Case Against David Moyes
With the 2017/18 season drawing to a close with a 3–1 win over Sam Allardyce’ Everton earlier today and with big questions marks over who will be in charge at West Ham next season, I thought I’d have a crack at assessing David Moyes’ tenure in Stratford. This season has been a largely a miserable one for West Ham fans, and the manager has certainly played his part in that. Here are some reasons why appointing him on a long-term basis would be a disaster.
First, a quick reminder that this was the state we were in when Bilic was sacked:
The squad is a shambles and we were trending downwards badly, but it’s not as if we were dead and buried at that point.
Moyes was only in charge for 27 games, so let’s evaluate how he did in those games in terms of pure points and compare that to Bilic’s efforts this season and last.
Points per game:
Bilic 16/17 — 1.18 (38 games)
Bilic 17/18 — 0.82 (11 games)
Moyes 17/18 — 1.22 (27 games)
If Moyes had accumulated points at the same rate over a full season, he’d have finished on 46. A definite improvement on the slow start to this season but not much better than last year, when Slav should have gone at the end of the 16/17 campaign.
That run of form in the opening 11 games of the season was deemed poor enough to warrant dismissing the incumbent manager, so let’s compare Bilic’s record in the spell just before he was sacked with his final 11 games last season and with Moyes’ last 11 games this year:
Bilic’s 11 games this season: W:2/ D:3/ L:6/ GF:11/ GA:23/ GD: –12/ Pts: 9
Bilic’s 11 games at the end of 16/17 (when he should have been sacked): W:3/ D:3/ L:5/ GF:11/ GA: 18/ GD: -7/ Pts: 12
Moyes’ last 11 games this season: W:3/ D:3/ L:5/ GF:14/ GA: 22/ GD: -8/ Pts: 12
The 7 points gained from the final 3 matches against teams who were effectively playing in their flipflops significantly boosts Moyes’ record here but even if we dismiss the circumstances, the points tally over his last 11 games is just 3 points better than the run of form that saw Slav sacked earlier this season.
Moyes has a reputation for being an organiser, someone who favours a back-to-basics approach and provides a defensively stable base for his sides to work from. Under his leadership, West Ham conceded 3+ goals 9 times in Moyes’ 27 games in charge. 3 of those were against top 6 sides. The others were Burnley, Swansea, Brighton, Bournemouth, Newcastle, and Everton.
Swansea failed to score in 18 of their games, Brighton 17, while Burnley and Newcastle each finished a match without a goal 13 and 14 times respectively, yet all of them scored 3+ against West Ham. To put that in perspective, each of those teams scored around 10% of their total goals for the season in 90 minutes against Moyes’ West Ham. Swansea’s 4 goal haul in March represented 14% of their overall goal tally (28 goals).
For reference, Bilic’s side, who had a reputation for capitulating after conceding an early goal, conceded 3 or more goals 11 times in 2016/17.
Defending set pieces was also a major problem under Bilic and his replacement hasn’t exactly rectified that: West Ham conceded 16 goals from set pieces this season, the joint-3rd highest of any Premier League team.
Then there’s the injury problems. West Ham have long struggled with injuries due to the quality of their training facilities and much has been made of the poor levels of fitness in the squad under Bilic. That may be the case, but Moyes has either failed to address those pre-existing issues, or has exacerbated the problem — since taking over in November, West Ham have had 11 separate hamstring injuries that caused a player to miss at least 1 game. The recurrence of that one specific type of injury suggests to me that the training methods being utilised are not looking after the players sufficiently. Under Moyes last season, Sunderland suffered approximately double the number of injuries compared to the previous year when Allardyce was in charge. He also had similar issues at United.
It’s also worth mentioning that Moyes completely binned off a League Cup quarter final against Arsenal and did his utmost to do the same against Shrewsbury, before eventually succeeding against Wigan in the FA Cup, in order to focus on the league. As we stayed up, it could be argued that the ends justified the means, but fellow relegation strugglers Swansea and Southampton both progressed deep into the FA Cup and it didn’t seem to affect their fortunes much.
In fact, Southampton picked up 6 points from the matches immediately after their 5 FA Cup games, while Swansea collected 13 points after their 7 FA Cup games (first 3 rounds went to replay). Their record in those games is better than their points per game ratio across the season as a whole. Southampton perhaps have a deeper squad than West Ham’s, but Swansea certainly don’t, so it’s tough to justify Moyes’ approach from that angle.
It’s not just the outcomes that have been poor. The bigger issues have arguably been performance-related.
If you’re interested in ideas of shot quality, Understat’s xG model suggests that we’ve overperformed our underlying attacking numbers — by a greater margin than any club other than Manchester City — and underperformed on the defensive end. Understat has us as the 6th worst attacking team, the 4th worst defensive team (even considering that we’ve conceded 9 more goals than we should have) and the 5th worst team for Expected Points.
Looking at shot data more generally, West Ham had the 4th fewest total shots (372) in the Premier League. In fairness, they rank 12th for shots on target (144) — and they hit the woodwork the joint second highest amount (11) — but there’s little difference between teams in the bottom half (Everton in 16th had only 10 fewer shots on target across the whole season) and taking fewer than 10 shots a game (3.5 on target) is grim.
There all sorts of tactical, stylistic and selection grievances with Moyes that are valid. Particularly galling has been the manager’s dogmatic adherence to his 5 at that back system that has turned watching West Ham into a miserable experience for long sections of this year. The overtly defensive football would be more palatable if it had proved at all effective — I’ve already shown that by many measures it hasn’t but if you want a concise summary: we finished the season with the joint-worst defensive record in the league along with relegated Stoke.
Moyes’ insistence on picking the same personnel and adopting the same tactical approach for matches against Stoke and Burnley at home and Arsenal and Liverpool away has been baffling. Part of that can be explained by the nature of the squad at his disposal, and there’s perhaps some merit to that, but the manager’s failure to adjust things (at all sometimes, let alone effectively) when the game plan evidently isn’t working has been infuriating.
The argument that this isn’t Moyes’ squad and that absolves him of criticism doesn’t hold much weight either. He was brought in to improve upon Bilic’s performance by extracting more out of the existing players. If he’s incapable of doing that, he shouldn’t have been appointed in the first place. Yes, he’s been working with a shit set of tools, but the bloke has shown that he can’t hold a drill the right way around, let alone build something with one. As it stands, he has fulfilled the job he was brought in to but only barely.
And that’s the crux of it. Moyes kept us up and he deserves credit for that, although it was still in question until the last 2 matches. But he achieved the bare minimum and showed no indication that he was capable of any more than that. Do we really aspire to staying up by the skin of our teeth next season and nothing else?
Even if you take the position that the squad has been too desperately short of quality for this season to be an accurate measure of his ability as a manager, you have to question whether he’s the right person to entrust with an overhaul (provided Sullivan is willing to finance that, of course).
Moyes is lauded for signing the likes of Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka, Tim Cahill, and John Stones for Everton a decade ago. He deserves recognition for that, and his record of buying dependable defensive players and young players to develop was largely good during his spell on Merseyside.
However, his record when he had money to spend is far, far worse. In fact, the players Moyes signed for a substantial fee (barring Marouane Fellaini and Juan Mata) have ranged from disappointing to downright abysmal: Jordan Hugill, Didier Ndong, Papy Djilobodji, Louis Saha, James Beattie, Andy Johnson, Diniyar Bilyaletdinov, Andy van der Meyde, Per Krøldrup were all signed for £5mil+ and failed to deliver on their price tag. There’s also a litany of loan signings and cheap punts that made little to no impact for his sides, but even without including those, it’s a mixed history at best, and not one that would encourage you to scrap plans to install a Director of Football at the club. Giving him carte blanche in the transfer market would be a highly risky move. What do the club do if he underperforms next season, they sack him by Christmas and they appoint another manager who has to work with another squad by someone else? We’re back at square one.
Moyes isn’t the only, or even the biggest, issue at the club, but it comes down to this:
He barely achieved the bare minimum and showed little to suggest that he could help the club progress while doing so.
West Ham need to be careful because if all you try to do is tread water, eventually you drown.
