It is tempting to think David Moyes woke, yesterday morning, feeling more relieved than bereaved. No more Twitter barrages. No more pundit put-downs. No more pretending to ignore the contempt of self-important Manchester United players.
His decline and fall lasted nearly as long as he did, and all of it seemed to be televised. It was, as one observer put it, a “pernicious, degrading, gruellingly voyeuristic” event.
At the end, the degradation was, at least as much about United. The club so proud of standing by Sir Alex Ferguson at a crucial moment turned against his replacement inside a season – and leaked the news before telling him.
Back in September, a lifelong United fan insisted to me that Moyes would get more than a season “no matter what”. Turns out, the lower end of “no matter what” encompassed a fourth-place finish in the Premier League. No Uefa Champions League? No job.
Moyes lost 15 games from 51 matches, but the word “disastrous” now seems firmly affixed to the 2013/14 season. The real trouble lies ahead. United have been exposed as just another capricious club, and now they carry on with a highly paid but ageing and mutinous squad with hardly a player an elite side would want. Remaking the side could require years.
Moyes’s reputation, however, took a beating. In 10 months he went from “hard-working overachiever” to “out-of-his-depth incompetent”. Soon, he will consider his future and find it circumscribed. Because of United, where expectations met reality and he took the fall.
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