At least a dozen 2026 World Cup national coaches left their posts by the time we arrived at the much anticipated final, five weeks later. Most went within days of the result that ended their team’s tournament.[1] A month-long tournament compresses something that usually plays out slowly, and mostly in the boardrooms, into a single pattern for all to see: a public collapse of standing, timed almost exactly to one poor result.
It’s a sobering pattern to watch precisely because it’s so public and so fast. Inside an organisation, the equivalent process usually takes weeks, gets dressed up in language about culture fit or strategic misalignment, and never gets described for what it is while it’s happening.
A World Cup compresses the same mechanism into a matter of weeks, sometimes hours, and puts it on the sports pages (and sometimes on the front pages), which makes it much easier to see clearly than the version that plays out quietly in a boardroom after missing some KPIs. It’s a useful lens for why leaders get blamed unfairly, since the pattern is far easier to track on a football pitch than in a quarterly board pack.
Reflect on what actually triggered some of the departures, though, and you may notice the coach’s own record barely features in their defence. Julian Nagelsmann left Germany after a Round of 32 exit to Paraguay, a result that mattered because Germany had arrived as one of the tournament’s favourites.[2] Ronald Koeman’s departure followed the Netherlands’ loss to Morocco at the same stage, an exit widely covered as one of the tournament’s biggest upsets.[3]
Tunisia removed Sabri Lamouchi within days of the tournament starting, after a 5-1 opening defeat severe enough on its own to end things regardless of what anyone had expected going in.[4] Different mechanism, same trigger: not necessarily what the coach had done (or not done), but how far the result sat from the story everyone already believed, or how much the scoreline alone could carry as proof of guilt.
Barely any of it turns on a considered judgement
of what these coaches actually did wrong.
What shifts is the gap between result and
expectation, or simply the force of the result itself.
There’s a name for this in the research on how people assign responsibility for outcomes. Work on what’s called the ‘romance of leadership’ found that people attribute organisational results to the leader in proportion to how extreme those results are, in both directions, largely apart from what the leader can be shown to have actually done.[5] A remarkable result reads as evidence of a remarkable leader. A shocking one reads as evidence of a bad one. Neither verdict requires anyone to check what the leader was actually responsible for, nor what they actually did – specifically. Which is really the mechanism behind why good leaders get blamed for outcomes they had only partial control over, and praised just as disproportionately when things go well.
The size of the surprise does the work that evidence would otherwise have to do.
It’s tempting to think this changes once the criticism does get specific: a substitution, a formation, a decision that’s been named rather than just a result. Thomas Tuchel’s England side illustrates why it doesn’t. In the World Cup quarter-final against Mexico, Tuchel switched to a back five to protect a one-goal lead, held on, and was called a tactical mastermind for it. Ten days later, against Argentina, he made the identical switch to protect the identical scoreline. Argentina scored twice, and by the next morning the same call was being described across the English press as unfathomable.[6] Same decision, same manager, a fortnight apart. The only thing that changed was the outcome. And sure, anyone with any modicum of critical skills might ask questions around context, the difference in opposition, the fatigue or fitness levels of the team, the difference in altitude, and even barometric pressure – simply to arrive at more even-handed analysis. Not so.
Research on how people evaluate decisions found exactly this pattern: the identical choice gets rated as better thinking, and its maker as more competent, purely on the basis of whether the outcome happened to be good, even when the people doing the rating are told outright that they have exactly the same information the decision-maker had at the time. Specific criticism in these cases simply gives the reaction something concrete to blame.
That’s worth testing against a coach who got a gentler exit under comparable circumstances. Zlatko Dalić left Croatia about the same time as the Germany coach, at the same Round of 32 stage, after a loss to Portugal. His departure was covered as the graceful close of a nine-year era that included a World Cup final and a third-place finish, and Dalić himself called stepping down the hardest decision of his career.[7]
One account of leadership would explain the gap by way of accumulated standing. Leaders build up a kind of balance through years of prior competence, sometimes called idiosyncrasy credit, that buys room to fail once without immediate expulsion.[8] It’s a tidy theory, and it would explain how Dalić’s record bought him the softer landing.
But it’s worth being sceptical of how much critical thinking went into creating this narrative. Nobody appears to have paused, after Croatia’s loss, to total up a decade of service against one bad result and rule accordingly. A defeat delivered at the expected stage, against a strong side, may simply not have supplied enough shock to set anything off in the first place. The praise for Dalić’s career looks more like a story added later than a test anyone applied before the result arrived.
What fires, when it fires, looks less like a considered verdict
and more like a release. Research on how people manage
overwhelming anxiety describes a defence in which something
gets held as either entirely good or entirely bad,
with no tolerance for a version of it that holds both at once.[9]
Extending the same account to groups, the psychoanalyst and group theorist Wilfred Bion argued that a group placed under enough pressure stops doing whatever task it was there for, and reorganises instead around a shared enemy to fight.[10] Both accounts describe a group discharging something it has no other way of processing, not a group thinking its way toward a measured conclusion about a particular person.
Organisational writing on leadership has already given a version of this a name closer to home. A 1990 study in the journal Human Relations examined ‘heroism’ as one of two defences organisations reach for under uncertainty, in which leadership gets split apart from management, idealised, made larger than the person actually holding the role.[11] What that study doesn’t spell out, and what this tournament makes hard to miss, is that the same split runs in both directions on a single switch.
Making someone a hero and then
tearing them down are not two separate reactions here.
They are the same defence in different modes,
switching as soon as the idealised
figure no longer gives the group what it needed.
None of this stays private anymore, which changes its speed rather than its nature. For example, South Korea’s Hong Myung-bo left his post amid criticism severe enough to include reported threats against him personally.[12]
Research on how moral content spreads across social platforms found that posts carrying moral or emotional judgement travel further and faster than neutral ones, rewarded both by the platforms’ own design and by people’s motivation to signal group membership through what they condemn.[13] A defence that once discharged itself inside a stadium, or a pundit’s desk the next morning, now discharges itself across millions of individually ‘reasonable-feeling’ decisions to share, each one convinced it’s delivering a fair assessment rather than joining a pile-on.
This pattern is not unique to football, which is why it should interest organisational readers as much as football readers.
How close to your experience is this assertion? A leadership team that misses its number gets read the same way a knocked-out national side does. The result lands, the story writes itself inside the hour, and the actual causes, distributed across a team and a system that no single executive ever fully controls, don’t get a hearing. The mechanism that’s running doesn’t call witnesses nor chase the evidence. Instead, it craves a verdict.
A product launch that underperforms, a transformation programme that stalls, a merger that fails to deliver its case: the postmortem in each of these usually arrives already written, with at least one name attached to it, well before anyone has actually reviewed what the team around that person did or didn’t have in place. The review gets held. It just doesn’t change the verdict, because the verdict wasn’t waiting on the review to begin with.
Rarely is an individual ever responsible for the whole failure.
Saying so does not excuse individual failure;
but it does suggest any structure built to pin a bad result
on one name will keep repeating the same reflex,
no matter who occupies the role when it happens.
So how might we turn this around and become a little less likely to reach for the pitchfork? It’s unlikely to arrive through an appeal for more patience, or more information, since the whole point of a defence like this is that it doesn’t run on either. It runs on shock, and it discharges before information has a chance to arrive.
What might actually intervene is friction built into the structure itself, ahead of time: a mandated pause between a bad result and any personnel judgement, a standing requirement to account for the system and the team before an individual verdict gets entered. Not because that would make the reaction fairer, but because it would deny the reaction the one thing it needs most – to arrive first, baying for blood.
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References
[1] beIN Sports. (2026, July 8). Not just teams are falling: One in four coaches who started the 2026 World Cup are no longer in charge.
[2] NotJustOk. (2026, July). World Cup 2026: Coaches who have been sacked during the tournament.
[3] Punch Newspapers. (2026, July). Full list: Eight coaches who resigned after 2026 World Cup elimination.
[4] NotJustOk. (2026, July). Head coaches who resigned or were sacked at the 2026 World Cup.
[5] Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78–102.
[6] ESPN. (2026, July 16). Tuchel’s retreat set up England’s World Cup exit as Argentina smelled blood.
[7] beIN Sports. (2026, July 8).
[8] Hollander, E. P. (1958). Conformity, status, and idiosyncrasy credit. Psychological Review, 65(2), 117–127.
[9] Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
[10] Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock Publications.
[11] Krantz, J., & Gilmore, T. (1990). The splitting of leadership and management as a social defense. Human Relations, 43(2), 183–204.
[12] beIN Sports. (2026, July 8).
[13] Brady, W. J., Crockett, M. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2020). The MAD model of moral contagion: The role of motivation, attention, and design in the spread of moralized content online. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(4), 978–1010.