Do the World's Best Influence On-Field Performance? Estimating the Impact of New Zealand-Born Rugby Coaches on Non-native International Teams

New Zealand-born rugby coaches have recently been regarded as the best in the world, and are in demand to coach offshore professionally both at the club and international levels. This paper seeks to quantify the impact that coaches of New Zealand origin have when coaching overseas teams at the international level. A model is built with socioeconomic- and rugby-specific predictors of a country's World Rugby ranking points in the spirit of previous economic research into determinants of success in other sports. Results from cross-sectional and panel data analysis indicate that New Zealand-born coaches have been associated with improvements in the international performance (via a statistically significant increase in ranking points) of overseas national teams that they have coached.