It’s been a funny old season for West Ham United. Seasoned Hammers fans would tell you that every season had a tendency to be a little bit “funny” at Upton Park, but during the past couple of years, life for the Hammers seemed to have become more stable. During both the 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 campaigns, Moyes’s men threatened to challenge for qualification for the Champions League on occasions. They never quite got there, but they qualified for European competition at the end of both seasons. For a club that had become accustomed to battling against relegation, it was quite the improvement.
The season West Ham has had might yet get stranger, because we’re writing these words before the club’s potentially era-defining clash with Fiorentina in the final of the Europa Conference League. We appreciate that it’s possible you’re reading them after the match has happened. If you are, we hope West Ham won. That’s not intended as disrespect towards Fiorentina or the club’s fans – it’s just that it would be a fitting reward for devoted Hammers fans after the season they’ve had to put up with.
Aiming for the stars and missing
Before the season began, David Moyes talked a good game about West Ham’s aspirations. Having qualified for Europe two seasons running and reached the Europa Cup semi-final, this was supposed to be the year that the Hammers took things to the next level. Big money was spent in the transfer market on players like Gianluca Scamacca and Lucas Paqueta. Nayef Aguerd wasn’t cheap either, and even bringing in Maxwell Cornet from Burnley cost more than £20m. Moyes was tooling up, and West Ham’s board were finally backing the manager. Great things were expected.
There’s a decent chance that you’re a West Ham fan if you’re reading this, so you don’t need us to tell you what happened next. For reasons that many an analyst has struggled to put a finger on all season, West Ham simply weren’t at the races. They drew games that they should have won. They lost games that they should have drawn. They spent most of the season battling relegation – an experience fans had hoped was in the rear-view mirror – and in truth, were largely spared from the drop because of the inadequacies of other teams rather than anything to do with the quality of West Ham.
Slanging from the sidelines
By Christmas, some of the press and a portion of the fan base had begun to ask questions of Moyes, who stuck to his guns and refused to change his strategy despite results consistently not going his team’s way. Some of the most stinging criticism came from inside the West Ham camp. Michail Antonio, who’d spent more time on the bench than he was expecting to following those big-money summer arrivals, told the press that Moyes’ game plan wasn’t working. The record-breaking forward said that in trying to become a “big team,” West Ham had abandoned the very things that had made them successful in the previous two years. Worse still, he dropped a heavy hint that he wanted to leave.
As things turned out, Antonio didn’t leave, and West Ham stayed up. However, regardless of whether the club wins or loses the Europa Conference League, there will still be difficult questions for Moyes to answer in the end-of-season debrief with the broad. Having a shiny trophy to show off to his paymasters will help him, but it won’t serve as a shield.
As far as he can go?
David Moyes has been in football management for a very long time, and the same criticism has followed him everywhere for the past ten years of it. He’s seen as a manager that can take a bad team and make them average, or take an average team and make them good. He can’t make a team great, and nor does he appear to be able to compete at the “great” level. He was a complete failure during his brief time at Manchester United. During his long stint with Everton, he constantly got the club to the brink of making the Champions League or within touching distance of a trophy, but he was never quite able to get them over the line. History appears to be in danger of repeating itself at West Ham.
West Ham fans owe Moyes thanks for taking them from inevitable relegation battlers to a genuine force within the league, even if he’s taken them a step backwards within the past twelve months. However, if the club has genuine aspirations of becoming a Champions League-level football team, the board has to ask itself whether Moyes has taken the Hammers as far as he can.
Risky business
We don’t make the suggestion that Moyes should be let go in favour of finding another manager lightly. We all know that hiring and firing managers is the football equivalent of roulette. That doesn’t stop at least half the clubs in the Premier League taking the gamble every season. If we’re going to use a casino metaphor, though, it should be this one:- If you’re going to play at an online casino, you’d be foolish to do it without checking a sister sites index to find out whether or not it’s going to pay out. If you’re going to replace your manager, it would be foolish to do it without checking to see whether someone else is free who might do a better job. In the current managerial market, there are two standout candidates.
The first is Graham Potter, who made a poor decision when he left Brighton for Chelsea. As Frank Lampard so adequately demonstrated, nobody could have managed Chelsea this season – the club is a mess. Potter has egg on his face and a point to prove, and he’d be eager to prove it at West Ham. On the other hand, there’s Brendan Rodgers. Firing Rodgers was a bad mistake from Leicester’s board – there’s little doubt the Northern Irishman would have kept the Foxes up – and he’s a winner. You might say that anyone can win a league title with Celtic, but Rodgers also won the FA Cup with Leicester. He, too, would be keen to prove he’s better than the way he left his last job might imply.
There’s no way the board would fire Moyes if he wins a European trophy, so if that happens (or has happened), he’s got another season to turn the ship around in the league. If not, though, this might be the perfect time to thank him for his services and tell him it’s time to move on.
