Long before performance analysis became such a fundamental part of the Premier League scene, David Moyes had a system of his own. On the wall of his office at Everton’s old Bellefield training ground in the 2000s, he had a colour-coded wall chart with four different felt-tip pens to grade each player’s performance in every game.
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Any time players — or indeed journalists — found themselves in Moyes’s office, their eyes would be drawn to the chart, trying to crack the code. There were times in his second full season when erratic performances left the chart looking more like a Jackson Pollock but over the years that followed, the picture became more settled, the number of green and yellow squares (or was it blue?) a testimony to his team’s stability and consistency.
We can obsess about how many passes teams play or how many chances they create or restrict the opposition to, but Moyes always felt that, as a manager, he could evaluate a player’s performance in more subjective terms. He knew what an outstanding, good, indifferent or bad performance looked like, whether from a grizzled central defender such as David Weir or a prodigiously gifted teenager such as Wayne Rooney. As a manager, he demanded a minimum level of application in every minute of every game. Over time, that was reflected in the way the team improved and the colours on the chart changed.
That is how it feels with West Ham United right now. For most of last season, they were barely a team at all. Over a period spanning the last dozen Premier League matches under Manuel Pellegrini then the first dozen in Moyes’ second spell, they took 15 points from 24 games — it was a relegation waiting to happen for a team that looked unable to stop the rot.
However, from that point, they have taken 54 points from 31 matches (a period starting last July). The first part of that run took them clear of relegation. The second part has taken them to fifth place in the Premier League, putting them in serious contention for European qualification of one type or another.
Moyes is doing a remarkable job. The most obvious illustration of that is the Premier League table, but it can also be seen by thinking in terms of his old wall chart.
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If you were evaluating West Ham’s performances last season, individually and collectively, there would be black marks everywhere, with only Declan Rice and Angelo Ogbonna finding any kind of stable level. This season is a different matter: Vladimir Coufal, Craig Dawson, Tomas Soucek, Michail Antonio, Rice, Ogbonna and others are all performing consistently in a team that, so unlike the West Ham of recent years, seem greater than the sum of their parts.
This is exactly what Moyes promised to do when he arrived to little or no fanfare in December 2019. Indeed, it is exactly what he promised (and arguably delivered) when he previously took over from Slaven Bilic two years earlier.
On that occasion, having hired him on an interim basis, the West Ham board decided to move him on so they could appoint “a high-calibre figure who we hope will lead the club into an exciting future”. That exciting future did not materialise under Pellegrini, so instead, they turned back to Moyes, who is proving a rather more higher-calibre figure than his employers and indeed much of the English football community had previously seemed to recognise.
It took four years of impressive work at Preston North End, taking them from the lower reaches of the third tier to within 90 minutes of the Premier League, for Moyes to be offered the chance to manage in the top flight with Everton. It took 11 years of highly admirable work at Everton, building a team that was consistently “the best of the rest” in a Premier League that was dominated by a handful of richer clubs, before he was offered a chance to prove himself at the elite level with Manchester United.
He clearly wasn’t the right man to follow on from Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford. Ferguson himself, having hand-picked his successor, seemed to overestimate quite severely just how different they were beyond their Glaswegian roots and a similar work ethic, and, for a few years that followed, Moyes seemed bruised — possibly a little bit broken — by the experience.
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He was far from the only manager to fail at Sunderland but he seemed wearily resigned to their fate from an early stage. The vigour and enthusiasm he brought to Preston and Everton in those early days seemed to have gone.
It slowly returned during that all-too-brief first spell at West Ham, though, and it is certainly back now. He has got that glint in his eye again and, more importantly, Moyes possesses a group of players pulling in the same direction and striving to achieve something together, not unlike his old group at Everton.
In a relatively short space of time, West Ham have become a team defined by their speed and energy, and the work they do without the ball — such a stark contrast from the days under Pellegrini when one source described their approach out of possession as “they press once, they press twice and then they walk”.
There is a myth about West Ham that successive owners have been all too eager to indulge. Yes, it is the club of Bobby Moore, Trevor Brooking, the academy of football and all that, but, for all this current regime’s efforts to project a certain brand image in an attempt to appeal to a wider London and international audience — playing a flamboyant brand of football — West Ham’s supporters tend to appreciate honest endeavour of the type they are seeing from this younger, hungrier-looking team.
Their football now, under Moyes, seems far more in keeping with “the West Ham way” than the half-hearted, off-the-cuff performances that were seen too often under Pellegrini.
Some have begun to campaign for Moyes to be considered for the Premier League’s manager of the year award. That seems premature, given that we are only just beyond the halfway stage and that, with the top half of the table so congested, there is so much scope for change between now and May. But certainly, there are not many managers and teams in the top flight who could be said to be exceeding expectations to the same degree.
After the Old Trafford experience and the misery that followed for several years afterwards, Moyes has got back to doing what he does well: invigorating, building, leading a team forward. There will be hundreds of different metrics you could use to illustrate just how much harder and how much more effectively West Ham are working, both with and without the ball, but in the most basic terms, their improved efforts are of the type that would show up on one of his old wall charts.
For the first time in five years since leaving Upton Park, West Ham have a team that passes the eye test. Perhaps for the first time since leaving Everton for Manchester United eight years ago, so does Moyes.
(Top photo: Chloe Knott – Danehouse/Getty Images)