David Moyes: a very modern media sacking

David Moyes’ sacking as manager of Manchester United demonstrates the power of the press, writes Raymond Snoddy – and particularly the potency of social media in a new era of impatience.

The decline and fall of David Moyes as manager of Manchester United culminated in a modern media sacking.

The word was everywhere on newspaper websites the day before it actually happened with the Sun posting details at 2.15pm.

Symbolically, the official announcement from the club took the form of a 33-word tweet at 7.40am on Tuesday.

Obviously Moyes was sacked because the mighty Manchester United was in seventh place in the Premier League, out of European football and no less than 23 points adrift of the current league leaders Liverpool.

But rather like former Culture Secretary Maria Miller was sacked because of what she did, or didn’t do, in both cases the overall power of the media and the potency of images and appearances accelerated the process and helped to make their departures inevitable.

It took Prime Minister John Major many years to recover from the cruel reputational damage inflicted by Spitting Image – the grey man who ate peas and wore his shirt inside his underpants.

For Moyes, as the results turned against him, it was pictures that went round the world portraying the haggard, haunted expression of a man who seemed to be on the brink of clinical depression.

There were other memorable images too that left an indelible impression. At the beginning there was the banner that read: The Chosen One – in a reference to the fact that Moyes was personally nominated by out-going manager Sir Alex Ferguson.

It was replaced in the mind by the fans who spent £870 to hire a light aircraft to fly over Old Trafford trailing the banner: The Wrong One – Moyes Out.

And then, in a foretaste of what was to come, there was the fan who dressed up as The Grim Reaper for Man Utd’s catastrophic defeat by Everton at Goodison Park.

The pictures went everywhere and helped to define the situation.

In the end it was hardly surprising that Moyes, by all accounts a perfectly decent man who appeared out of his depth, came to hate the photographers. He hated them so much that he set off for the training ground for his last meeting at 4.30am and left by the back door afterwards to avoid them.

Neither will he treasure any of the cartoons.

The sacking of Moyes was a huge story that led television and radio news bulletins and rapidly turned into learned speculation on the role of the manager as scapegoat and even what it told us about the nature of leadership in both business and politics.

The facts about the life and times of football managers are distressingly clear. No less than 35 managers have already been sacked in the four leagues of English Football this season – more than one third of the total.

In the Premier League where the stakes are highest, it is almost 50 per cent with nine casualties so far with two games still to go.

Yet according to The Fink Tank, the statistical analysis of football orchestrated by Danny Finkelstein of The Times, the importance of the manager is much exaggerated.

Finkelstein believes you need four or more years to judge whether someone is a good manager rather than merely reflecting “the random ups and downs of luck.”

In fact calculations made before Moyes took over suggested there was a 30 per cent chance United would finish outside the top four and a 7 per cent chance they would finish 7th or worse.

For Finkelstein and his stats the key determinant of success or failure is money spent on acquiring the “best” players.

While Manchester City and Chelsea have each pumped around £1 billion into their clubs in recent years, Manchester United’s American owners, the Glaziers, have effectively extracted £700 million to pay off debt from the leveraged buy-out that gave them ownership of the club.

In such analysis that gap is the main reason for the decline of Manchester United rather than the ineptitude of David Moyes and therefore it was a mistake to sack him after only 10 months.

We must bow, at least in part, to the weight and wisdom of such statistics that question the mighty central role conferred on the individual manager.

Yet Crystal Palace seemed to be on their way out of the Premiership when Ian Holloway left by mutual consent in October. With largely the same players they are now safe from relegation under the management of Tony Pulis who had in turn been sacked by Stoke for no very good reason.

The case of Liverpool is also instructive. Brendan Rodgers was appointed manager in 2012 and only managed 7th place in his first season. He could have been sacked; instead, patience was shown and rewarded as Liverpool are now favourites to win this season’s Premiership without a vast spending spree.

And you can spend many millions assembling what appears a top quality squad but if they are the wrong players nothing much happens, as Queen’s Park Rangers can testify.

For Manchester United the danger now is that they will lurch from one “miracle worker” to another in the elusive search for success and unless they are very lucky it could be a very bumpy road.

A new star has risen and it is Liverpool.

The Moyes affair is a symptom of a new impatience in life, the media and everything else which, in democracies at least, will continue to undermine the cult of the great leader – the person with magic powers. Their feet of clay can be ruthlessly exposed second-by-second by social media.

In another symptom of changing times, at the Telegraph Media Group the head of content, Jason Seiken, has announced the end of the imperialist, control and command editor on the grounds that such people are inappropriate for a more collaborative digital age.

We may have to rethink the nature of leadership in the media, business and politics and develop thicker skins and greater tolerance of short-term failure.

As for football, it is unlikely that the lessons of the Moyes manoeuvre will be learned any time soon.

In the search for instant success one of the favourites to be the next manager of Manchester United is the autocratic Dutchman Louis van Gaal.