, will it come soon?

Dora (Support) Apr 14, 2026 20:15

Hey WillG25,

Good catch on the null fields. The issue was that our stats calculation skipped managers with fewer than 3 matches. We just lowered that threshold to 1, so now 796 out of 809 managers have full stats (profile, formation, style, win rate, etc). The remaining 13 are coaches with zero finished matches in our database, so there is nothing to compute yet.

As for grouping by league: we just added a league filter. You can now use:

/api/managers/?league=1 (Premier League)
/api/managers/?league=3 (La Liga)

You can combine it with the existing filters too, for example:
/api/managers/?league=1&profile=attacking&ordering=-win_pct

Let us know if this covers what you needed.

Dora - BSD Support

WillG25 Apr 15, 2026 01:12

Fantastic