By Tom Parsons
April 25 – A year ago today, David Moyes was celebrating his 50th birthday at Goodison Park with a birthday cake presented to him by his Evertonian staff. This year things might be a bit different in the Moyes household and the celebrations a bit more subdued.
Ever since Moyes was appointed manager of Manchester United back in the summer, the job at hand was always going to be tough following the most successful period in the club’s history. The reception to his appointment on social media was mixed, but the fans of Manchester United were willing to trust the opinion of Sir Alex Ferguson in his recommendation to appoint the former Everton manager.
However, as we all know, results went against United and Moyes broke numerous records (of the wrong variety) giving Manchester United their worst season since the 1990s which included them not qualifying for the Champions League for the first time in 18 years. This led to the decision being made on Tuesday to terminate Moyes’ contract just 10 months into his six-year contract.
Over the last month patience of Manchester United fans really started to wear thin and murmurs starting spreading on Twitter that Moyes’ days were numbered. With every game that United lost the pressure on Moyes was being ramped up on Twitter and other social media platforms.
According to data from Topsy.com, since March 25 there have been 3,824,323 mentions of the word “Moyes” on Twitter, 1,456,778 of the phrase David Moyes and 135,765 people have Tweeted the hash tag #MoyesOut.
158,613 of the “Moyes” mentions were on the day that United were knocked out of the Champions League and 310,469 after Moyes’ former club Everton had beaten the Red Devils to all but finish United’s season as they could no longer finish in the Top 4 and therefore qualify for the Champions League.
The day Moyes was sacked resulted in 1.2 million uses of the phrase “Moyes” being Tweeted with many United fans happy with the news that the club had sacked its first manager since 1986.
On the other hand fans of rival clubs such as Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea took to Twitterdistraught that the man who had masterminded United’s shocking season had left the club.
Comparatively, in the same time frame the word Rodgers has only been mentioned 560,671 times in the whole month and Guardiola 702,199 times. Both teams are having fantastic seasons thus suggesting that failures are talked about considerably more on social media than successes are.
Moyes’ short term replacement Ryan Giggs has been mentioned 412,870 times on Twitter in the last few days. It will be interesting to see how he fares in the short term role and how Twitter reacts to his performances as a player-manager.
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