Seven Pro League coaches are under fire again. Kortrijk shows why the coach is rarely the real problem.

No league in Europe sacks coaches mid-season like Belgium does. Most of those sackings start with decisions made above the coach, and Kortrijk is this season's clearest example.

Ten sackings a season

We counted every permanent head coach who was sacked after the season had started, over the last five full seasons, in Belgium, the big five leagues and the Netherlands. Caretakers are left out, and so are coaches who left for another club or were replaced over the summer.

Belgium sacks 10 coaches a season. Serie A, the league famous for sacking coaches, sacks 9.2, with 20 clubs instead of 16 or 18. LaLiga 8.6. The Premier League 7.2. The Bundesliga 6.6. The Eredivisie 3.8. Per club, Belgium sacks a third more coaches than Italy and almost three times as many as the Netherlands, and it has topped that ranking four seasons in a row.

Last season, 11 coaches were sacked in a 16-club league, 0.69 per club. The next league, the Bundesliga, was at 0.44. And five more coaches were taken by another club in the middle of the season, which then left that club looking for a coach too. When Club Brugge sacked Nicky Hayen in December, they took Ivan Leko from Gent. Gent took Rik De Mil from Charleroi. Charleroi appointed Hans Cornelis, and sacked him four months later.

Almost half of all Belgian clubs sack their coach during the season. In the big five leagues it is one in three, in the Netherlands one in five.

The coach pays for decisions made above him

A sacking looks like a verdict on the coach. Look closer and it is usually the end of a chain that started somewhere else.

Management from the top. Squads assembled late, by people who will not be judged on the results, sometimes for a different coach or a different plan.

Pressure from the stands. Three bad results and the debate is no longer about how the team plays, only about who is on the bench.

A mismatch nobody checked. A coach hired for one kind of football, a club that expects another, and a squad built for neither.

When those three meet, the coach is the only part of the chain a board can change in a week. So he goes.

Kortrijk: promoted with an identity, then rebuilt

Kortrijk came back up last season as runners-up of the Challenger Pro League, with 2.09 points per game. Not through possession, they had the ball about half the time, but through territory and control: third in the league for share of play in the final third, third for chances created, second-best for chances conceded. Three centre backs, wing backs, a clear plan.

Then the summer. Twelve players who hardly or never played for Kortrijk last season have now played Pro League minutes, five of them debuting between 29 August and 6 September. Only 56% of the minutes this season went to players who carried the team last season.

The new players are mostly duel winners and ball winners: good for defending a compact block, which is what a promoted club fighting to stay up needs. Few of the defenders are quick enough to defend high, and few are comfortable building up from the back. Already under the promotion coach, 74% of goal kicks went long, against 35% the season before.

Six games, zero points, and on 14 September the coach who got them promoted was sacked.

Hired for the style. Which style?

The new coach, Daniel Beichler, was presented with the same message we hear at almost every appointment: he fits the way of playing the club has in mind. So we put his only senior job, at Red Bull Salzburg last spring, next to Kortrijk's promotion season and next to Kortrijk now.

At Salzburg, Beichler's team had the ball, lived in the opponent's half and won it back high. It still produced the weakest points average of any Salzburg coach with more than ten games since 1980: four wins in 14 matches, and he was let go in May.

At Kortrijk, only one part of that survives: winning the ball back high. Everything else is the opposite. Kortrijk have the least possession and the least territory in the league, and kick more goal kicks long than anyone. He has used a back four at Genk and a back three at Standard two weeks later. When Genk built up, a Kortrijk player was within five metres of the ball 17% of the time, the lowest of their season. At Standard it was 33%, their highest. One point from three games.

That is not a coach imposing his style. And to be fair to him, it should not be. A coach can arrive with a clear vision and still has to work with the squad he finds, all the more in a relegation fight. Adapting to these players is probably the sensible call. But then the appointment was never about style, and the club should not present it that way. The mismatch between coach, squad and the football the club says it wants was there on day one.

Lommel and Beveren went up too

Kortrijk were not the only club promoted. Beveren won the second division unbeaten, Lommel came up through the play-off final. Both are doing better.

Lommel kept their coach and still build up short, even more than in the second division. Beveren changed coach in the summer, not in September, and kept three quarters of the minutes with the players who won the title. Both kept most of what got them promoted. Kortrijk changed the squad first, the coach second, and the style twice.

So what is the plan?

If Beichler was hired for a style, that style needs a different squad and time. Then he has to stay, even if this season ends in the second division. If he was hired to keep Kortrijk up, it is hard to see why the choice fell on a coach whose last job ended with four wins in 14 games and who has never coached a relegation fight in a top division. And if it goes wrong by January, does the phone ring for Bernd Storck again?

The fix is not patience for its own sake. It is knowing what you are asking for. How do we want to play? Can this squad play that way? Does the new coach play differently from the old one, or is he a new face for the same problem? Clubs can answer those questions with data before they sign a contract or a player, not after the third defeat in a row.

Until clubs know their own game, the coach will stay the cheapest one to blame. And the most expensive mistake.

Coach sackings from the managerial-changes tables of each league's season (permanent head coaches sacked after the season started). Match and positional analysis by MyGamePlan, Pro League 2026/27 up to 4 November.