David Moyes leaves La Liga without having learned anything at all

Upon his arrival he declared his intention to implement “an energetic style, more ‘British’.” By that he meant a fast-paced counter-attacking game. There’s certainly no room for tiki-taka in Moyes’ footballing philosophy. Seemingly unperturbed by his miserable experience at Manchester United, he was doing things his way. Within a couple of months, Moyes seemed to be succeeding in his quest to turn San Sebastián into a Basque outpost of two banks-of-four football. They completed the season in 12th place, and had given themselves a solid platform on which to build.

But the improvement never came, and just a quarter of the way into the new season, Moyes has been sacked. Pinpointing exactly went wrong is a futile task. As ever, it is a lethal cocktail of factors both in and outside the manager’s control. No one can claim to fully understand the complex relationship between the bounce of a football and the human psyche. But with the knowledge of hindsight, it seems obvious that Moyes’ explicit attempts at molding the club in his own image only left him open to criticism when results dipped -- an inevitable phenomenon for any manager at every club.

It allowed the media to easily cast him as a modern-day footballing imperialist, seeking to impose his will with scant sympathy for the cultures or traditions of the club. In reality, it’s nonsense: firstly, it undermines the claims made upon Moyes’ arrival that there is a heavy British influence on the Basque country’s footballing customs. Secondly, La Real must have known not to expect elegant possession football when they fought so hard to hire him. But it doesn’t really matter whether it actually is true or not. What matters is that people believed it to be. And, alas, Moyes didn’t exactly help himself in attempting to win the battle for San Sebastián’s hearts and minds.

As a case study, compare him with Quique Sánchez Flores, a Spanish manager who took charge of Watford in the summer having never before played or coached in England. Admittedly, he’s blessed to have a natural charisma that one can only derive from looking less a football manager and more the fiery Latin lead in a black-and-white classic, but Flores hasn’t solely relied on his godly gifts to win the support of fans and players. Perhaps most crucially, he arrived in England already competent in the language, whereas the rather telling legacy of Moyes’ La Real tenure is a damning series of Vines in which his inability to hablar español is cringe-inducingly apparent.

Of course, none of this means his training or tactics were necessarily problematic. But it merely meant that when results nosedived -- as much by accident as faulty design -- and confidence began to spiral downwards, the media could throw an awful lot at him. Iñaki Izquierdo of local paper Diario Vasco is a prime example of the overarching sentiment, writing after the terminal defeat to Las Palmas that Moyes “still bears the impression of someone who has only just arrived and doesn’t understand the club, the players, the league, the city, the opponents, the referees, the languages, the stadia, the timetables ...”

By the end of his tenure, Moyes had entered into the vicious circle of poor results and low confidence. Unable to speak the language, he was entirely unable to offer a defense and arrest the slide.

The sideshow prompted delight from the supporters, and the video went viral. An irreverent irrelevance, yes, but also an all-too-rare example of Moyes bridging the cultural divide. Ultimately, it wasn’t being foreign that was David Moyes’ problem: it was that he always remained the foreigner.