Does Moyes deserve the chance to turn West Ham's fortunes around?
From Champions League aspirations to Championship fears. On New Year’s Day 2022, West Ham United battled to a 3-2 victory over Crystal Palace to move to within a point of the top four. Fast forward 12 months and David Moyes’ men are outside the Premier League relegation zone on goal difference alone.
This is not what anyone expected in the summer. After finishing sixth in 2020/21 and seventh last term, West Ham spent £172m - only Chelsea and Manchester United splashed more cash - in a bid to cement their status as the best of the rest beyond the big six.
Gianluca Scamacca, Lucas Paqueta, Thilo Kehrer and Nayef Aguerd were among the arrivals at the London Stadium, giving Moyes the strongest squad he has worked with across his two spells at the club.
Counterintuitively, perhaps that is part of the problem. Moyes has an abundance of options at his disposal and has hitherto been unable to fit all the pieces together, particularly the new faces.
Until the defeat by Brentford on Friday – their fifth loss in a row – the West Ham boss had resisted calls to deploy Paqueta in a deeper midfield role alongside Rice. Scamacca has yet to nail down a starting berth. Kehrer has made numerous of errors - his WhoScored rating is a lowly 6.33 - Flynn Downes has been a bit-part player at best and injury has restricted Aguerd to just 75 minutes of action. Some former stalwarts are also struggling, most notably the Czech duo Tomas Soucek and Vladimir Coufal.
The problems have mainly been in attack. Ahead of the midweek round of fixtures, only Nottingham Forest (12) and Wolves (10) have scored fewer goals than West Ham, who have made the net bulge on just 13 occasions.
In Moyes’ defence, the evidence suggests conversion has been more of an issue than creation. West Ham (13.6) rank seventh in the Premier League for shots per game, which is an improvement on their average of 11.8 last term, and they sit eighth for attempts from inside the penalty area with 7.5 per match. But the Hammers are down in 12th for attempts on target per game with four.
The expected goals data tells a similar story. West Ham have scored eight fewer goals than they would have been expected to based on the quality of their chances. That is by far the biggest such underperformance in the Premier League.
Yet while West Ham have been let down by poor finishing, their football has often been stodgy and unimaginative, despite the availability of flair players like Paqueta, Jarrod Bowen and Said Benrahma.
Moyes is a reactive manager by nature, and that approach is increasingly at odds with the talent West Ham have within their squad. They start games too slowly – only Southampton have a worse record in the first half of matches – and allow their opponents to take control. This passivity has proved costly on several occasions.
West Ham’s away form is also cause for concern. They have won just once on the road all season and are averaging 0.5 goals per game on their travels. Only Nottingham Forest have collected fewer points at opposition grounds than their four.
West Ham’s next three league games could determine Moyes’ future, as they face fellow strugglers Leeds, Wolves and Everton. A negative result at Elland Road on Wednesday would see the Hammers drop into the bottom three for the first time since September.
"I don’t think [the criticism] is unfair because the business we’re in means that if you go five games when you’ve not won then you could always be under pressure, I totally get that," Moyes said after the Brentford defeat. "You feel bad when you lose one, when you lose two, never mind five. That is football.
"I understand that totally, I only want the best for West Ham because it’s been a great club for me, the club’s done well. We’ve taken it into a better place than it was before so I’m desperate and determined to keep it there. I don’t want it to go back down and get dragged back down."
After his fine work over the last two full seasons, Moyes deserves more time to try and turn the situation around. But a man of his vast experience will know that when results do not improve, the manager usually pays the ultimate price.
