Giovanni Trapattoni once said a good manager can make a team only 10 per cent better. A bad manager, the Italian felt, could make a side 30 per cent worse.
So the good news, such as it is, for David Moyes is that he doesn’t quite qualify for the great Trapattoni’s definition of a poor manager.
Rumours are swirling from various news sources that Manchester United will sack the Scot imminently and it is hard to make a case for Moyes to stay at Old Trafford.
Last season, United ended with 89 points. At their current rate, they are on course to finish with 64, or 28 per cent fewer.
Moyes is not a bad manager. Indeed, his record at Preston North End and Everton suggests he is a good one. However, he is doing a spectacularly bad job at United. They are infinitely worse than Sir Alex Ferguson's final title-winning team.
The figures are only a guide. More damning than the number of defeats – 11 in the league – is the manner of them. Sunday's 2-0 loss to Everton at Goodison Park joined a long list of performances with few, if any, redeeming features: to Stoke City and Olympiakos away, for example, or to West Bromwich Albion and Swansea City at home.
Then there are both league encounters with Manchester City and Liverpool, high-pressure games when United plumbed the depths.
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The weekend return to Merseyside brought Moyes full circle: back to the place where he made his reputation and back to the city where, on the field, anyway, his management of United first began to unravel. There were unfortunate parallels.
Moyes invited ridicule by suggesting his side played well in September’s 1-0 reverse at Anfield. He did so again on the other side of Stanley Park. In reality, only one visiting team performed creditably at Goodison this month: Tony Pulis’s purposeful Crystal Palace who, in the scale of their improvement under the Welshman, are a repudiation of Trapattoni’s maxim.
United have travelled in the opposite direction after a managerial switch. Their flaws are illuminated by the man charged with correcting them. Whereas Ferguson invariably managed to deflect attention from poor performances, Moyes has an unfortunate habit of highlighting them.
He compounds his problems with his comments, leading more to think he neither sounds nor seems like a Manchester United manager.
There are games when Moyes’s United have been hapless. This is a season when he has also been luckless.
United’s decline would be damaging enough without the context: without one rival, Manchester City, having won a trophy and on course to finish with more than 150 goals; without their bitterest enemies, Liverpool, set to clamber back upon the perch Ferguson famously knocked them off by winning a first title since 1990; without Everton doing a deserved double over United to provide indisputable proof that they are better off without Moyes, just as the Scot’s new employers are worse off with him.
Perhaps it wouldn’t seem so dreadful if Moyes’s flagship signing were not Marouane Fellaini, the £27.5 million (Dh170m) misfit whose struggles sum up his manager’s problems finding the right role for his charges.
Fellaini’s limitations suggest Moyes set the bar for a United player too low, just as his rhetoric indicates he is satisfied by too feeble a level of performance.
Fellaini’s failings, like Juan Mata’s ineffective displays against better opponents, raise further questions if Moyes is the man to entrust with a huge transfer budget. United’s attraction used to lie in a guarantee of success, a culture of winning and annual Champions League football.
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Now they seem resigned to conceding their allure comes from a new-found willingness to pay over the odds.
In any case, signing players helps only if the manager knows where to play them. The sense is that Moyes is getting further away from his finest 11. Only three of those who seemed to belong in his strongest side in August – David de Gea, Michael Carrick and Wayne Rooney – began at Goodison Park. Moyes’s uncertain attempts to ally defensive solidity with creativity backfired when Shinji Kagawa neglected the less glamorous half of his job and allowed Seamus Coleman to dominate the game.
The Japanese is one of many to underperform during Moyes’s reign. Danny Welbeck, whose 10 goals represent a marked improvement on his tally of two in Ferguson’s final year, appeared a rare beneficiary of regime change.
Then reports emerged that he, too, was disenchanted with Moyes. Besides Rooney, who has been granted a ludicrously lucrative contract, who actually is happy? Few cut content figures, with some seemingly eyeing the exit and others presumably hoping Moyes leaves first.
Given their lamentable efforts this season, it would serve some players right if a new manager came in and decided he didn’t want them. Given United’s collective malaise, it feels inconceivable that the Glazers, their owners and ruthless businessmen, would grant Moyes many millions more than Ferguson ever spent in a summer when there is the very real risk that a second season would prove equally abject.
Decision time is beckoning and, beyond the rationalisation that United may already have hit bottom, there are too few reasons to believe they will improve next year. They shouldn’t take heart from Liverpool’s revival.
Brendan Rodgers took the probable champions to seventh last season, but only after inheriting a side marooned in eighth. Moyes has gone from first to seventh. United are substantially, seriously worse, far poorer than anyone could reasonably have believed 12 months ago. They require radical surgery, to both the playing and coaching staffs.
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