David Moyes's Biography

Who is David Moyes?

He started his playing career with Celtic. He then moved on to Shrewsbury, Bristol City and Dunfermline, making over 550 league appearances in total.

David Moyes ended his playing days at Preston North End, where he became a coach.

At Preston, David Moyes worked his way up to assistant manager and eventually became the manager in 1998.

In his first full season as manager at Deepdale, David Moyes almost got Preston promoted after reaching the play-offs, but they then lost to Gillingham in the semi-finals.

A season later, in May 2000, Preston were crowned champions of Division 2 and were automatically promoted. Then they made an impressive start in the First Division and were outside contenders for immediate promotion.

In the end, Preston finished the season well, reaching the play-off final, but lost 3-0 to Bolton. The season was over but David Moyes was on the list of possible candidates for a few big name jobs, like Man City, Southampton and West Ham.

To settle the rumours David Moyes signed a 5 year contract with Preston, but the club allowed him to talk to Everton after the dismissal of Walter Smith and he joined the Toffees.

David Moyes's first task was to keep Everton in the Premiership and the Everton fans gave Moyes a hero's welcome after David Unsworth's goal for Everton in the first 30 seconds against Fulham in Moyes's first match. Everton won 2-1.

In 2004-2005 Everton surprised everybody when having sold Wayne Rooney, they still qualified for the Champions League. It was David Moyes's greatest achievement thus far.

Wayne Rooney revealed years later in his autobiography that: "I would have gone almost anywhere just to get away from David Moyes." Rooney wrote that Moyes "appeared overbearing; just wanting to control people."

In June 2008, David Moyes accepted substantial libel damages over claims made by Wayne Rooney in his autobiography, including Rooney's version of how he came to leave Everton. Moyes said he would donate the money to the Everton Former Players Foundation.

Back in 2002, David Unsworth had a different view of David Moyes's attention to detail. He told BBC Sport:

"David Moyes has come in and turned the club around. He's brought in players like Richard Wright and Joseph Yobo to add quality and works us very hard in training. We train as we play. We pass the ball and the atmosphere is fantastic."

The 2005/6 season started poorly for Everton with early departures from both the Champions League and the UEFA Cup but from the turn of the year their performance was much improved.

Similarly, Everton went through a bad patch in the 2006/7 season but still managed to end up 8th.

Everton under Moyes continued to perform consistently well and in the 2008/9 season were once again 8th in the Premiership.

After further successful seasons with Everton, on 9 May 2013, it was announced that David Moyes would take over from Sir Alex Ferguson as the Manchester United manager on a six-year contract starting on 1 July.

David Moyes's tenure at Manchester United was not a success and he lasted less than a season. He was sacked on April 22 2014, by which time it had become statistically impossible for Manchester United to qualify for the Champions League.

In November 2014, David Moyes became manager of Real Sociedad in Spain, however he left there a year later.

In July 2016, Sunderland announced that David Moyes was taking over from the new England boss Sam Allardyce as manager.

However, Sunderland under Moyes, ended up being relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 2016/17 season and he resigned from the club.

In November 2017, he was appointed manager of West Ham.

Although he oversaw West Ham's survival in the Premiership, David Moyes left the club in May 2018.

However, in December 2019, West Ham sacked Manuel Pellegrini and once again appointed Moyes manager.

He was coach at West Ham until the end of the 2023-24 season.