The current manager of Everton Football Club, Mr David Moyes, was once the manager of Manchester United, and like almost all football managers, he wound up pretty unpopular with the fans. Towards the end of his stint as manager, as United lay seventh in the Premier League with their lowest ever points tally and a win percentage of only a whisker above half, one Man United fan was interviewed outside the stadium after watching his team lose 2-1. The fan was asked if he had anything to say to the boss David Moyes. His words have echoed through the annals of Premier League history. It has been almost 12 years to the day since he uttered those words, and they still float into my mind at least once a week.
He said: “David Moyes, a monkey in a shoe could do a better job than you.”
A monkey in a shoe. A monkey inside a shoe. A free monkey, not confined to a shoe, would be too good at managing Man United for the purposes of this parallel. If the manager of Man United was a monkey that was inside a shoe, then yes, that would be a more apt comparison to the standard of management that David Moyes was executing at Man United in 2014. However, the monkey in the shoe would still do a better job than David Moyes.
David Moyes had been appointed at Man United as the successor to the Great Sir Alex Ferguson. Sir Alex managed the club for 27 years and he was a relentless winner. His Man United team won the Premier League 13 times – no manager before or since has achieved even half that number. No managerial innings compares in terms of longevity and success anywhere in the world.
In 2013, Sir Alex decided he’d done his time. He won one final Premier League for good measure and closed the chapter as the most successful manager in the league’s history. It was the club executives’ job, not Sir Alex’s, to appoint his successor, but when the strategic genius of the past three decades offered his two cents on who they should go for, they didn’t take his opinion lightly. Ferguson said: go for David Moyes.
Now, Fergie’s shoes were big boots to fill, and perhaps Moyes didn’t have enough monkeys. But he failed to fill those shoes. He was mercilessly sacked after 10 months and his tenure will forever be remembered as an unequivocal cockup.
This is all makes me think: who would be a football manager? What other job consists of relentless scrutiny and abuse throughout, culminating in global denigration and the most public sacking imaginable. Yes, Sir Alex was in the improbable 5% of top football managers worldwide who are allowed to leave their job on their own terms. Most managers will suffer this perverse humiliation cycle four or five times over the course of a career.
When David Moyes was dismissed by Man United, he decided to head somewhere less gloomy than Lancashire and took the job in sunny San Sebastián at Spanish Club Real Sociedad. Real Sociedad are a middling team in the Spanish first division and it seemed like somewhere Moyes might be able to get his footballing ducks in a row without such huge weight of expectation. Moyes managed exactly 364 days in charge before another brutal sacking.
Today, Moyes is still very much going. He has been a football manager for 27 years, the same length of time that Sir Alex was at United winning everything, and Moyes has never won a single trophy. Well, actually, he did win a third tier European Cup with West Ham a couple of years ago, but he has never won a league title at any of his clubs.
So, would it be fair to say that he has failed as a manager? Well, if you ask me: longevity is success. The lights of topflight football are glaring, and so many players and managers fold and fizzle through inability to handle the pressure. It is a furiously intense environment which chews on and spits out huge talent daily. The players and managers who today are household names are such because of their temperament and attitude as much or more than because of their footballing talent. They are those who could take the heat. Moyes’ mental fortitude and self-assurance in the face of global condemnation are to me as impressive an attribute as any that Sir Alex had. Sir Alex’s attainment on those counts was hardly tested. Sir Alex’s managerial ability was never compared to a monkey’s, shoe or not. Maybe, if it had been, there would be no Sir Alex Ferguson.
A monkey in a shoe could do a better job than you. Is the monkey wearing one shoe? Or is it a small monkey in a big shoe? Would be an important distinction to make, if you were the monkey’s cobbler.
I can’t know what happened in that fan’s brain in that moment. I can’t know why, in a fit of fury after watching his beloved team underperform in spectacular fashion, the image of a monkey in a shoe glided into his mind. I can’t know, but I think about it often. And it is absolutely a simple joy.
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