How much is a manager worth?

There is a question we ask constantly in football without ever really answering it.

How much is a manager actually worth?

Not their salary. Not their reputation. Not the number of trophies listed on their Wikipedia page.

Points

If you take a football team and replace its manager with Jürgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti, or Unai Emery, by how many points should the team improve? Five points? Ten? Twenty?

If we can establish a reasonable estimate of the typical impact of an elite manager, perhaps we can start to distinguish the coach's influence from other factors surrounding the team.

This leads us directly to Pep Guardiola and Manchester City.

There are two prominent arguments about Guardiola that are often conflated. One suggests that Pep is arguably the best coach of his generation. The other claims that Manchester City's remarkable resources have created conditions that are unavailable to almost all other teams. Both arguments may be valid. The intriguing analytical challenge is to determine how we can separate these influences.