West Ham are eight games without a win. It is their longest winless run since early 2020 and makes 2024 their worst start to a calendar year in 17 years.
In isolation, it would justify ending David Moyes’ second stint as head coach, having returned in late 2019. Even in a season of historically few sackings, tenures have been cut short for less.
After the recent 2-0 away defeat to Nottingham Forest, Moyes, often reserved in press conferences, fought back: “I don’t think we can ever please everybody, but it would be hard to say there have been many better times at West Ham.
“I think they’ll (the fans) honestly have to say that it’s as good a time as there’s been regarding winning a trophy (Europa Conference League) and league positions. Maybe they’ll be managers who excite them more. But the one who’s sitting here wins more.”
His bigger-picture-focused counter-argument is valid. Last season, West Ham claimed their first European trophy since 1965. That was an important success for a club famously knocked out by now-dissolved Romanian side Astra Giurgiu in Europa League qualifying rounds in 2015-16 and 2016-17.
In 2020-21 and 2021-22, Moyes guided West Ham to consecutive top-seven finishes for the first time in Premier League history.
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How else could we look at West Ham’s strength under Moyes? Well, we can look at the club’s Elo numbers, with help from ClubElo.
ClubElo is a rating system that works by allocating teams points when they win, giving more for beating tougher sides (for example, Bayern Munich in the Champions League) and fewer for dealing with easier opponents (for example, Norwich in the Premier League).
As we can see from the graph below, West Ham’s Elo rating is almost as high as it’s ever been, suggesting their recent bad patch of form is not reflective of their overall strength.
This season is set against the backdrop of Declan Rice’s departure to Arsenal. Losing their club captain and academy graduate could have catalysed collapse, but West Ham have doubled down on a risk-averse, defend-first and counter-attack strategy. They are ninth, just two points behind seventh-place Brighton & Hove Albion, and into the Europa League round of 16 as group winners.
It is not a debate about success but the importance of style in achieving it. The Athletic’s playstyle data — which you can read about in more detail here — can be used to longitudinally assess West Ham. It measures teams based on style and effectiveness, condensing multiple metrics into easier-to-understand concepts (ie, chance prevention, rather than non-penalty xG conceded per 90 minutes).
Under Moyes, they have consistently kicked long from the goalkeeper (low deep build-up scores) rather than trying to bait a press. This season, they have the fewest open-play sequences of 10-plus passes of any top-half Premier League side.
Their declining field tilt (the share of possession a team has in a game, considering only touches or passes in the attacking third) since 2021-22 shows a team increasingly prepared to concede territory. In 2021-22, West Ham finished seventh and reached the Europa League semi-finals at their wide-attacking best. Moyes had dribbling wingers in Said Benrahma and Jarrod Bowen, who both hit double-digit goal tallies (all competitions), to support No 9 Michail Antonio.
They circulated the ball around opponents, had overlapping full-backs, wingers attacking crosses/cutbacks and plenty of box-crashing midfielders: Rice, Tomas Soucek, Manuel Lanzini and Pablo Fornals hit 24 goals combined in all competitions.
The upside of their style? They regularly create higher-quality shooting opportunities than most (shot quality: 75 out of 99 this season), largely because of their counter-attacking threat and set-piece quality.
Those traits underpin five wins from 10 games against ‘Big Six’ sides this season — only Wolverhampton Wanderers and Newcastle can match that.
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Moyes is correct that “the one who’s sitting here wins more”. He has the best points-per-game average, as per Transfermarkt, of any manager/head coach with 20-plus games in the club’s history.
His previous teams, particularly Everton, were also about structure and organisation. Moyes spoke of having “to try and compete in a different way” to keep West Ham “punching above our weight”, which echoes former West Ham manager Sam Allardyce. He was clearly bothered when he spoke about “the ‘West Ham way’”. He added: “Nobody could define (it), but, whatever it was, I apparently didn’t play it.”
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Allardyce continued: “The fans were being brainwashed into thinking that, historically, the club had a particular style of play, akin to Barcelona, which was potty. I once called the supporters deluded and I stand by that. I don’t know who invented the ‘West Ham way’ phrase, but it’s a millstone around the club’s neck.”
West Ham are at something of a glass ceiling.
There might be a halo effect, whereby head coaches born in continental Europe and with experience in Europe’s other major leagues have more mystique to English football fans. Moyes has coached the third-most Premier League games (only Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have more) and the most among active coaches.
He is the longest-serving West Ham manager since Harry Redknapp (1994-2001). Simply, fans know and have seen Moyes teams, and — for better or worse — might just want something new.
Football clubs cannot make managerial decisions purely based on play-style excitement, but it is telling that West Ham have tried to evolve with and without Moyes and both times reverted to him and his tried-and-trusted system.
Chairman David Sullivan replaced him with the former Manchester City (and title-winning) head coach Manuel Pellegrini in 2018. Sullivan’s reasoning? Pellegrini’s “reputation for attacking football”. Seventeen months later, after a 10th-placed finish and more goals conceded than scored, Pelligrini was sacked with West Ham in 17th. Moyes returned. They took 20 points from their final 19 games and stayed up.
Perceptions on style have been impacted by the move to the London Stadium, the third biggest in the Premier League and a 77 per cent capacity rise from Upton Park. They have gone from a cauldron of noise and the smallest pitch (better for defending and counter-attacking) to a bigger, quieter stadium, which is suited to a controlling style.
Sullivan’s vision with the change of ground was to “take the club forward so we can compete on the pitch at the highest level.” West Ham have had more than 60 per cent possession just 13 times in 158 league games of this Moyes era.
At the start of last season, they tried to evolve again. Antonio explained this on his podcast, The Players’ Channel: “Because we were so close to the Champions League places last year (2021-22), we decided we wanted that and changed our mark. Everyone in the top six plays possession football, so we have been trying to score more free-flowing goals. We wanted to make the next step but we’re conceding more goals because we’re more open.”
Compare West Ham’s two halves of the league season in 2022-23 and they significantly improved in the back end (even more impressive considering they had Europa Conference League knockout games to juggle). Less possession, more goals, more clean sheets and more wins.
| Metric | First 19 games | Final 19 games |
|---|---|---|
4 | 7 | |
3 | 4 | |
12 | 8 | |
15 | 25 | |
45% | 38.50% | |
15 | 27 | |
25 | 30 | |
3 | 6 |
In Moyes’ second spell, West Ham have won 61 league games. Only 13 have been by three or more goals, and 31 have been by a marginal goal. They do not blow teams away, but are rarely put to the sword themselves: 33 of their 63 defeats have been by a singular goal, and only nine times have they lost by more than two — though, four of those defeats by at least two goals have been since November.
The team has succeeded in recent seasons but as a club, West Ham have further to go. It is a case of striking a balance between understanding history and being realistic with expectations while not settling on achievements and allowing appropriate idealism. Moyes, in some regard, is suffering from success as he has raised the bar. Their 17-game unbeaten run in Europe, between August 2022 and October 2023, was the longest in English history.
That said, Brighton, Aston Villa and Bournemouth have all been promoted to the Premier League more recently than West Ham and evolved their tactical style, becoming possession-based and high-pressing, while changing head coach.
Similarly, Brentford and Wolves have shown tactical flexibility, trying to dominate games against lower-table opposition and switching shape to play defensively against ‘Big Six’ sides.
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“We’re not a team that signs with a project for the future, we’re signing for now,” Moyes said after the 1-1 draw with Bournemouth at the start of this month. “We’re not a Brighton model, we’re not a Brentford model, but we’re a side who have tried to sign to keep us near the top”. Since 2018-19, they have spent the sixth-most of any Premier League side — more than Liverpool and Newcastle, though those two are among eight teams with a bigger net-spend negative.
Fulham (29.4) are the only Premier League club with a higher average age this season than West Ham (28.8), while West Ham’s average age has been among the four highest in every season since 2018-19. This is at odds with their history, the self-styled “Academy of Football” (emblazoned across the sideline at the London Stadium).
It is not as though they are lacking the talent. Their under-18s are joint-top of the league, having been runners-up in 2021-22 and winners last season by 17 points — they won 19 out of 22 games. They also won a first FA Youth Cup in 24 years last season.
The problem is the talent tends to stay in those age groups, rather than being fast-tracked into the first team or sent out on loan. Declan Rice and Ben Johnson are the only academy graduates born since 1990 to play more than 50 Premier League games for West Ham.
Divin Mubama epitomises this. He was the second top-scorer in the Premier League 2 last season (13 goals in 18 starts) and the top-scorer with eight goals in the Youth Cup run. He showed glimpses of his talent in fleeting Europa Conference League minutes last season, and could be the ideal all-round No 9 profile for Moyes’ 4-3-3.
But Mubama has been limited to bench displays ahead of Danny Ings. West Ham spent £12m ($15m) on Ings in January 2023; he has three goals in 44 appearances.
Johnson is the only club-trained player to play in the first team this season regularly. The CIES observatory group defines ‘club-trained’ as players who spent at least three years at the club between the ages of 15 and 21. For West Ham, these players account for just 0.3 per cent of their league minutes, with the divisional average being 7.5 per cent. Teams such as Brighton, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United all give over 18 per cent of minutes to their graduates.
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Similarly, West Ham only appointed a technical director, Tim Steidten, as of July. Chelsea appointed one as early as 2011, United in 2021, while Arsenal, Brentford and Brighton introduced the role in 2022. It is another area in which West Ham are playing catch-up, something which — if being critical — Moyes is a symptom of rather than a cause.
This adds to the theory that the grass is greener where you water it, not just on the other side. Changing head coach could raise West Ham’s ceiling, but Moyes has lifted the floor a long way, and they could equally return to scrapping near the bottom of the league rather than being European contenders.
There haven’t been better times than this at West Ham, but they are equally entitled to want even more.
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(Top photo: Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)