“WHY would he?” That’s the question most people have been asking after Chris Coleman left Wales to become Sunderland boss. It’s a managerial graveyard, the argument goes, so why would Coleman go there when his stock is so high? 

The question that doesn’t seem to be being asked, although it’s just as pertinent, is: “Why would they?”

Given the endemic problems on Wearside, what the club needs is stability, someone who can oversee a long-term project, someone who can pull them out of the relegation zone this season, consolidate and then build towards promotion. 

Where is the evidence that Coleman is that someone? Is it just possible that the Black Cats have bought overpriced stock?

One of the fundamental arguments of Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s book about the statistical revolution in baseball, is that there is a “tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance — what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next.” 

Building on this, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, the authors of Soccernomics, argue that “the worst time to buy a player is in the summer when he’s just done well at a big tournament.” It’s a basic mistake, but it’s one that Sunderland appear to have made with Coleman.

After failing to qualify for the 2014 World Cup, Coleman led Wales to Euro 2016 — their first international tournament in 58 years. A fine achievement, but it can’t be ignored that he benefited from the fact that the competition had been expanded from 16 teams to 24 in 2016. 

That meant that the 54 teams which entered the qualification stages had a 44 per cent chance of reaching the tournament proper, an increase from 27 per cent in 2012. 

So Wales qualified for Euro 2016 automatically despite finishing second in their group when they would have faced a play-off under the previous format.

That expanded number of teams also meant that progress within the tournament was easier. Prior to 2016, eight of the 16 teams (50 per cent) in the group stages reached the knockout phase of the tournament. In Euro 2016, it was 16 of 24 (66 per cent). 

In effect it was twice as hard NOT to qualify for the knockout stages than it was to progress. Granted Wales topped their group, but the quality of both the groups and the knockout phase had been significantly diluted by the inclusion of eight teams that would not have been there in previous years. 

So instead of facing one of the best eight teams in Europe in the second round, Wales faced, well, Northern Ireland, themselves at their first international tournament for 30 years.

Furthermore, over the last five years, Coleman has been extremely fortunate to be in charge of a team that included Gareth Bale, one of the world’s best players playing at, or at least very near, his peak. 

For sure, with solid Premier League players like Ashley Williams and Aaron Ramsey in the side, Wales are not a one-man team, but their over-reliance on Bale going forward makes for stark reading.

Since the Real Madrid star made his international debut in 2006 Wales have won nearly 50 per cent of the games in which he played but only 25 per cent of the ones he hasn’t. 

In that time they have won just three qualifiers in which he was absent. Of the 11 goals they scored during qualification for Euro 2016, Bale was involved in 82 per cent, scoring seven and creating two more. His goals alone were responsible for seven points, without which Wales would have finished fourth, not second.

His scintillating form continued into the tournament proper where his performances saw him ranked third by the Uefa player barometer. Aaron Ramsey, ranked 19th, was the only other Welsh player to make the top 20.

In the qualification campaign for the 2018 World Cup (in which teams had only a 26 per cent chance of reaching the tournament finals), Bale missed crucial games against Serbia (through suspension) and Georgia and Ireland (through injury). 

Wales won just one of them and finished third in their group, thus not only missing out on automatic qualification but also a play-off berth. In short, a Coleman-managed Wales without the world-class Bale looks decidedly ordinary and is not as successful.

None of this is to say the Welsh team has not improved under Coleman, nor that their success at Euro 2016 had nothing to do with him, just that a tournament is a hot-house environment after which players’ and managers’ stock can be overvalued.

But not only have Sunderland overvalued Coleman’s achievements with Wales, they are also judging him by the wrong criteria. In their book The 90-minute Manager, business analysts David Bolchover and Chris Brady argue that it is common for football clubs to hire managers “to achieve a specific set of goals purely on the basis of their attainment of utterly different goals.”

So in their consideration of Coleman Sunderland should have given greater weight to his club management career than his international management career and that does not look so good.

In 2003 he became the youngest boss in the Premier League when he stepped into the Fulham hot seat, but there he inherited a strong squad at a relatively stable, well-run club, a very different situation to the one he faces at the Stadium of Light. 

He was sacked four years later, having not demonstrably improved the club’s fortunes.

His 15-month spell at Coventry is arguably an even better barometer. There he took over a club in 20th place in the Championship in February 2008. By the last day of the season Coventry were still in the mire and Coleman looked on helplessly as his team suffered a 4-1 defeat to Charlton Athletic but were saved by results elsewhere. 

The 2008-09 season saw Coventry finish in an uninspiring 17th and Coleman was sacked in May 2010 after the Sky Blues finished in 19th.

So, Coleman may well lead Sunderland to safety this season, but there is nothing to suggest he will be able to build a team fit for promotion in the long-term. 

Sunderland have hired someone seemingly adept at the short-term requirements of international management where transfers are not an issue when they should have hired someone adept at the long-term requirements of building a promotion team on a shoestring budget. 

Someone like Simon Grayson, for example, who gained promotion with all four teams he managed before he joined Sunderland in the summer. However, instead of having faith in their decision, the club sacked him after just 15 games.

Grayson was not a high-profile figure. Coleman, at the moment at least, is. In their analysis of the transfer market, Kuper and Szymanski suggest that some football clubs don’t even try to be rational in the transfer market. 

Citing the example of Michael Owen’s ill-fated move to Newcastle, they argue that some clubs buy expensive players as “gifts” to the fans because “buying a big name is a way of saying: ‘Yes, we are a big club’.”

And that is what the Black Cats have done with Coleman. His is a fan-friendly appointment, one that says, “despite all the problems of recent years, we can still entice one of the hottest managerial properties in the business to the club.” 

Coleman is the manager Sunderland want. Whether he is the manager they actually need, well, that’s a different matter.