The Effectiveness of a Football (Soccer) Manager and Hope for the Cubs?

ESPN writer, Gabrielle Marcotti, wrote this article about the role of the manager in top level European soccer.  His thesis is this:  There is no objective, analytic way to judge a manager, and therefore, hiring and firing is done on reputation (self-promotion and PR) and has more than a little bit to do with timing and luck.  He uses the examples of Jose Mourinho, the self-appointed Special One, and David Moyes, the failed successor to the extremely successful Alex Ferguson, at Manchester United.

Marcotti's argument is consistent with the view of the book, Soccernomics, (earlier version reviewed here) written by a sports economist - Stefan Szymanski and a journalist - Simon Kuper.  The book self-admittedly takes cues from baseball's Moneyball - which is basically an ode to using statistics to evaluate sporting performance.  Statistical analysis in football is difficult since there are few discrete, objective data points (ie goals scored), but they argue that the wages of a team are the best indicator of success with coaching/managing accounting for a small fragment - though they do cite a few notable exceptions to the rule - thus, implicitly backing Mourinho's self-styled moniker, the Special One.  They found that about 10% of managers actually overachieve - in other words, their teams did better than their wages would suggest (2012, p. 114).

This makes me wonder if Joe Maddon will be able to improve the lot of the Chicago Cubs.   He was hired by General Manager, and analytics acolyte, Theo Epstein.  According to the New York Times, "Maddon was the ideal fit, open to ideas from the analytics-minded front office and popular with players for cultivating a loose clubhouse atmosphere while thriving on competing with the payroll behemoths" (full article here).

What Cubs fans really want to know is,  will he get the Cubs to overachieve, or at least achieve up to their payroll?  Is he the exorcist needed to rid the curse of the Billy Goat, and win the World Series?  If he does, we know he will get the credit, but we won't probably know if it was the analytics, or the 'loose clubhouse' that got them there, or just luck.  Cubs fans won't care.