Julen Lopetegui, it appears, is not a signatory to the quaint football convention that you do not discuss taking a job while another manager is in that job. He is not the first to trample over that behavioural nicety. And he won’t be the last.
Lopetegui, though, has managed to take things a step further. According to his friends, he has actually agreed to take the West Ham job while David Moyes, the club’s most successful manager for decades, is still in the post.
It feels very much as if Lopetegui’s tenure is being born under a bad sign. That is hardly unusual for the way West Ham conduct their business. Some might say that Lopetegui and the West Ham owner David Sullivan deserve each other.
‘Show some class, West Ham,’ the former England defender Stephen Warnock said on Monday as more of the unpalatable details of Moyes’ treatment began to emerge. There is not much chance of that.
Class is not the first word that springs to mind with either Sullivan or Lopetegui, sadly, but maybe the former porn baron has found the boss he has always yearned for. Perhaps this will be a beautiful union of kindred spirits.
Lopetegui, after all, has form in this area. In 2018, when he was manager of Spain, he agreed to become the new boss of Real Madrid behind the back of the Spanish Football Federation a few days before the start of the World Cup and was promptly sacked.
The federation’s then president, Luis Rubiales – remember him – said he had found out what Lopetegui had done five minutes before Real Madrid’s announcement. The furore cast a shadow over Spain’s tournament and they were knocked out by Russia in the second round. Lopetegui lasted 14 games and 138 days at the Bernabeu before he was fired.
One other thing about Lopetegui: he didn’t fancy working with the financial restrictions that were to be imposed on him at Wolves this season. Gary O’Neil took over from him and not only kept Wolves up but made them prosper with intelligent, innovative coaching that has marked him out as one of the game’s leading managerial prospects.
The idea that Lopetegui represents a radically different direction to Moyes is also flawed. He is an able, efficient manager. He is tactically astute. He achieved good things with Sevilla in the aftermath of his Madrid debacle. He provided echoes of that in his short time at Wolves before he walked away. But he is hardly part of a managerial avant-garde.
I always felt a little bit sorry for Lopetegui over the Spain-Madrid fandango. I felt sorry for a guy who blew his one precious chance of winning the World Cup for his country because he was too weak to say no to Madrid and was then cast aside like trash by the club.
The thing is, I don’t feel sorry for him any more. Sullivan and the West Ham hierarchy are the villains of this piece but Lopetegui is old enough to know better than to allow himself to be part of the grubby, unpleasant handling of the exit of a manager who won the club’s first major trophy for 43 years and consistently had the team punching above its weight.
Moyes is the best thing to have happened to West Ham for a long time. He was pointing the club in the right direction when they got rid of him the first time in the summer of 2018. They thought Manuel Pellegrini would be an upgrade because he had won a title for Manchester City.
Eighteen months later, in December 2019, West Ham had to go back to Moyes to ask him to clean up the mess that Pellegrini had made. Moyes did that and much more. It was only 11 months ago that West Ham won their first European trophy for 58 years when they lifted the Europa Conference League final in Prague.
That victory made Moyes the only British manager since Sir Alex Ferguson to win a European trophy. He led West Ham to sixth place in the Premier League in 2020-21 and seventh place in 2021-22. They got to the quarter-finals of the Europa Conference League this season before losing – as everyone does – to Bayer Leverkusen.
But that’s not good enough, apparently. Many supporters clearly feel it is time for a change and many more point to recent results to back up that feeling, not least the recent drubbings West Ham have suffered at the hands of Chelsea and Crystal Palace.
It seems pertinent to point out that, for all the criticism aimed at Moyes and his style of play, West Ham are two points ahead of Brighton & Hove Albion, managed by everyone’s favourite boss, Roberto De Zerbi. So Moyes must still be doing something right.
Funnily enough, things seem to have fallen away a bit for him since it became an open secret that the club was approaching other managers to take over at the end of the season when Moyes was still talking about his hopes of remaining at the club and signing a new deal.
What sort of a way is that to treat a manager like Moyes? Yes, of course we have to accept there will be an element of realpolitik in the appointment of a new manager. Clubs have to plan for the future. But West Ham should have told Moyes they had decided to move on with someone else. They should have been straight with him.
Instead of which, they subjected him to the low-grade humiliation of their open and awkward courtship dances with potential replacements such as Sporting Lisbon manager Ruben Amorim and Lopetegui. That prompted criticism from club legends such as Tony Cottee and Frank McAvennie. Moyes, and the club’s supporters, deserved a lot, lot better.
It was a sign of just how much rancour the club’s approach was causing that technical director Tim Steidten, who was leading the search for a successor while Moyes was still talking about signing a new contract at the end of the season, had to be banned from entering the dressing room for the remainder of the campaign.
It could easily be argued that Sullivan – and the club’s hierarchy – have cost West Ham a place in European competition next season by the way they have undermined Moyes’ authority in the last month. They have pulled the rug out from under him.
Still, it is said that a tribute is being planned for Moyes before his last home game at the London Stadium against Luton on Saturday. Maybe Sullivan will get into the spirit of it and give him a tin tack for a leaving present.