In Defense of David Moyes

Entitled Manchester United supporters scoff that Moyes inherited a “championship team,” but: 

(1) How strong has United’s team truly been since selling Ronaldo in 2009? And

(2) What sort of competition did they face for the title during their two title campaigns in the last 3 seasons?

The answers are (1) increasingly average and (2) none whatsoever.

I’ll address the competition argument first.

In 2012/13 United was the only team in the EPL with more than 80 points. The 2010/11 championship team also was the only team in the league to reach the 80-point mark. When faced with serious competition for the title from Chelsea in 2009/10 (86 pts) and City in 2011/12 (89 pts), United came in second.

The reasons why Chelsea and City struggled last season are abundantly clear.

The Benitez saga at Chelsea was a joke, and the Blues struggled to handle a media circus that surrounded their team.

The same applied to City. Major discord arose between manager Roberto Mancini and the City board, as Mancini ended up getting sacked simply because he was on very high wages and City needed to cut the wage bill to balance the books for Financial Fair Play.

It’s no surprise United won the league last season facing such lackluster competition. But the manner in which they did so should have rung the alarm bells at Old Trafford. An on-fire Robin van Persie distracted from a team that’s age was catching up to them, a team that was leaking an alarming amount of goals.

That’s because United’s defense and midfield has declined sharply over the past 4 seasons.

DEFENSE

United conceded 43 goals in 2012/13. That was more than City, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Everton. 43 was tied with Liverpool for the 5^th best defense in the league.

Look at how United’s defensive record declined:

2009/10: 28 goals conceded. Best defensive record in England. Finished 2^nd to Chelsea with 85 pts.

2010/11: 37 goals conceded. 3^rd best defensive record in England. Finished 1^st with 80 pts.

2011/12: 33 goals conceded. 2^nd best defensive record in England. Finished 2^nd on goal difference to City with 89 pts. 

2012/13: 43 goals conceded. Tied for the 5^th best defensive record in England. Finished 1^st with 89 pts.

United have conceded 38 goals this season with 6 games left to play.  United currently have, for the second straight season, the 5^th best defensive record in the league.

Moyes inherited a defense that was worse than his rivals and getting worse every day. United’s defense has 3 first team players who are 32 or older and well past their prime. Understanding this, it is hard to say that Moyes is at fault for a defense that has performed at the level anyone should have expected them to play this season. In fact an argument could be made that United’s defense has overachieved under Moyes this season.

MIDFIELD

On top of the defense’s decline with age, United’s midfield is alarmingly lacking in mobility. The top English teams all have midfielders who “run all day,” constantly closing down the ball and harassing their opponent to win the ball back quickly. As the league has evolved, having these types of players who can both put pressure on the ball in midfield and cover for attacking fullbacks has become an absolute necessity.

The days when you could win the Premier League with two slow central midfielders in their 30s are over.

City replaced the static Gareth Barry with the more mobile Fernandinho. Ramires provides a huge amount of mobility for Chelsea. Liverpool has relied heavily on the vastly improved Jordan Henderson for his energy and work rate this season. Aaron Ramsey was this player for Arsenal, and Arsenal’s poor form since his injury is similar to United’s form all season. Even Everton brought in this type of player in James McCarthy.

United doesn’t have a comparable midfielder. For years United fans have been asking for central midfielders, and Sir Alex Ferguson chose to convert Ryan Giggs to play that role and bring Paul Scholes out of retirement rather than pursuing a long-term solution. Even when an obvious long term solution was wasting away in United’s academy.

As the Premier League shifted to midfielders with pace and energy, Ferguson failed to adapt.

Moyes inherited the inevitable consequences of Ferguson’s short-sightedness.

TRANSFERS

Moyes tried to fix Ferguson’s mistakes. Moyes went after quality midfielders this summer. He pursued Thiago Alcantara. Thiago chose to join Guardiola at Bayern instead. The Ander Herrerra saga was not Moyes’s fault, as United’s transfer executives (read: not Moyes) were duped by people pretending to represent the player and United’s transfer proposal never reached Athletic Bilbao. In the end, Moyes settled for a deadline-day move for Marouane Fellaini. But Fellaini was nothing other than a last resort.

Who else was available? Who else changed clubs?

Paulinho? Luiz Gustavo? Kevin Strootman? Geoffrey Kondogbia? All chose to play for teams with less competition for places in preparation for the World Cup. And would any of them honestly turn United’s season around single-handedly?

I know! Moyes should have invented a time machine to keep former United academy/current Juventus young superstar Paul Pogba!

Sir Alex made Pogba sit behind Fletcher, Giggs, Scholes, Carrick, Anderson and Cleverley. Ferguson let arguably the best young midfielder in the world bolt for Italy. Not Moyes.

Moyes went out and bought BY FAR the best player available in world football this January: Juan Mata. There isn’t a single better player who changed clubs in the winter.

And still United fans cry that he can’t play in their system, that he isn’t a winger, and that Moyes is clueless for wasting money on him.

Nonsense. Mata played as a winger in a Hazard-Oscar-Mata trio more than 20 times last season. It worked because Chelsea had a mobile midfielder in Ramires who could cover for the Spaniard. United has no such mobility. United has Carrick, Fletcher, Giggs, Cleverley, Anderson, and now Fellaini.

Demanding Moyes to fix United's midfield problems in two transfer windows is daft. They have only become more and more apparent over the past 4 seasons. United fans have chosen to ignore them. 

The acquisition of the most in-form striker in the league was able to cover up United’s substandard defense and midfield last season. But even the van Persie acquisition came at a heavy price to the long-term balance of the United team.

ATTACK

When Ferguson bought van Perise nearly every pundit wondered:

(1) How Rooney and van Persie would be able to play together, and

(2) Whether a 4-year deal for a 28-year-old player with a lengthy injury record, and who also played in Rooney’s position, was a good long-term investment.

The answers are simple: (1) they can’t, and (2) it wasn’t.

Rooney couldn’t play with Berbatov either, remember? Rooney only plays well as a #10 when partnered with a genuine poacher, a player who keeps the spacing by staying on the shoulder of the last defender and looks to run in behind. A player who only wants to finish an attacking move, not contribute to it.

Rooney’s partnerships with Tevez, Chicharito, and Welbeck in the past have been effective, while his partnerships with Berbatov and now van Persie have failed.

This is because Berbatov and van Persie aren’t poachers. They are better on the ball, and naturally drop deeper to be more involved in the build-up. Rooney can’t alter his game to play with these types of players. For all his supposed “versatility,” Wayne is remarkably inflexible.

Ferguson must have known this about Rooney, because he benched him and rode an on-fire van Persie off into the sunset to go out on top.

Rooney’s displeasure at being benched was well-reported, culminating with his highly-publicized transfer request at the end of last season. Fergie’s “masterstroke signing” left behind a large amount of discord and friction in the dressing room.

Remember that a majority of United’s transfer window was held hostage by Rooney as he tried to push his way out of the club. Few United supporters mention this when complaining about how poorly Moyes handled his first transfer window. I can’t imagine what they’d say had Rooney left.

Knowing that losing Rooney to an English rival would be an absolute disaster, United doubled-down with a huge improved contract to convince Rooney to stay. The problem is, with Financial Fair Play, no team can afford to bench a player earning 26 million pounds per year (more than Yaya Toure and Sergio Aguero combined…and United fans call City players mercenaries!).

Van Persie has, predictably, cooled off as the injury problems that dominated most of his career have resurfaced and the forced partnership with Rooney hasn’t been effective. In addition, Rooney simply isn’t playing at nearly the same blistering form van Persie did last season. Rooney isn’t earning his hefty paycheck.

Rooney has been good, not great. 15 goals in 27 matches is a good record, its pretty comparable to Olivier Giroud’s 13 goals in 30 matches. It’s not great like van Persie’s 26 goal effort last year or Luis Suarez’s 29 goals so far this season.

The result has been a decline from 86 goals scored in 2012/13 – the best in England – to just 52 goals this season – 5^th best in the league.

MOYES’S TACTICS

Moyes never had high-scoring teams at Everton, but he had a strong defensive track record. Ferguson and the Man United board room felt the club’s ageing defense and midfield needed a conservative approach in order to protect what is the team’s most obvious weakness, and Moyes was the man for that job. I believe they were correct in that assessment.

Ferguson and the United board perhaps wrongfully assumed there was enough talent available in attack to continue to score goals, even in Moyes’s conservative approach.  Perhaps Fergie forgot that the club’s best two players preferred to play the same exact position and could not play together. It was someone else’s problem now, after all.

United supporters have chastised Moyes’s conservatism and pleaded for a more aggressive, attacking style of play. I believe United’s weaknesses in defense, and their midfield’s lack of mobility to cover for that defense, would only be further exposed in such an approach. 

Embarrassing results like the 1-6 defeat to City at Old Trafford in 2011 would be more frequent. And United would most likely be doing even worse than they are currently.

Moyes needs time to rebuild the defense and midfield to compete in the modern Premier League. He needs time to build a new attack around Rooney, Januzaj, and Mata. The squad Moyes inherited is nowhere near as good as Man United supporters would like to believe. Ferguson did him no favors whatsoever.

Ferguson, not Moyes, is United's April fool. It’s no wonder Ferguson stressed how important it would be to “stand by the next manager” in his final farewell.

Sir Alex knew he was handing over a team that was built to compete in 2008, not 2014.