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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Barney Ronay

The last of the anti-possession men: David Moyes is now an exotic cultural antagonist

An illustration of David Moyes
“A manager who once seemed like an avatar of the same-old same-old is now an outlier and a vital note of tactical variation.” Illustration: Matt Johnstone

Ever since David Moyes left Manchester United, or at least since it became clear that this was a case of Manchester United doing something terrible to David Moyes as opposed to the other way round, that he was essentially a bystander, I have been trying to promote a hypothetical process some (ie nobody, anywhere) are already calling (nobody has ever called it this) the Moyes Revenge Horizon.

This theoretical Moyes Curve is an attempt to map the related career trajectories of Moyes and United in that decade since. The key note in this model is a scenario where Moyes’s steady rise in desirability as a managerial good will eventually intersect with and then surpass United’s own downward progress on the Y axis as a luxury football item, an economic event known, apocalyptically, as Brailsford’s Ballbag.

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