David Moyes has finally left Sunderland, but he checked out months ago

It’s a funny word, resignation. It’s a thing that can be offered and accepted: David Moyes, for example, has just offered his resignation to Sunderland Football Club, and had it accepted.

But resignation is also a state of being. A blank surrender; a sigh and a shrug and an “oh well, nothing to be done.” And in that sense, Moyes resigned himself a long time ago.

When considering the worst team in the Premier League, remember that it wasn’t meant to be like this. Not just the results — relegated in last place with a mere 24 points — but the whole story. Having saved Sunderland from the drop last season, Sam Allardyce was supposed to be pepping up Sunderland’s spirits, feeding the team a little red meat, organising a defence. Doing Sam Allardyce things.

Instead, he went off to drink wine in pints on the country’s dollar, and Sunderland ended up with Moyes, their sixth manager in as many years. That he went out following a 5-1 thrashing at the hands of Chelsea isn’t a huge surprise, since Chelsea are the best team in the league and Sunderland the worst. But it’s fitting that he goes out having agreed to have his team put the ball out in the 26th minute so that John Terry could have a wave and a cry. Whatever you made of that, there’s no doubt that Moyes and his team have been doing their opponents favours all season.

In fairness, Sunderland’s state of permanent chaos — managers coming and going, plans being made and then overwritten — is something that most bosses would have struggled with. One suspects, however, that most would not have quite so readily named his team as relegation candidates in August. Throughout the season he has been unremittingly negative, and not just with the press and public. Reportedly, a former player nicknamed him “the energy vampire,” and it stuck.

It’s tempting to diagnose this all as some post-Manchester United malaise. In some parallel dimension, he’s just wrapping up the fourth year of that six-year contract; here, he still looks like a man scarred by having his ambitions fulfilled, then exposed, then shattered, in one clatteringly awful season. It makes sense, it’s neat … it’s probably a bit simplistic. But “Has he still got it?” and “Is he now an ex-manager?” were pressing questions before the season. Midway through, the world added: “At what point did he become the saddest man on the face of the planet?”

Resignation has filtered through everything that Sunderland have done this season, and everything Moyes has tried to do. It’s been there in the unambitious team selections, in the unimaginative transfer dealings, in Patrick van Aanholt’s apparent desperation to flee one relegation fight for another. It was there in Moyes’ decision to slip quickly down the tunnel last weekend, as Sunderland finished their home campaign with a 2-0 defeat to Swansea. And now the resignation has coalesced into an actual stepping down.

You suspect that few of the players and fewer of the fans will be sad to see him leave. If Sunderland are to make a success of their Championship campaign they will need to persuade a few players to stick around. They will also need locate some energy, drive, vim, vigor, self-belief, thrust, swagger … none of these seem particularly Moyesian words. Perhaps, in a sad sort of a way, they might begin to flicker in the wake of his departure.

He’ll get another shot somewhere; managers like Moyes are part of the fabric of English football, and they always get at least one more shot. Whether he’ll make a go of it is another question entirely. You’d hope a holiday and a break will do him good. But on this season’s showing, the resignation may have seeped into his very soul.