Joking aside, this is an excellent piece of journalism from Barney Ronay:
Farewell, then, David Moyes. You made some mistakes as Manchester United manager. But none of them, let's face it, as gapingly inept as the decision to appoint you Manchester United manager in the first place.
It would be nice to conclude that United's 20th permanent manager burned brightly during his 10-month succession, that he flew too close to the sun, that this grand old romantic beast of a corporate super-club simply was not ready for the radical re-imaginings of all-out Moyes-ism. But it would also be untrue.
In the end Moyes's greatest failing during the last 10 months was simply to walk into Old Trafford and act like David Moyes, the same David Moyes his previous managerial career had always suggested him to be: a hard-working 50-year-old with obvious virtues but with a limited palette of skills when judged against the very best.
Perhaps Moyes could have learned more quickly on the job, revealed previously unseen elite-level tactical refinement, or had the courage to junk and rebuild from the start a jaded squad. That he didn't do any of this can hardly be a surprise, though. He did his best. He stayed true to himself. But from the start neither of these were ever likely to be enough.
A great deal of brain-mangling speculation will now be expended on where United go from here, but what Moyes does next is a question of some interest too, not just for Moyes himself, but also in the wider story of United's ongoing post-Ferguson macro-shambles. It is important to absorb exactly what Moyes has been subjected to here. A genuinely vertiginous descent from Chosen One to shortest-serving managerial sacking in United's 122-year history. Moyes is just the sixth United manager ever to be sacked. Leaving aside for now the 10-year churn of the post-Busby void Moyes is only the third genuine sacking after Ron Atkinson and John Chapman, who was suspended by the FA for "improper conduct" in 1926.
It is rare territory indeed for man who was prior to leaving Everton the second longest serving manager in the Premier League. If it is hard to see what he might do next then this is perhaps because there are so few precedents for this kind of slow-burn managerial Icarus-act. The ever-generous Carlo Ancelotti has already suggested Moyes will have "another club, another opportunity" before long and that this is all just the lot of the football manager, whose very existence was partly founded out of the need to have a high-profile patsy to fire when things went wrong.
But is it really? This feels like something beyond the ordinary. It has instead been a mega-sacking: pernicious, degrading, gruellingly voyeuristic, even at times a little nasty. The spectacle of Moyes on the touchline in those final weeks was painful and ever-present: a raw, wild-eyed figure lost on his blasted heath, pelted with hailstones, twitching and fretting and continually whirling around in confusion like a man menaced by a cloud of invisible bats.
The Moyes brand – and these things matter in the job market – has been disastrously smudged. There is a slight danger now of following the Graham Taylor dynamic, an excellent man and fine manager who became forever associated with his own moment of high-end public failure. Moyes at United was never quite headline turnip territory, but it has been more insidious. There has never really been a rolling-news-era football failure on this scale, each real-time black eye processed and chewed up by social media, with its daily Moyes-out statistical briefings, its brilliant rolling propaganda tech; and beyond this the unceasing artillery range harangue of the professional pundit class. It is much more than simply a sacking Moyes will need to recover from.
It has been suggested that, like Roy Hodgson and André Villas-Boas, Moyes is sure to get another chance at a similar level, but there is no real like for like Moyes comparison here. Hodgson had managed Internazionale and taken Switzerland to a World Cup before he went to Liverpool. Villas-Boas was still young and progressive-looking post-Chelsea, a skinny-tied harbinger of the new world. Moyes is simply Moyes, for whom the reservations of his Everton days remain, chiefly a failure to beat the better teams and a certain style of square-headed linear football.
Another job at a club in or close to the Champions League would require a second leap of faith given his failings at United: the peculiar big-money signings of Marouane Fellaini and Juan Mata, neither of whom addressed United's basic lack of mobility in midfield; plus also the lack of genuine, egomaniacal big league presence on the touchline, the lack of style to suit the club.
With this in mind it seems likely Moyes has two immediate options. First an Everton-level job in England. Perhaps he could revive Aston Villa, or provide a Pardew-upgrade at Newcastle. West Ham fans would surely take him. Much better, he could simply go abroad. Let's face it the high point of Moyes' dead-headed season came in the Champions League where United briefly led Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals.
And while there will be sniggers from those picturing the Moyes-led destruction of the Bundesliga youth system, or a junking of the practice balls at the Ajax academy in favour of vomit-soaked bleep tests, a spell at a German, Dutch or Italian club could provide some vital rejuvenation. Just as Bobby Robson flowered into an adaptable, sometimes incoherent European football eminence post-England; or more pertinent, as Steve McClaren rebuilt both his methods and basic sense of himself in Holland.
Either way, it is a process to be managed carefully. Almost every member of United's post-Busby and pre-Ferguson platoon of pressed-men and fill-ins ended up looking frazzled by the experience. Wilf McGuiness opted for a sun-kissed dictator-era retreat to Greek football with Aris Thessaloniki and Panachaiki. Frank O'Farrell resurfaced with Cardiff City and the Iranian national team. Tommy Docherty was in Australia within two years of leaving United. Atkinson, bolstered by a couple of FA Cups and a winning personality, went back to his old club West Bromwich Albion, an option Moyes might be best not chasing up at the moment.
Plus, of course, what Moyes does next has its own wider fascinations. It is hard not to hope he flourishes on a more fitting stage. If only to highlight the fact that those who appointed him are still in situ and that, frankly, Moyes himself looks a little like a victim in this bodged high-end succession, and a footnote in a wider story of institutional confusion that may have some time to run yet.