Why You’re WRONG About David Moyes & West Ham!

Hello and welcome to Why You're Wrong, a new show where I look at some of football's biggest narratives to separate fact from fiction and let you know what you might be missing, as well as pointing out some mistakes of my own. Today we're starting in East London, with under fire manager David Moyes. Just over halfway through the season and it feels like David Moyes is trudging towards another sacking at West Ham. He might even have gone by the time you hear this, and when you look at the Irons' position you can understand why. After 20 games, the Hammers are in 16th, with just five wins all season. Only Southampton have lost more games, only three teams have scored fewer goals, and just one point separates the club from the relegation zone. An absurd position for a team with a €100m central midfielder, and which has spent €194m this campaign. More than every Premier League club, except Manchester United and Chelsea. In that context, it's a massive slide from 7th place last season, with West Ham tumbling from 1.5 points per game to 0.9 at the time of writing. And the fans have been getting desperate. On the one hand, they're kind of right. West Ham should be way better than this, having added the highly rated Lucas Paquetá and Gianluca Scamacca to the attack over the summer, as well as making solid squad additions in Niafa Gerd, Emerson and Thilo Kehrer. But if you look deeper into the numbers, you see that the team is actually slightly better than they were last year, and their position right now is more about terrible luck than terrible play. According to Expected Goals, West Ham's play would normally be predicted to have yielded 26 goals, 9 more than their actual tally, and have seen them allow 22, 3 fewer than the real total. That would put them on a goal difference of plus 3 instead of minus 8, and would rank 9th best in the division, in a far more respectable berth between Brentford and Fulham. And while some Hammers fans would no doubt take issue with that spot too, it's worth noting that XG rated the club as 9th best last year as well, dead even on attack and defence, in contrast to the plus 9 goal difference they ended up with. Of course the Hammers did tire as the season went on last year, so it's not a completely fair comparison. But even if we compare what the club is doing now to the first 20 games of 2021-22, they're fine, with an XG difference of plus 0.17 a game compared to 0.12 back then. To show how unfortunate they've been, here's a chart from Twitter user AtWeRogue. It's a little involved, you probably won't win an argument in the pub using it, but in simple terms it shows that West Ham are getting unlucky in two ways. First, in how expected goal difference is turning into actual goal difference. And second, in how low they've fallen in the table relative to teams from the past with that goal difference. They're unfortunate in their own play, and unfortunate in how the league is punishing them this season in particular. You shouldn't be taken in by claims that the style has got worse either. West Ham complete about 25 passes fewer each game than they did last year, but have only seen slight drops in progressive passes and passes into the final third. They attempt the same number of long balls and crosses as they did in 2021-22, they spend the same amount of time in the opposition zone as they did before, and they take marginally more shots, though those shots are further out than they were last term. So why are they doing so badly? Well, part of it is how these numbers break down. The attack is marginally worse this year thanks to those lower quality shots, while the defence has improved, with only City, Arsenal and Newcastle better according to the stats. But football has a lot of randomness baked in. Keepers let in shots they shouldn't, opponents blast one in the top corner, the ref gives a dodgy penalty. And that means that no matter how good your defence is, you can still go behind at any time, and if your attack is poor, you can't dig yourself out of a hole, resulting in West Ham spending nearly 37% of game time trailing this campaign, with only Southampton spending more time in the deficit. Individually there are issues too. Michael Antonio missed only two matches last term, playing his most minutes in a single season since 2014-15 in the Championship with Nottingham Forest and delivering 18 goals and assists, while this year he's on track to play about 1,000 minutes fewer and has contributed to just four strikes. Jarrod Bowen likewise is on four, down from the 22 he managed across the previous 12 months, and while you can argue that's down to issues with Moyes' coaching, the Englishman is running at half the eight goal involvements XG would predict, which can't be down to the manager. Skamaka has made a slow start, and Lucas Paquetá, capable of supplementing the front line, has instead been deployed as a conventional midfielder, with big ball progression and defensive numbers, while ranking low for chance creation. In all, West Ham are completely fine, a mid-table side playing like a mid-table side, and hamstrung by injuries, form issues, and perhaps some tiredness from a gruelling campaign last year. Given the money they spent and the players they have, you can argue that's disappointing, and it's potentially true that a new manager could get more out of this group, with coaches like Thomas Frank and Roberto Di Zerbi showing what a middling PL team can attract. But teams take backward steps all the time, look at Crystal Palace, or even Liverpool, and if the claim is that the Hammers are bad now, and it's down to Moyes, it simply isn't true. This is a narrative worth resisting. To defend myself at the beginning, I should point out that I was not among the loudest critics of Manchester United's €57m swoop for Lisandro Martinez in the summer. Some pundits, most of them English, felt that the 5ft 9in Argentinian's height made a PL career at impossible, perhaps not noticing the ways that crossing has declined over the last decade, and that some of the players we consider modern greats, like Javier Mascherano or Fabio Cannavaro, were able to excel in central defence despite also standing under 5ft 10. But I did think it would hamper Martinez, it meant he would have to engage more aggressively on the ground, potentially making him more error-prone, that a move to a back three might be a wise change, and that Lisandro's chief contribution was likely to be his passing. Well, it turns out I was wrong on all counts. Martinez's passing has been fine, good even, but nothing special. 3.7 final third entries is only fourth in the squad, and fewer than Maguire when he plays, while five players complete more progressive passes, and even Martinez's 86% pass accuracy is only middling, around the 60th percentile for players in his role. But that hasn't mattered because the 25-year-old has been spectacular without the ball. Last year in the Eredivisie, Martinez won 55% of his aerial duels, against all the odds that's improved in the Prem, with 59% of those situations seeing him come out on top. That's in the bottom third of centre-backs, but it's not shockingly low or bad enough to make him a target for the opposition, as some feared. And more importantly, as soon as the ball touches the ground, Martinez has been borderline impassable. To date, Martinez has completed over 80% of the challenges he's attempted, again up from 61% last year, and that ranks him in the Premier League overall, and fourth among centre-backs, with only Esri Konca, William Saliba, and Fabian Scheer coming out ahead. Despite theoretically facing less traffic, he wins possession as often as Diogo Dalot, and amazingly his aggression has been perfectly judged, with under a foul a game, while he's also helping the midfield mop up broken play, recovering more loose balls than any United defender bar short. United have gone from allowing 1.6xG a game last year to 1.2, their defence now climbing to fifth in the Prem, and they've only allowed more than 1.6xG themselves in two Premier League matches this campaign, away to Manchester City and Arsenal, putting them on track for a comfortable top-four finish and a strong start to Eric ten Haag's tenure at Old Trafford. In a team yearning for fight, leadership, and quality, Martinez has supplied all three, and looks certain to make good on his monster feet. The only consolation on this one is that I won't be the only one eating my words. So that's our first episode of Why You're Wrong. Thank you for watching, let us know what you think of the format, and hit us up with your suggestions of other things I got wrong. We're also planning a new segment in future where you tell me your beliefs about football, and I'll let you know if you're deluded or a genius. Get your entries in the comments below, don't forget to like and subscribe, and we'll see you next time.