The Moyes is back in town

On Tuesday, the day after the Slaven Bilic era officially came to its conclusion, West Ham swiftly unveiled the man who was to become just the 16th permanent manager in the club’s history. David Moyes was announced on an initial 6-month contract, with a rumoured optional 2-year extension, having met Gold & Sullivan’s main criteria for leading the club to safety: having the first name David.

Few were surprised by the appointment. Rumours of Moyes’ imminent arrival had begun to circulate over the weekend after West Ham’s abject performance in a chastening 4–1 defeat to Liverpool on Saturday evening. As soon as those rumours emerged, the accompanying backlash from Irons fans followed, in addition to scorn and mockery from supporters of other clubs. By Sunday evening David Sullivan was said to be so shocked by the fan reaction that he was reconsidering his decision. If you ever wanted confirmation of how out of touch the board are with the fans, look no further than that.

Sullivan didn’t waiver, though, and the 54-year old Glaswegian was named as the new boss on Tuesday morning. Since then, he’s had his first official press conference where he appeared bullish and talked up his desire to “find a winning formula” and admitted that he felt he had “a point to prove” after overseeing a calamitous relegation at Sunderland.

Over the course of this week, the club’s various social media profiles have understandably been doing their utmost to present the new manager in the best possible light. Most prominent among these efforts have been a series of clips of Moyes getting down to work at Chadwell Heath. One of the main arguments against Bilic was that his training methods were ineffective and a contributing factor to his team’s sluggish, listless performances. The smoking gun for this was the widely distributed stats about West Ham’s low number of high intensity sprints and distance covered per game.

(A side note on that: not only are those particular stats largely useless in isolation — we’re playing football, not running 10,000 metres at the Olympics — they also fail to take into account that we’ve played almost two hours of football so far this season with 10 men, thanks to Arnautovic and Carroll. That’s substantially more than any other Premier League club and it therefore seems only natural that we’d rank poorly under those metrics. Turning those stats into a rod to beat Bilic with was a little unfair).

Elsewhere, David Gold has already taken to Twitter to implore the fans to get behind Moyes and the board’s official statement was straining at the sinews to hype up their chosen man. Of his ill-fated reign as Ferguson’s heir they wrote: “ Moyes won the Community Shield at Wembley in August — becoming the first Manchester United manager ever to win a trophy in his first season in charge, but left the club after just ten months.” Even your washing machine doesn’t spin that much.

The differing evaluations of Moyes’ ability as a manager seem to come down to which portion of his career to date is deemed more significant. Is it the decade of steady, midtable finishes with occasional forays into Europe that he enjoyed with Everton? Clearly this is the manager that Gold & Sullivan think they’ve appointed. In their statement they mention that he took over from Walter Smith in March of 2002 with the club in a relegation battle and point out that he successfully steered them to safety. That was 15 years ago and the world of football has moved on in the intervening years. Is that particular experience still valuable?

Or are Moyes’ post-Everton failures more pertinent? The 7th placed finish with Manchester United, the unhappy year in San Sebastián, the abysmal leadership of a dismal Sunderland side — are these a more accurate reflection of what he’s capable of now?

What happened at United seems, effectively, largely irrelevant to his ability to manage West Ham: the circumstances, squad strength, expectations, and stature of that job at that time are in a completely different stratosphere to the one he finds himself in now. Far more instructive, and troubling, are his spells with Real Sociedad and Sunderland.

Much of the criticism of Moyes’ time in charge at the Stadium of Light tends to revolve around his personality; after suggesting that his team were in a relegation battle two games into the season, and claiming that the players he could attract in January probably wouldn’t improve the squad…before going out and making a number of signings, Moyes earned himself the “energy vampire” epithet from angry fans. While there is undoubtedly some merit to all of this, without first hand experience of the effects of that attitude inside the club, it’s difficult to assess how damaging it really was.

The psychological impact of managerial personality is something that is often overvalued or overstated. It’s a natural thing for fans to cling onto, but the way a manager interacts with the press is not necessarily the way he interacts with his players and staff in the dressing room. Likewise, there is no “right” personality required to achieve success in football — Zinedine Zidane and Antonio Conte both won their respective league titles last year and yet could not be further apart in terms of their demeanour on the touchline. Jose Mourinho is frequently a dour, negative, and prickly individual in front of the camera but that hasn’t hindered his capacity to win trophies.

Ultimately, a lot of the conversation in the immediate aftermath of this appointment has been about whether or not David Moyes is a good manager, which is far less interesting or important than the question we should be asking: would David Moyes be a good manager of West Ham?

And for me the answer is a resounding no.

There are plenty of objections that can be made about Moyes as West Ham manager but the primary one is this: the appointment of David Moyes doesn’t actually solve any of the problems we had under Bilic. If anything, we’ve signed up for more of the same thing.

A lot of these points stem from Louise Taylor’s excellent primer on Moyes’ time at Sunderland, which goes a long way towards confirming some of the commonly held truisms about the Scot. Here’s a brief overview of why he’s a bad fit for West Ham:

• Questionable training methods. As previously mentioned, this was a major criticism of Slav. Players from United, Sunderland, and Real Sociedad have all complained about Moyes’ old-fashioned, outdated, and ineffective training sessions. Additionally, a recent report by JLT, a specialty insurance broker, found that last season Sunderland sustained a league high 58 injuries with at least three players unavailable for every match day of the 2016/17 season, with this number reaching more than 10 at times. The average number of unavailable players each match day for the Premier League champions Chelsea was 1.66, whereas for Sunderland it was 7.37. 47 of those 58 injuries were classed as “significant injuries” meaning that the injury resulted in a player missing 10 days or more. Some of the players in that Sunderland squad had generally poor injury records, so I’ve got some sympathy with that (even if a few of them were players signed by Moyes), but that number is so laughably high that you’ve got to question whether what they were doing in training was contributing to the frequency of injuries. For context, in the 15/16 season under Allardyce, Sunderland amassed 34 injuries and their players missed a total of 731 days. The league average for that season was 35.25 injuries per team and 1035.6 total days missed by a club’s players, meaning that Allardyce’s Sunderland experienced injuries either at, or well below, the average rate; under Moyes their total number of injuries almost doubled.There’s regularly been speculation that the high frequency of soft tissue injuries picked up by West Ham players is linked to training. There’s little indication that we won’t see more of the same under Moyes. Taylor’s article also mentions an “inordinate amount of time devoted to crossing practice” which leads on to…
• A lack of tactical competence. Again, a major problem Bilic had was that there was no real plan for how to set his team up to actually win games. Often when we got into the final third we just relied on aimlessly crossing the ball, which is not a reliable or effective way to create high quality chances. Moyes uses on a similar approach and he’s regularly struggled to create a competent attack: his Real Sociedad team scored 44 goals in his 42 games in charge and at Sunderland last year managed 29 in 38. Here’s a quote from his time in Spain: “David Zurutuza claimed “there are lots of things missing, not just the final pass … we’re having doubts, we’re lacking an idea””. Sound familiar?
• Defensive issues. Moyes has a reputation for being a back-to-basics manager who can organise a defence and get his team well-drilled. His last season at Sunderland suggests otherwise. Sunderland’s back four had looked solid and sturdy under Allardyce but with Moyes they began to give away a huge number of goals due to silly individual errors, seemed incapable of executing the fundamentals of basic defending, and were constantly overrun in midfield — not dissimilar to what we’ve been seeing over the last year or so. Sunderland also conceded 14 goals from set pieces: the joint 6th worst record in the league and 4 more than West Ham conceded. In the previous season under Allardyce, Sunderland conceded just 8 goals from set pieces (4th best record in the league), meaning that goals conceded from set pieces doubled under Moyes’ guidance. At United in 13/14, Moyes’ side conceded 11 goals from set pieces (9th worst in the league) while at Real Sociedad in 14/15 his team also allowed 11 goals from set pieces (11th worst).
• Squad strength. You can argue that our squad is better than Sunderland’s was last year but there’s quite a lot of similarity in terms of the type of player available: lots of slow, ageing players and not an enormous deal of creativity — a similarity of qualities, if not quality. You can even draw a series of one-to-one comparisons between the two teams: Lee Cattermole and Mark Noble; Bryan Oviedo and Aaron Cresswell; John O’Shea and James Collins; Lamine Koné and Winston Reid; Wahbi Khazri and Manuel Lanzini; Steven Pienaar and Marko Arnautovic; Didier N’Dong and Cheikhou Kouyaté; Fabio Borini and André Ayew; Jermain Defoe and Javier Hernández; Victor Anichebe and Andy Carroll. Moyes struggled to stitch together something cohesive to get the most out of those types of players at Sunderland. It was less that there was a strategy in place but the players weren’t good enough to execute it properly. It was more that they didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to be doing. There’s no real indication that he’ll be able to achieve that with our squad.
• Recruitment. The worrying thing about that is that his Sunderland squad was largely shaped by him. They were hardly all-but-relegated when he arrived — he was appointed midway through pre-season and brought in 12 players throughout the course of the year, 8 of whom he’d worked with previously. Sunderland spent about £17m net over the course of last season which is roughly equivalent to what we spent over the summer. The one plus side here is that Moyes previously worked with our Head of Player Recruitment when they were both at Everton. Hopefully that pre-existing relationship will help matters.
• Problems with non-British players. His reported struggles to have a fruitful working relationship with foreign players is also a bit of a worry, considering that the majority of our best players fall into that category. What’s perhaps most concerning is his repeated, bizarre insistence on instilling some vague notion of “Britishness” into his team and players. Moyes dropped Didier N’Dong in favour of Jack Rodwell for a game against Burnley because he “thought the game might suit more Britishness in the middle of the pitch.”. Earlier in the season, when asked about Papy Djilobodji, Moyes said “I’ve got an awful lot of work to do on the training ground getting the Britishness into him.”
• Manuel Lanzini. Moyes has never really successfully played a system that used a number 10. At United, he occasionally used Shinji Kagawa or Wayne Rooney there but Moyes never really got the best out of Kagawa and Rooney operated predominantly as a sort of secondary striker rather than in an overtly creative role. At Real Sociedad, Moyes played a 4–2–3–1 variant with Xabi Prieto in the attacking midfield role, but his side were stagnant in possession and he failed to make the most of his captain’s ability. That doesn’t bode well for Lanzini who is one of our few genuine difference makers.
• Misogyny. During his first press conference at the London Stadium, Moyes was inevitably asked if he’d spoken to Karren Brady about the incident in March where he threatened to slap BBC journalist Vicki Sparks. Brady had been highly critical of his conduct at the time and, given that they will have to work relatively closely to one another, presumably the topic would have come up in the interview process? Apparently not: “No we didn’t discuss it at all” was Moyes’ response. If this is true, rather than simply a way to sidestep an uncomfortable question, it is staggering and highlights both the incompetence of our board as well as demonstrating how little West Ham United regard their female supporters. That Moyes’ behaviour was not treated more gravely is a disgrace.

Let’s not kid ourselves — the West Ham job, at present, is a deeply unattractive one and the club have paid the price for not making the managerial change over the summer when far better candidates were available. But that does not make a Moyes a good fit nor does it mean that there weren’t more talented, more appropriate or more progressive options available to the club now. By selecting someone they perceive to be a low-risk candidate, Gold & Sullivan have in fact taken an enormous gamble.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: whether you agree with the decision or not, the board parted ways with Sam Allardyce because they aspired to do more than simply survive in the Premier League by setting up to narrowly grind out results. Moyes was picked by Sunderland as someone to take over the reins from Allardyce and they regressed hugely under him. Therefore doesn’t Moyes, even as a short term measure, represent an enormous step backwards?

The fear is that by May it won’t be Allardyce we’re comparing Moyes with. It’ll be Avram Grant.