What kind of history is new Houston Dynamo head coach Owen Coyle up against?

It has been a long-held axiom in MLS: imported coaches do not do well in our league. Whether it’s the differing styles of play, all the different roster rules, or something else, coaches who come to MLS with no background in the US & Canadian game have almost uniformly failed to succeed.

The Houston Dynamo are hoping they have the man that will buck that trend. The team hired Owen Coyle, best known for managing Burnley and Bolton in England, to be their manager. Coyle comes into MLS with no prior coaching or playing experience in MLS or any of the leagues lower down the pyramid in the US and Canada.

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So now our job is to examine the axiom: do imported coaches really succeed at a lower rate than coaches who are familiar with North American soccer?

In order to do this every coach in MLS history was slotted into two categories: imported or North American. And no, it's not as simple as finding their place of birth.

Thomas Rongen and Steve Nicol, for example, had long years in the US before getting ahold of their first MLS head coaching jobs. Rongen was a part of the original NASL as a player, and had been in the States for nearly two decades come his appointment, in 1996, as the first manager of the Tampa Bay Mutiny. Nicol, a Liverpool legend, came to the US in 1999 to play with the lower-tier Boston Bulldogs, and it was a full three years before he became the fulltime boss of the New England Revolution.

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Both those guys were imports, but neither came to MLS "cold," so for the purposes of this conversation they -- and many more like them -- were slotted in with the North American coaches.

Here are the regular season records of both sets of coaches:

One problem with this is obviously the difference in sample sizes, one set of coaches has over 7,300 games under their belts while the other has just 667. But according to a significance test, the difference between the records of the two sets of coaches is statistically significant.

It also should be noted that of the 20 foreign coaches only two lasted more than two full seasons: Gary Smith and Hans Backe. Smith is the outlier -- he won an MLS Cup with Colorado in 2010 -- and even he didn't come directly to Denver to coach the Rapids, but instead to set up their academy in winter 2008. He was named interim manager near the end of that season, which gave him more than six months to get his feet wet in MLS before helming his first league game. Furthermore, Smith had picked up more US soccer knowledge from a stint as player-coach for now-defunct lower-division side Cape Cod Crusaders back in the late 1990s.  

Backe's three years in charge of RBNY were noteworthy more for their spectacular postseason flame-outs than their admittedly consistent regular season shows. 

Houston knew all of this when they hired Coyle. History is against them -- but they also know that, given the right lever, history can change.