As of Tuesday, there are still two years, two months and 19 days remaining on it. “It” being the six-year contract David Moyes signed when Alex Ferguson anointed him his successor at Manchester United in 2013.
In a parallel universe, Moyes is promising to offer them the same longevity he brought Everton. In that world, his early, ambitious signings of Gareth Bale and Cesc Fabregas set United onto a course of big-spending entertainment married with seamless success.
These days, that feels plucked from the realms of fantasy. Moyes lasted 295 days at Old Trafford, only slightly longer than Sunderland will spend in the relegation zone this season. One appointed to win the Premier League at United instead props it up.
The tragedy of Moyes is that his career was sent into a nosedive by getting his dream job. Before he got the call from Ferguson, he delivered stability and overachievement. After it, he has offered instability and underachievement.
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After Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to his old employers, Moyes pledged: “We keep fighting.” Yet the fight seems to have gone out of him. Moyes confessed in private in November that he expected Sunderland to go down. He looks fatalistic, powerless to halt one of the most remarkable declines in managerial history.
He seems a victim of fate, not a man who shapes his destiny. Now it seems anything that can go wrong does. Many felt Seb Larsson's red card against United was harsh. It was nevertheless indicative of Moyes's fortunes.
When the final whistle blew, Sunderland had gone 65 days without scoring, left with nothing to show for 79 shots. If a midwinter break in New York was supposed to galvanise them, Sunderland have returned subdued. Whereas Martin O’Neill, Paolo di Canio, Gus Poyet, Dick Advocaat and Sam Allardyce conjured spring revivals to keep Sunderland up, Moyes’s team seem devoid of the belief they can engineer an improbable escape.
It conformed to a familiar theme. The sight of his buy Marouane Fellaini captaining United and Luke Shaw and Ander Herrera, two signings he identified, impressing was a reminder that, even to the last, he was regarded as a fine judge of a player at Old Trafford.
But the concerns senior figures had there – that his side lacked spirit, that their style of play and results were poor and that he was not getting the best from his players – are constants since he quit Everton, where his teams had the resolve to end any slump and the capacity to perform near their capacity.
His strengths have deserted him since he left his comfort zone. Moyes may not always have been the wrong man – and the Everton variant of him would have been an excellent choice for Sunderland – but he has invariably been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Replacing Ferguson equated to a poisoned chalice, but he could not turn United down. He had to accept the Real Sociedad job – not least because the Spanish club had announced his appointment – to try and prove himself outside Britain.
He could not say no to Sunderland, because he was running out of options in the Premier League, but he joined at the time when Ellis Short decided to stop funding huge annual losses to stay up. Hence a squad of misfits, rounded up on the cheap, and old allies united for an exercise in mutual misery.
He had rejected West Ham United, whose owners invariably afford managers a sizeable transfer fund, in 2015 out of misplaced loyalty to Sociedad, whose president bought players Moyes did not want and sacked him early into the next season.
Now he will be tarnished as the manager who did what even the bizarre Di Canio did not and took Sunderland down. In what seemed a ruthless figure’s attempt at sympathy, Jose Mourinho called Sunderland a “sad team”. And so a depressed group are.
But the adjective’s informal meaning – pathetically inadequate – is equally applicable. It is all part of the sadness of David Moyes.
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