Moyes — Time to Let Him Go

I keep hearing the same line trotted out by every pundit who's clearly never sat through 90 minutes of Everton doing precisely nothing in the final third: "he saved us." Yes. He did. Once. In January 2025, when we were a point off the bottom three and Dyche, Woan and Stone had run out of whatever passed for ideas. Fair enough, hand David Moyes his flowers for that. I liked him back in the day, the fiery redhead prowling the touchline at Preston and then Goodison, all elbows and indignation, looking like he'd bite the head off anyone who suggested Everton should play with more than one man up top. That fire's long since gone grey along with his red hair, and what's left is the caution minus the conviction.

A younger Moyes took us into a state-of-the-art training ground and while he was away, we’ve built a stadium that cost more than most countries' GDP, he is now working for owners who can actually spend, yet we are somehow contemplating a new contract for a manager whose current side just finished 13th. Thirteenth. With Jack Grealish for half a season and a back five that, when healthy, should be nowhere near the bottom half. The end of season collapse was oh-so-typical of a Moyes team when it comes down to the business end and that substandard run in ultimately cost Everton over £20m in league placings and another big chuck of cash for missed European football.

And let's not pretend the football has been anything other than what it always is with Moyes: functional, joyless, and constructed entirely around not losing rather than winning. Everton's new shirt sponsor CMC Markets is fitting: both are purely transactional.

Everton conceded fewer goals than half the top ten this year, and I'm supposed to be impressed by that in the same way I'm supposed to be impressed by a bloke who's spent a decade building a bunker instead of a house. It kept the rain out. Congratulations. Chelsea got taken apart at the new ground in one of the few afternoons all season that actually felt like Everton, and everyone lost their minds like we'd stumbled onto some template for the future. We hadn't. We'd stumbled into a half arsed Chelsea who decided they were on their holidays a couple of weeks before Everton went on theirs.

This win was surrounded by months of sideways football that asked nothing of the opposition and delivered nothing to us. It included Moyes’ customary unlucky underdog defeats to Liverpool and the cherries on the cake for 2026 were the no-shows against Sunderland at home and the utterly pathetic missed golden opportunity to relegate Spurs – I will bet my house on this now, Spurs will finish above a Moyes-led Everton next season.

If you bother to look past the clean sheets the stats tell their own story. Fewest players used of any side in the league; 22. In a squad that isn't small and isn't cheap. Tyrique George, brought in from Chelsea specifically to add something different out wide, given a grand total of 325 minutes across eleven appearances after Grealish left a gaping hole. You lose your best creative outlet in January and your response is to shoehorn Dwight McNeil in, rather than trust the kid you paid for and got in specifically to solve that problem? That isn't caution, that's a manager who doesn't trust his own recruitment and doesn't trust youth or flair.

Moyes would prefer to keep it tight and lose 1-0 to a penalty that he can blame on VAR, instead of winning 3-2 by moving up the pitch and taking a risk. I hope Tyler Dibling has taken advice from Ross Barkley about what to do when your manager prioritises tracking back over passing forwards. Anyway, we've seen this film before and it didn't have a good ending the first time either. Moyes seasons and tenures are like the Godfather trilogy: it starts well and hooks you at the start and then leaves you bemused as to how something that started with such promise could end up so utterly grim.

And here's the bit that should really worry anyone still clinging to the idea that this is a project heading somewhere: none of this is happening under austerity anymore. Bill Kenwright isn't rattling round Goodison hiding the accounts from anyone who asks. The Friedkins have put real money into this squad, we've got a stadium that's the envy of half the continent, and yet the football on the pitch still looks like it's being played by 10 Phil Nevilles who are all 49 years old. That fear made some sense at a club fighting relegation with no cash and a chairman more interested in producing pantomimes than producing a football team. It makes no sense at a club that has finally, after decades of self-inflicted mediocrity, been given the tools to actually go and compete. If Moyes can't take a well-funded, well-built squad and get anywhere near Europe, what exactly are we waiting for him to do differently next year that he hasn't managed to do in any of the previous twenty?

I don't doubt the man cares. I never have. Nobody who calls this the People's Club twice in two different decades is doing it cynically. But caring isn't the job. The job is putting out a team that plays like it wants to win football matches rather than a team that plays like it's terrified of what the manager will say if it concedes. Ask any Evertonian who sat through a Moyes 4-5-1 how it feels watching your own midfield refuse to get within thirty yards of the opposition box, and they'll tell you exactly what I'm telling you now: this isn't nostalgia talking, this is déjà vu. He's had three transfer windows, with money, to sign a player who can net: again this is déjà vu. Moyes doesn't like signing strikers.

And let's have a word about the great managerial pedigree everyone keeps raving about, because it's thinner than it looks. West Ham fans will tell you the same story if you catch them in an honest mood: seasons of depressing strikerless hoofball, a top-half finish here and there, and a style so risk-averse that half of London Stadium spent alternate weekends googling the league table to calculate how many points a team needs to survive, rather than where it might finish. And yes, he won a trophy there. The Europa Conference League. The competition UEFA invented specifically so clubs who couldn't get near the Champions League or even the Europa League proper had something shiny to point at.

Every West Ham fan I know calls it exactly what it is: the Mickey Mouse Cup. It's Moyes' one major (ahem) honour in a near thirty-year career, and it came in a competition most casual football fans couldn't even name or tell you the format of if you gave them three guesses. That's not a knock on the achievement of getting a group of players to believe in a European run, but let's not pretend it's proof of some tactical evolution we're about to see the benefit of at Goodison. If beating Fiorentina in Prague is the ceiling, God help us if we're relying on that same ceiling to get us into the actual Europa League, never mind anything with real pedigree attached to it.

And it wasn't as if West Ham was some triumphant swansong either. Moyes did the job there in typical fashion: solid, unspectacular, occasionally scraping results out of games his side had no right to still be in, before it all curdled into the usual sulk about a lack of transfer funds and a growing sense the players had heard it all before. He left the way he always seems to leave clubs, muttering about resources and reluctantly shaking hands and no closer to being the manager who takes a side somewhere it hasn't already been. If a Conference League win and a runners-up medal in a Community Shield are the ceiling, I'd rather we found out what's above it with somebody else.

If there's a boardroom conversation happening right now about handing Moyes a new deal, and I'd love to know what exactly in this season's league position justifies it beyond sentiment and the fact that changing manager again feels like admitting the last decision was wrong. Sometimes it was. Loyalty is a fine thing when it's being repaid. Thirteenth place, the joint fewest wins we've had in a while, and a squad that spent half the year looking like it was playing with the handbrake on isn't loyalty being repaid, it's loyalty being spent on a man who's already had his second go at this job and produced, at best, a photocopy of the first one, without the FA Cup final.

Everton have spent the best part of a generation being told to be patient, to trust the process, to give it one more window, one more January, one more contract extension. We finally have the stadium, the ownership, and the resources to stop being patient and start being ambitious. Keeping Moyes on because sacking him feels awkward isn't a football decision, it's an emotional one dressed up as stability. We've had plenty of stability. What we haven't had in a long, long time is a team that actually excites anyone watching it. Thank him for the rescue job, shake his hand, and go and find someone ambitious who wants to build something rather than making sure that nothing falls down.

Like a lot of other fans, I am unhappily dissatisfied with the prospect of another season of Monday Night Football fodder with Andy Hinchcliffe co-commentating on half of them. If this club is serious about its future, it cannot keep hiring yesterday's solution to tomorrow's problem. Thanks for what you’ve done, David, but no thanks.