You never go full Tim Sherwood. It’s the first rule of football.
The former Tottenham and Aston Villa manager became a laughing stock for bringing up his win ratio as a defence-mechanism (yes, yes, a better defence mechanism than Richards and Lescott at centre-back), and it was used against him whenever people found it convenient to do so.
So, if you were an under-pressure manager with a point to prove at your new club, you probably shouldn’t go down that route.
We said you *probably shouldn’t*, David.
MOYES: "I have the fourth best winning record in the @premierleague. I don't want to lose that, I want to better it."
— Sunderland AFC (@SunderlandAFC) August 1, 2016
A manager saying he wants to win is like a model saying he wants to be really, really ridiculously good-looking. It’s par for the course, and thinking any different just defeats the point of why you were selected for the role in the first place.
And about that ‘fourth best’ claim. How accurate is it?
Moyes won four games out of nine in his first season at Everton and 17 wins in his first full campaign, while the following 10 Premier League campaigns saw him chalk up nine, 18, 14, 15, 19, 17, 16, 13, 15 and 16 victories respectively When you add in the 17 wins from 34 games in charge at Old Trafford, the Scotsman has a win percentage of just under 41%.
That puts him below Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho, Mauricio Pochettino, Claudio Ranieri, Ronald Koeman, Slaven Bilic and Francesco Guidolin when it comes to Premier League win percentages.
When you add newcomers Walter Mazzarri, Antonio Conte and Pep Guardiola into the mix, and note that Hull are currently without a permanent manager, you’ll notice that there are almost as many top-flight managers with a better win record than Moyes as there are with one worse than him.
Just for kicks, we decided to check Sherwood’s win percentage in the Premier League as well.
He won 13 out of 22 games at Tottenham, five out of 13 in his first season at Aston Villa and one out of 10 in his second, making for a total of 19 out of 45, or 42.2%.
Oh.
