A data & innovation article brought to you by our Partners
“I experienced it first-hand as a practitioner,” Rich Buchanan tells the Leaders Performance Institute, having previously worked behind the scenes at Swansea City FC, the Wales FA, and other organizations. “The people tasked with making sense out of assorted data are under immense pressure to interpret information every single day for every single player throughout an entire season. The weight of delivering ROI lies in their hands.”
Buchanan, who has also worked for organizations in the US and continental Europe, is now the Performance Director at Zone7. The company’s artificial intelligence [AI] system is being used by a growing number of top-tier sports outfits as they look to convert data collection into actionable insights for higher levels of athlete performance and availability.
“If you have one person undertaking manual analysis and interpretation, it is difficult, if not impossible, to do that consistently well over the course of a campaign,” he continues. “Just as we’ve seen in other industries, I believe AI will play an increasingly important role in helping professionals identify complex risk patterns from an athlete’s data that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye.”
How does data fatigue manifest? “Typically, sports scientists or fitness coaches are the ones tasked with monitoring players using data-generating tools, like GPS or biometric wearables,” says Buchanan. “Many of these professionals, however, are not data specialists by trade. They are generally sports practitioners whose expertise is better served in athlete-facing environments – on a pitch, in a gym, etc. – where they work directly with athletes in a practical manner.”
“Right now, the conventional norm for making sense of athlete performance data in sport requires significant time commitment to examine large datasets. It is a laborious manual analysis and interpretation process, one which often runs counter to why these professionals embarked on a career in sport in the first place. As a result, disenchantment becomes quickly apparent and you see signs of data fatigue setting in as they’re pressured to deliver meaningful insights that can then be practically applied.
“Even now, as many organizations employ data science personnel, it’s not humanly possible to do this kind of manual analysis and interpretation effectively and consistently for multiple athletes over the course of a season. Combined with the frequency and complexity of new datasets becoming available, the manual approach often results in flawed insights that reduce the value that organizations receive from investments in data collection tools.”
Buchanan works closely with Tal Brown, CEO and Co-Founder of Zone7, whose extensive background in creating and deploying AI technology with the likes of Salesforce and Oracle has allowed him to witness data fatigue first-hand.
“The need to find accurate solutions for harmonizing, analyzing, and interpreting such large volumes of data has never been clearer,” says Brown. “I’ve spent much of my career creating intelligent tools that minimize data fatigue while creating more efficient data analysis processes. This is now becoming a significant challenge for decision makers in sport, especially as they’re tasked with validating and correctly interpreting data from a growing array of different sources. It’s not just game and competition data, we’re also seeing increased amounts of medical, strength & conditioning, sleep and general wellbeing data generated by wearable technologies.”
The scenario of data fatigue described by Buchanan is not uncommon and Zone7 is aware of the vital need to adopt a ‘practitioner’s lens,’ continues Brown. “Tech innovation and evolution is driven by the need to answer harder questions in more efficient and reliable ways. You need to collaborate with practitioners and ultimately provide the insights that add value in their specific environments.”
One such practitioner is Javier Vidal, a Performance Coach with Spanish La Liga club Valencia CF. Vidal has used Zone7 in a number of different team environments. “Zone7 is a tool I’ve used for several years,” said Vidal. “Its AI has allowed me to adapt my day-to-day routine and get more value of out new data generating technologies that are arising all the time.
Zone7 has been deployed and operated real time by Vidal at Valencia CF since the start of the 21/22 season and the number of confirmed injuries has dropped by 52% compared to the previous season. This closely resembles results during his tenure in Getafe another La Liga team, where Vidal saw a drop of 70%, with a 65% reduction in days that first-team players were lost due to injury. “It would be the work of many people analyzing data all day to gain such useful information, but with Zone7 I get accurate, usable information within minutes that I can immediately put into practice.”
Buchanan adds that, in the case of forecasting injury risk, AI can also take a complex, multifaceted problem and present it in an easy-to-understand way. “At the top line, Zone7 presents ‘athletes at high, medium, or low risk. On top of that, it presents potential actionable solutions, such as, ‘do more or less in this specific area than you originally intended.”
Multifaceted problems also create greater risk of blind spots emerging in athlete monitoring. In this case, the relationship between classic sports performance data streams such as external workload, strength and internal workload, and ‘next gen’ of data points such as heartrate variability [HRV] and biomarkers monitoring stress, sleep or diet presents a margin for error. “We can create visibility into how those nodes interact in the day-to-day environment,” says Brown. “More data allows us to calibrate tools that can understand those relationships. Traditional spreadsheet-like tools just don’t offer that functionality.”
One of the missions driving Zone7 is to give practitioners a sense of security at moments when they are under significant pressure to deliver. “One of the hardest parts of a coach, analyst, or performance specialist’s job is giving definitive advice on decisions made around athletes,” says Buchanan. “The number of times these professionals are tasked with doing this under pressure from all directions, with only their own subjective opinion to draw upon, is concerning. Equipping medical, fitness or coaching professionals with the objectivity that AI provides, driven by complex computations, creates more certainty and a stronger case for the advice they provide in that scenario.”
“Humans, by nature, already have in-built biases,” Buchanan continues. “We already have opinions about certain athletes; who’s robust and who’s not robust, who’s likely to report muscle tightness, etc. Now, if Zone7 corroborates those opinions, it assures the user. If what Zone7 suggests turns out to be true, then the trust builds. When we suggest something that’s counterintuitive, people may find that uncomfortable because it’s challenging preconceived beliefs. But I would say, in a way, that’s the true value-add that Zone7 brings, highlighting those blind spots. We’re there to make sure those players, and the opportunities to pre-emptively intervene, don’t slip through the net.”
Brown and Buchanan are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for data science in professional sports, whether that be 360-degree support for any interaction a player has related to performance, the possibility for longitudinal injury risk profiling, or the ability to support practitioner across a variety of different sports, each with their own cadences. The latter is already underway, with Zone7 being actively applied across American football, basketball, baseball, and rugby, in addition to extensive work in soccer.
Zone7 will also continue to challenge accepted wisdoms. “Regardless of the value individual practitioners and sports organizations place on data to manage athletes/players, the industry has been heavily reliant on simplistic data analysis and interpretation for a number of years and, quite simply, there’s now a more refined way of doing it,” says Buchanan. “Using AI to simulate different training load scenarios with the aim of physically peaking on certain days on the training cycle is just around the corner. “This is where people can get very precise on how they prepare their players or athletes for future events, rather than best guess periodization models.”
“Ultimately, future sporting success belongs to those who leverage their data in the most efficient, effective and accurate manner. We’re here, primed and ready to help practitioners in sport do just that.”
To connect with Zone7 directly, please email [email protected]
An article brought to you by our Partners
The Performance Director of MLS champions New York City FC is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute and Elite Performance Partners [EPP] about his own experience as both a practitioner and a leader.
“In my first leadership roles,” Bettle continues, “I really thought having the best strategy or having the best ideas, that was what was going to make me a great leader, that people would just hear my idea and say ‘this is brilliant! Let’s do it!’ And you very quickly realise that it’s all about the people that you’re going to be leading.”
Bettle speaks from his experience leading performance divisions at teams including the Anaheim Ducks and Toronto Maple Leafs. “Yes, you have to have a strategy but the other side of it is that you need to have empathy for what people are going through, their sense of threat from your new system, and the humility you must have to go into a new environment and take it all in. There’s a huge component of leadership you almost don’t realise until you’re in the job already. Hopefully you ride that storm out where you last and get to take that next step.”
The Leaders Performance Institute and EPP’s Dave Slemen and Anna Edwards are also joined by Darren Burgess, the High Performance Manager of the Adelaide Crows who also leads EPP’s search offering in Australia, and James Thomas, the Performance Director at British Gymnastics.
Although the trio offer three different perspectives from three different sports, systems and countries, they hit on the numerous performance principles that EPP, a performance consultancy and search firm, discuss with their clients on a daily basis. One such principle being the need to ensure people are developing a range of ‘human skills’ over and above their technical competence in order to prepare for leadership. Here are some of the other key considerations they identify for performance directors going into new roles.
Cultivating high performance habits
The environment is uppermost in the minds of all three, playing to EPP’s belief that culture and strategy hold equal weight in an organisation – like two strands of a DNA helix, with strong leadership binding the two together and enabling the team to retain its core structure when pressure is inevitably applied. “You don’t have to get it perfectly to succeed at all because talent will probably beat that, but where talent is equal, the environment becomes really important,” says Burgess, who has led high performance teams in the English Premier League at Liverpool and Arsenal, as well as in his native Australia, where he helped Melbourne to win the AFL Grand Final last year.
The dynamics are not quite the same in Olympic sport but the need for a clear performance vision is paramount, as Thomas explains. “I’ve always described culture as turning expectation and beliefs into behaviours, and then behaviours into daily performance habits,” says Thomas, who has previously worked with British Judo, Welsh Boxing and Great Britain Wheelchair Rugby. “The people I’ve seen be successful have had consistently high performance habits in an environment that allows people to express those habits daily, to allow them to be reinforced and celebrated in training and competition.”
It takes time to reach that point, as Bettle points out. “People need to be open-minded and have humility, both me coming into an environment and the people there,” he says. “In a positive environment, there’s a lot of work done to prepare for your entry, but that isn’t always the case and staff can have no clue as to what’s expected and why we’re making a change. You have to spend a significant amount of time on the front end just letting the staff know exactly what the new org chart looks like.” Even when you get there, leaders need to remind their teams of the culture they are trying to build on a daily basis, EPP’s Dave Slemen adds.
Stop, look and listen
That said, it is important not to rush. “I think the most important thing that I’ve done is taking some time to not do anything,” says Bettle. “Really just observing the current culture, the current systems; really taking it all in before you actually start plugging your system into it.” He admits it is an error he has made in the past. “You go in too quick and you’ve got a system that you want to drop on this new culture and you miss things that are being done really well. You lose sight of the fact that this is a big change management project, and so people can’t change as fast as you would like them to if you just go in on day one and start to change systems and processes and reporting lines.
“For 60 days, you should observe and plug in little pieces where you can, and then once you’ve done that evaluation, you can plug in your system to really complement the things that are being done really well; and you can give them small pieces to change over time, and look at it as more of a long-term project than ‘at day one you’ve got to come in and produce results’.”
Burgess concurs: “People need to feel safe and they need to feel appreciated, and they need to feel that just because there’s change that doesn’t mean there will be wholesale change, and that’s a tough balance because, in a lot of clubs, in a lot of situations, you’re brought in for a reason, and they know that and you know that and the players know that, so there is a delicate balance there you have to find.”
The performance director role must begin to engender trust. “Unless you spend the time to build the connection with somebody I’ve often found it falls a little bit short,” says Thomas, who understands the importance of giving his staff a sense of psychological safety. “I’ve always taken the time to stand next to a coach during training, watch, ask questions, be inquisitive, and give them a sense that I’m interested rather than coming in and make a big change. It might not need a big change, but unless you talk to people and find out, you’ll never really know. It’s probably quite simple, but I just stand, watch and ask questions and try to be humble. I’ve come in, I’m not going to fix everything for anybody, but I’ll happily try and help. But I need to know about what you feel, what you think the issues are, and what you think doesn’t need fixing. What you think is great and really sacred to the sport, what needs to be maintained for the next few years.” Burgess points out you also need to speak up when it’s required, which fits with the definition of psychological safety held by EPP. “It’s not just about creating an environment in which everyone can speak up and be heard, it’s about creating one where you have an obligation to if you think something is wrong,” adds Slemen.
Thomas’ inclusive approach proved useful as British Gymnastics devised its plan for the 2024 Paris Olympics. “By the time we’d launched our plan, which was just before Tokyo, everybody had seen it and heard the words, heard the language, and heard the ideas of change, so it felt quite normal,” he says. “It felt like people took and breath and just said ‘onto the next four years’. There’s a few changes and I’m sure people will have to work through that, but we’d taken on such a journey and evolved the team quite early on. There was actually a big sense of togetherness rather than a secret thing that was cooked up in a boardroom that no one had ever seen and all of a sudden now you were putting it on them.”
The importance of a criteria-based approach
As Bettle says: “You want to be clear about your standards and how people are going to be held accountable and, within that, being as supportive as you can.”
To that end, Burgess has adopted a criteria-based approach. “I tend to give the staff a practical job description and say ‘there’s your practical day to day responsibilities’ and then there’s a real clear expectation and they can be as little as ‘you’re putting out the cones for the warm-up’ to as extensive as ‘you’re responsible for delivering the training analysis to the coach’, he says. “Whether that’s a physio, doctor, psychologist, a performance analyst, they all have their practical job description and therefore they know what they’re going to be held accountable for, and that tends to be a little bit more specific and practical than a human resources-designed job description. That’s helped a lot. It’s helped us to get people aligned in what they’re doing, it’s also created its own issues when people fall short because it’s only mine and it’s not HR’s, but within our staff context it works quite well.” Which is perhaps why he’s such a good fit for EPP, who take a similar criteria-based approach to their hires, taking time upfront to ensure all are aligned on the key priorities for any role and why they are hiring, rather than getting blinded by names of prospective candidates or silverware.
For Thomas, it is a question of impact. “I’ll say, ‘where do you, as an analyst, as a physiotherapist, show impact? Can you talk me through where you impacted on performance?’” he says. “And then we move away from KPIs and job descriptions to actually showing me or telling me a story about where they impacted and connect to the team going after world championships and winning four medals; the nutritionist can tell me a story of the six weeks before and you get a real sense that somebody really can give you a great story of where they’re adding value; or if someone can’t quite describe that to you that’s where I start to think where are they? Where are they working? Where are they impacting? Moving forward, is this an area that we might want to change?”
Find your authentic voice
Authenticity is important and, in Edwards’ view, the most important leadership trait, alongside vulnerability. “It’s just what is right for me and what allows me to be my best, draw from my experiences, inspire others, but in a way that suits me,” says Thomas. “I’m not a stand on top of a desk and beat my chest person, I try to inspire through relationships, caring about people, good strategy, but actually allowing other people to feel empowered to do it. So for me it’s been learning about myself, trust myself, but do it the way it feels right for me.”
For his part, Burgess initially noted down the qualities he liked and disliked in his leaders. “I would just come back and check those quite often,” he says. “The big one for me, in every organisation, was that I barely got feedback and that might be a conversation on the pitch or more formalised feedback and those things are really important because most of the staff are just craving some sort of information on how they’re doing.”
Mentors and blind spots
Thomas found a mentor early in his career. “I wanted someone to challenge me outside of the gymnastics space,” he says. “It was a safe space where someone could really push me, get me asking the right questions, and give me feedback about how I was doing and how I was coming across.”
It’s something that I always quite pleased on, my ability to make tough decisions, and someone held the mirror back at me and said ‘you’re great at making tough decisions, but do you have tough conversations before that?’ That’s something different. Making a tough decision and just doing it, that’s one thing, but actually telling people beforehand or getting their views beforehand and having those tough conversations, that was a little bit of a blind spot for me and maybe I’m shying away from the tough discussion but then going straight to the tough decision. That’s something I’ve learnt, that they go hand in hand, but they’re two very different skills.
The importance of mentors came out as a key theme in Slemen’s dissertation for the Executive MBA he completed last summer. In interviewing ten of the UK’s top performance leaders, he found all had leant on mentors throughout their careers, and most highlighted it as the most pressing factor in their success.
Thomas advocates the same for his team. “It was something probably two years in that I pushed really hard with my senior team; ‘get yourself a mentor, get someone who can support you outside of the work environment’. It’s been a massive success for gymnastics in terms of the growth I’ve seen in my team and them enjoying more leadership responsibility. A lot of that has been in seeking feedback from other members of the team.”
Quarterly 360-feedback is now part of British Gymnastics’ programme and Thomas relies upon it. “They might not even be involved in performance, it might be PR or marketing or finance, but tell me how I’m doing, tell me how I’m coming across, what grates on you that I do that I’m not aware of, that I need to think about, where my blind spots are that I’m just not aware of day to day; and it’s that ability to reflect based on other people’s feedback has been really important.”
Bettle agrees. “I’ve worked with a mentor and coach for some time now and I think that that process of self-reflection has been one of the most important things in my career, certainly transitioning into leadership, just general self-awareness, self-reflection and getting to know yourself better, getting to know what my defaults are and what my blind spots are has been really important coming into environments as we try to increase diversity within an organisation; and you just know that you’ve got blind spots that you’ve got no way of knowing how other people are really thinking unless you’re really seeking it out.” Having seen the importance of such guidance in the careers of many of the leaders they work with, Edwards has undertaken a Master’s in Mentoring & Coaching, allowing EPP to offer this as an additional service to those with whom they work.
An article brought to you by our Partners
“When you invest in a new job you feel that you have to do everything but, as I’m getting older, I don’t want to have to do everything,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute’s Jimmy Worrall.
The conversation took place in August just as West Ham and Moyes had made a promising start to the current Premier League season. The Scot was still basking in the glow of West Ham’s highest finish since 2001 and their first qualification for European football since 2006. As December arrives, they are again challenging at the top of the table.
At the time of his appointment in December 2019, however, delegation was not a priority. The club was mired in relegation trouble and Moyes’ remit was for a swift turnaround. “I think to get things up and running you need to have your hands on everything. You need to try and get all departments pulling in the right direction,” he continues.
Just three months later, the pandemic brought the 2019-20 Premier League season to a standstill. Moyes relished the opportunity to work closely with his playing group during the enforced hiatus. “We were on the pitch every day and, in a way, I think it helped me,” he says. “It certainly helped the team because I got the chance to do individual work with them every day. We were only allowed one member of staff and that was me at the time. The more I saw it, the more important I thought the individual work was. The players were probably having a closer relationship with the manager and the coaches as well.”
While positive results tend to produce a better atmosphere, and soft skills alone will never produce results, it is clear that Moyes’ players are both happy and receptive to his ideas. “I’ve played in teams here that have fought relegation and been mid-table, but in the last two seasons, what the manager has built for us, and what we’ve bought into as players, has been amazing,” West Ham midfielder Declan Rice told a press conference in September.
Rice, who represented England at the delayed Euro 2020 this summer, reported back for West Ham duty earlier than requested and has maintained his superb form in claret and blue. “It’s a place where you wake up in the morning and you look forward to going in and having breakfast with the lads. You look forward to having a laugh and you look forward to training.”
Rice’s words resonate with Dave Slemen, Founding Partner at Elite Performance Partners [EPP], a performance consultancy and search firm working across elite sport. Slemen says: “Tapping into why players love football and keeping it fun is such an underrated quality in a coach. So much pressure is put on players externally – if you can make it fun, it releases the stress so players are only in that state during games, when it matters.”
Nor has there been unrest from those fringe players with limited game time. Moyes has made every effort to ensure they feel included. “It’s like a big family,” added Rice. “I think the gaffer said it before, we’re all like a bunch of kids. Honestly, it’s such a great place to be around at the moment. With the results and how well we’re doing, that makes it that bit more special.”
“Winning makes a big difference and, in the sport we’re in, it really does change how you feel, how the media perceive you in all things,” Moyes previously told the Leaders Performance Institute. “But I would hope that I would still be treated the same way if we were losing.”
Changing perceptions
Moyes has been more directly involved in player transfers than during his first spell with West Ham. A number of his signings have sparkled including, in January 2020, Tomáš Souček [initially on loan] and Jarrod Bowen. They, along with many who made up the squad Moyes inherited, did their bit to stave off relegation that season.
“Getting a couple of players right was really important for me because suddenly we changed the dynamics, the mentality of the club,” says Moyes of his first weeks back in charge. “Yeah, the manager’s got a lot to do with it but, ultimately, it’s the players. Whether you buy them, whether they’re already in the building, you need them to be the ones to do it for you and, fortunately, we got a couple of players in the January window not by massive design, not by massive scouting networks and watching them for 20-30 games; a bit of simple work, looking at a few stats and you hit the jackpot. Now and again, you hope to be lucky and a couple of Januarys ago I was, we got these boys in.”
First-Team Coach Kevin Nolan – a former West Ham player and the coach with perhaps the strongest links to the playing group – has spoken of the club’s growing preference for younger players with a point to prove. “We can’t match the financial side of a lot of clubs but we can match it by hard work and determination,” he told the Athletic in May. “People will want to come here and work hard and not be seen as a club where players look to finish their careers, or come and enjoy a year in London. That’s not what this club is about. The gaffer wants to make this club better day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year.”
Moyes has also taken a keen interest in the fortunes of West Ham’s youth and under-23s teams, regularly attending matches home and away when his schedule permits. He also tells Worrall of the importance of getting to know the grounds and kitchen staff at West Ham’s Rush Green training ground. “I hope in some ways to start to build the club and show people that you’re trying to build a better and brighter future for all the people who are involved in the club.”
This approach is crucial for alignment. “The team is bigger than just the players,” adds Slemen. “We believe alignment can have a big impact on the behaviours of the group and its sense of identity. It can bring people closer together, especially when things get tough.”
Perhaps this is all circumstantial. Moyes is wary of trying to pinpoint empirical evidence in a conversation of his successes and shies away from attributing his success to any particular cause, but he does highlight the organisational stability and job security he currently enjoys. His tenure has long surpassed his six-month spell in 2017-18 when he first helped West Ham to retain their Premier League status. “Getting the chance to feel that you’ve got a bit of time I think gives you the feeling that there’s stability, you can get a bit of power and you can start to make decisions that you think are correct. I think when you feel as if you’re on a short lead you find that you have to do things quickly, you’re maybe making rash decisions.
“I’ve got to say, though, when we came back in here at West Ham this time, I felt under pressure that we would have to make quick decisions. We had to stay in the Premier League.” Results were required and, when they came, he gained a little more latitude. “Sometimes, people will get jobs that are already nicely prepared for you, all nicely packaged up for you to be a success.” Most managerial appointments, however, follow a poor run of results. The incoming manager is required to firefight. “Quite often the job is that you have to correct things, put things back, and try to start again.”
Moyes is also keenly aware that he, like any manager or head coach, is just a few bad results away from being pilloried. He is familiar with both ends of the spectrum. He built his coaching credentials at third-tier Preston North End, where he began as a player-manager in 1998, and led them to promotion to the second tier in 2000. He further burnished his reputation during an 11-year spell in the Premier League at Everton. Less fondly regarded are his spells at Manchester United, Real Sociedad and Sunderland, which seem like a distant memory at this stage.
He has always backed his ability as a coach, but understands that he had to continue learning and relearning the art of coaching. “To become a better leader, you need good people and staff around you,” he says. “It’s vitally important.” Each of Moyes’ first-team coaches – the aforementioned Nolan, Billy McKinley, Paul Nevin and Stuart Pearce – have been managers in their own right. “Even leaders need to be told ‘well done’ now and again because the leaders make the decisions and, quite often, the decisions are not right. It’s not a bad thing to have people around you to say ‘well done, you’ve done a good job today’.”
“No one gets there on their own – no one,” says Slemen. “You need to be both challenged and supported in any coaching role, this is especially true of the head coach. You would hope they are having the biggest impact so need the most help to get it right. In fact, 55 percent of CEOs in FTSE 100 have executive coaches and it wouldn’t surprise me if that will be the next trend at the top of the game.”
Moyes says: “We’ll all have bad days, it might not go right, but I think that’s when you need the support even more so than when you’re winning. We can be very isolated, very lonely. Yes, you have staff to help you but you still need good mentors in the background, good people that you think you could speak to about something you’ve got a concern about; people who if you’ve got a decision that you’re torn between could maybe clear it for you. I think to have one or two people around you who can help you with that is really key when you’re in the top level in elite sports.”
Slemen suggests that Moyes is onto something. “Everyone needs help – both coaches and mentors – people to talk you through what you do but also people who have been there before that can relate specifically to the challenges you are going through,” he says, adding that during his recent MBA dissertation he interviewed ten elite sports leaders and found that their only common trait was their use of coaches and mentors at different stages of their journey.
East London calling
Moyes famously coined the phrase ‘people’s club’ at his first press conference as Everton Manager in 2002 having been inspired by the Everton jerseys he saw on the streets of Liverpool as he drove to that first media engagement. His inference being that Liverpool Football Club did not seem to be as highly represented amongst the local populace. The sentiment was warmly received at Goodison Park.
He feels West Ham, surrounded by illustrious London neighbours, can occupy a similar space in the east of the city. “I think it’s an area that needs its football team and I think, for so long, we’ve been behind it. I want us to have a new young support, I want us to have new methods of trying to attract more supporters, but I think the biggest attraction to supporters is winning, especially to young supporters. A lot of the dads who maybe want to bring their sons or daughters to the game might have been West Ham supporters but might not feel there’s been enough success to warrant getting a season ticket or coming to the games. But I think, at the moment, there’s quite an exciting young team at West Ham and some really nice young players and the team’s going well.”
Like Merseyside, he also sees east London as a hotbed of young talent. “I’d love to have 30 or 40 scouts all around the East End of London because that was the way we done it at Everton and we pulled up an awful lot of good players at that time.”
Worrall wraps things up by pointing out that Moyes seems to be smiling on the touchline these days. “I’m very much the realist and I still am – but I felt as if the realist bit is not working anymore,” says Moyes, explaining that he has to be softer with the truth. “I find some of it really hard because I only want to speak the truth. Sometimes nowadays it’s very difficult to do that, but these are the things we do as we get older and we learn a bit better.”
Moyes may be a realist but he is also an optimist. “I hope that the best period of my management is still to come, even though I’ve had some pretty good periods. I’m hoping that this period might see me doing even better than I’ve done before.”
The Big Interview brought to you by our Main Partners
“I’m in the job because I want to be in the job, not because I need to be in the job.”
Moyes, who recently celebrated his 1,000 match as a manager, is enjoying a career renaissance at the London Stadium. He returned to West Ham in December 2019 with the Hammers in danger of relegation and worked to ensure their survival at the end of the Covid-hit 2019-20 season. It was the second time he had achieved that feat following an initial six-month stint in east London in 2017-18.
This time, he remained at the helm for the 2020-21 season and oversaw a transformation of the club – far quicker than anyone had anticipated – from brittle and perennially relegation-threatened to European contenders capable of posing opponents questions from front to back. In May, Moyes steered the club into the Uefa Europa League courtesy of a sixth-place Premier League finish – their highest since 2001.
A new three-year contract for Moyes followed in June and his team has carried their superb form into the current campaign. They sit atop of their Europa League group while again challenging at the upper echelons of the Premier League.
It is a remarkable turnaround for Moyes, who had endured a series of unsuccessful spells at Manchester United, Sunderland and Real Sociedad before again finding stability at West Ham. His reputation has not been as high in nearly a decade.
“I’m personally in a better place and managing in the way that I want to and I’m not having to be miserable because I’m losing games all the time!” he told the Leaders Performance Institute’s Jimmy Worrall in October. “I’ve actually got a team that’s winning.”
Moyes, who was labelled the ‘Moyesiah’ by West Ham supporters for his feats last season, instinctively understands that a manager is never more than a few bad results from being ridiculed, despite the elusive mix of talent and circumstance required to succeed at the highest levels of the sport.
“Winning makes a big difference and, in the sport we’re in, it really does change how you feel, how the media perceive you in all things. But I would hope that I would still be treated the same way if we were losing. We’re in a sport where there is winning and losing, not everyone can win. In fact, there’s very few people who can win. I really enjoy it. I don’t want to step away from it at the moment. I feel good and I hope it’s helping me manage and work better.”
What has changed? “If I’m being honest, I think I’ve changed a lot as well,” says Moyes, who did not manage between leaving West Ham in 2018 and returning to the club a little over a year later. At times during his hiatus he worked as a technical advisor with Uefa, a role he returned to during the delayed Euro 2020 tournament last summer.
“I was out of work, I was doing lots of stuff with Leaders, I was listening to people talking, I was listening to how people were building their clubs or what sports they were in. I did a lot of games for Uefa, I did a lot of speaking at conferences, and I think that, myself, I had to change.
“I said this in some of the conversations I’ve had with Leaders before that I felt communication has become even more important in modern day coaching and managing, whether that be to your players, your owners or the media. I think people do want to hear more and I think they want to see more positivity; the players need it as well.
“I felt as if I had to change a little bit and see if I could alter my approach. I’m not saying that’s the reason for any success, but I’m trying to remain positive in the job where, in recent years, it’s been quite difficult for me because there’s been a lot of negativity around me, around maybe some of the clubs I’ve been at. But overall, I’ve felt if I could be a bit more positive that would be a starting point, so I’ve tried to do that.”
Moyes then elaborates. “I probably looked closer to see how I’ve been doing things and checking if I thought they were right,” he says. “The majority of the things were right, all the basics, all the organisation, all the planning, but I had to look at things differently. I think my communication had to become better. I think that was the biggest thing I found with the players. I think there is a need for much more communication, but even the message you’re giving out to the media now. I felt as if I had to change from where I’ve come from.”
Moyes became player-coach of third-tier Preston North End in 1998 at the age of 34 and was a typically coach of that era: stern, aloof and sparing with praise. It was effective and he led Preston to the second tier in 2000, and later enjoyed a successful 11 years at Everton in the Premier League with largely the same approach. A generation of players has passed through the league since then and it feels like something of a bygone age – a fact not lost on Moyes.
“On days gone by, I think people would tell you, you wouldn’t come to the manager’s door very often,” he continues. “I’ve tried to be in and around the players as much as I can but keeping my distance because they have to understand that I’m still the manager. Nowadays, I’m talking to them more, about their daily lives, whether it be their families, what they’re up to, whether it be what their interests are.”
It might be a stretch to pin this as a direct reason for West Ham’s resurgence, but this approach has perhaps enabled Moyes to do his best work by helping to improve his general wellbeing. “It’s made me feel much better by having a positive outlook as well.”
The last point resonates in particular. “Sometimes people forget about the mental health of the leaders who probably have the decision-making responsibility,” says Moyes, who acknowledges that it is not easy for his players either. “The winning or losing means so much. Quite often, we can sit and listen to a radio show, which will be discussing if you’re getting the sack or not. And that, nowadays, for any other member of the public now would probably be seen as a mental health issue, but for sports coaches or managers, that’s seen as an open forum and it’s allowed to be spoken about. Most people’s lines of work would not be discussed because it would be seen as not right.”
Moyes has not been out of work for long periods during his 23-year coaching career but there have been occasional spells. What went through his mind during those times? “When you’re out of work, you can’t wait to get back in it. When you’re in work, quite often you’re saying ‘I wish I was out of it!’ because of the pressure and stress you get from it,” he says, adding that he can see more and more coaches opting for sabbaticals as a means of staving off burnout.
“Being out of work can sometimes be a good thing for managers. Pep [Guardiola] took a year out where he went to New York and did something different. I think you’ll see more of it. You’ll see some of the top managers really thinking now ‘I don’t want to be under this level of such stress every week and probably 10 or 11 months of the year I’m away from home every weekend or I’m working every weekend.’ So I do think you may see this in the next generation of managers where you might do a couple of years, and then take a year out and try and come back in again. For me, at the moment, I’m enjoying it.”
Few of Moyes’ contemporaries from his time at Preston and Everton are still operating at the highest levels of the game in England or abroad and the man himself believes that continuous learning has improved his chances when he has been out of work.
“Sometimes when you get this job you might think ‘I’ve got a job now, that’s set, I don’t need to look for anything new, I don’t need to hear what other people do’. I think you have to keep trying to find a way of learning. At the moment, I want to update all the football sessions I do; I’m trying to move them on, I’m trying to find other ways. I want to be able to test the players in as many of the football sessions as I can. I’ve got enough library material in my head to put on coaching sessions every day, but I want them to become new, fresh and updated and I’m always trying to challenge myself to find out what else I can do. But I think being out of work, I had to find ways of [working out] how you do that. When you’ve been near the top it’s difficult.
“You’ll know the people I’m going to talk about: David Brailsford, Gareth Southgate; so many of the people I get to hear from, so many great leaders, people who are great in different sports. It’s amazing how many tips you can get off of people and hear little things that complement [what you’re doing].
“I wouldn’t say I’m a great reader but I’ve picked up a couple of books and I’m picking things out of reading. Sometimes it can be enough to give you a little bit of motivation to say something or to encourage yourself to be ready.”
He mentions Guardiola again. “I heard Pep say he used the word ‘football thief’. I think we all have to be football thieves, I think we all need to steal a little bit from wherever you go.” He cites his work covering the Champions League and Euros for Uefa. “[That is] part of understanding what the new trends are and what’s up to date and where the goals are being scored from, what way teams are now lining up. The new flexibility that’s coming into football.
“If you want to stand still you can do so, but I want to try and move on and keep up with the best teams and coaches.”
