Jesse Lingard, West Ham and What Moyes Saw

Tricks of the Light

By Rory Smith

For possibly the first and only time this season, David Moyes was wrong. As the January transfer window drew to a close, his West Ham side had agreed on a deal to sign Jesse Lingard on loan from Manchester United, and Moyes was keen to stave off the Premier League’s proclivity for rushing to judgment.

As far as Moyes was concerned, Lingard was a smart option. He was well aware that what his team needed more than anything was a striker: Sebastian Haller had left for Ajax, leaving the redoubtable Michail Antonio as the club’s only specialist forward. And even he, strictly speaking, was a late-in-life sort of a striker.

The problem, as Moyes put it, was a scarcity of plug-and-play replacements on the market. Lingard, he said, might offer a way to think around the problem. He could play as a forward if necessary, but he could also play wide right, wide left, or in a deeper role through the middle. With West Ham chasing a place in Europe for next season, that versatility made him a great value.

Not everyone saw it that way. The reaction to Lingard’s arrival at West Ham was mixed. In English soccer’s ever-voluble punditocracy, its content-industrial complex, some saw him as a “diamond.” Others questioned whether a player who had been an outcast at Manchester United would be “good enough” to earn a place at West Ham.

A former teammate, Rio Ferdinand — long before he produced what may be the most extraordinary take of the season, on any subject, in any sport — had always been a staunch supporter of Lingard, but even he could see the player was a polarizing figure. He had, he said, “argued with pundit after pundit, on air and off air,” over the 28-year-old Lingard’s merits.

Moyes knew all of that, and so he asked for patience. “It will take him a little bit of time to settle, so let’s give him a chance,” he said a couple of days after Lingard arrived. And that is where he was wrong, because 24 hours later, Lingard was busy scoring twice on his West Ham debut, inspiring a rout of Aston Villa, and looking for all the world like the best player on the field.

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Since then, Lingard has hardly stopped. He did not, it turns out, need any time to settle at all. He has five goals in seven appearances for West Ham, the sort of form that has not only persuaded Moyes to attempt to sign him on a permanent deal but that has attracted the attentions of Leicester City and Aston Villa, too. This week, he returned to the England squad for the first time in two years.

Reputations rise and fall precipitously in soccer, but even by those standards, Lingard’s transformation, what he has described as his “new lease of life,” is eye-catching. He had not just become a bit-part player in Manchester United’s eyes; he had, to the wider world, become something close to a figure of fun.

Every month, a meme borrowed from the influential, worryingly prescient British comedy series “The Day Today” made its way round Twitter, asking if Lingard had scored or assisted on a league goal over the last four weeks. It had been started innocently enough, but, as is the way of things on social media, had been co-opted by cruelty.

The joke, of course, was that he never did. Lingard had enjoyed one golden month in December 2018, scoring four goals and creating two others, but had done nothing before or since. His reputation had been built on the exception, rather than the rule.

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That the impression stuck was, at least in part, because Lingard was seen as fair game for mockery. Partly, that was through no fault of his own. Pundits assailed him for his extracurricular business interests. The news media, meanwhile, bizarrely insisted on identifying him as a young prospect, long after he had outgrown that particular label. Fans, at least some, objected to his performed, public persona, particularly online.

And partly, he did not help himself. It is deeply unfair and moderately pompous to judge a young man for expressing his personality, but at the same time it seems likely that the elaborate goal celebrations, the social media antics and the use of the nickname J-Lingz did not help others take him seriously. Lingard, to some extent, was complicit in his Peter Panning.

By January this year, the combination of all those factors seemed to have brought Lingard’s career to a standstill. He had barely played for Manchester United, despite, in his view, the fact that he had returned from lockdown in good form and fine fettle. The only clubs interested in handing him a second chance were West Bromwich Albion and Newcastle United — the transfer market’s last refuge of the damned — and, thanks to the fact that Moyes had worked with him at Old Trafford eight years ago, West Ham.

The evidence of the last three months is that he chose correctly. Some credit for Lingard’s renaissance, of course, must go to Moyes, who has filled him with trust and confidence, and provided a space in which he can thrive. Much of it, too, must go to Lingard. He has a whiteboard on the wall at his home filled with a set of targets for him to achieve, including the number of shots he takes, the number of players he beats. In private, he is clearly very serious about his career.

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But there is a lesson in Lingard’s story, too. More than one, in fact. The first is an old one: that, in soccer, the stage matters as much as the ability of the actor. Players thrive and talent shines in a conducive environment; being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people is as important as an individual’s baseline of talent.

The second lesson is that perception can be skewed by circumstance, that it is too easily forgotten that the higher up soccer’s pyramid one goes, the thinner the air. It is easy to forget that only players of the very highest quality are good enough to be surplus to requirements at Manchester United and the rest of Europe’s rarefied elite.

Too often, there is an assumption that those who fail to make the grade at Old Trafford or the Bernabéu or the Allianz Arena have been exposed as talentless hacks, a curling of the nose at the idea of signing another team’s rejects.

The reality is not only different, it is the precise opposite: A player who has survived for as long as Lingard did at Manchester United will stand out, in fertile soil, almost anywhere else. Perhaps Lingard was not good enough, not any more, for the club where he started his career. That he was, at one time, should have been reason enough to take him more seriously than we did.

Postponing Problems

The managers of Europe’s elite clubs would hardly have been alone at breathing a sigh of relief, a couple of weeks ago, when South America’s soccer authorities confirmed the round of World Cup qualifiers scheduled to be held this week would be postponed.

It is precisely the outcome Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp and several of their peers had wanted, of course, and it was the correct course of action from a public health perspective. But they were not the only beneficiaries.

A two-week break in this most frantic of seasons will be of considerable benefit to those players who would, otherwise, have been traveling thousands of miles to play two matches inside five days. It is an unexpected blessing in a campaign that has pushed those whose job it is to play the game to their limits. Weary bodies will have had time to rest and repair. Tired minds will have had chance to reset.

There is, though, a drawback. Obviously there is a drawback. And it is that those games now have to be slotted in somewhere else, and the calendar is no less forgiving once this season is finished.

There is little space to play the postponed fixtures this summer. South America’s teams already have two delayed qualifiers to play in early June, squeezed in before yet another Copa América. (There is, as we have seen previously, always a Copa América. But don’t worry, they’ve changed this one, altering the format to make it worse.) And there is little room to breathe next season, with the schedule compressed anyway by the looming logistical problems of a mid-season World Cup at the end of 2022.

We have learned this lesson before, of course, but it bears repeating: There is too little slack in soccer’s calendar. What is dressed up as compromise is, in reality, often nothing more than greed, every interested party happy to sign up to anything as long as they get what they want. And, at the end of it all, the people who suffer are the ones who have to fulfill these ludicrous schedules: the players.

In Case You Missed It: U.S. 4, Jamaica 1

The Reward and the Risk

To many in women’s soccer in England, Monday was a day of vindication. After months of negotiation, the Women’s Super League — regarded by many, now, as the finest domestic competition on the planet — confirmed that it had agreed to a three-year television deal with Sky and the BBC, one that will earn its clubs almost $11 million per season.

The triumphalism is, in large part, warranted. Nobody will pay more to broadcast women’s soccer anywhere in the world. Sky has promised to give the W.S.L.’s games the same treatment — hope you like bombast and slow-motion montages, W.S.L. fans! — that it affords the Premier League. It is a level of exposure and, bluntly, revenue that those who have worked tirelessly to advance the women’s game deserve.

The hope, of course, is that the new deal will kick-start a virtuous circle: more investment means better facilities; better facilities attract (and produce, the thinking goes, though whether that part is correct or not is debatable) better players; better players lead to better games; better games attract more viewers; and more viewers lead to more investment.

There are, though, two notes of caution worth considering. The first is that the W.S.L. is, increasingly, dominated by two clubs: Manchester City and Chelsea, two teams that have packed their rosters with international players. Indeed, lack of competitive balance is as much an issue for the women’s game as it is the men’s.

Will this television deal give their rivals the resources to compete, or will it simply entrench their dominance? In the longer term, too, will the money not incentivize clubs simply to buy in talent, rather than develop homegrown players, a problem that men’s soccer has had to wrestle with for years?

And second, and more pressing: Though the free-to-air BBC will be showing a handful of games (and matches will be streamed by the Football Association itself), the vast majority will be on cable, effectively paywalled off from consumers.

Sports that have a far larger popular following than women’s soccer currently enjoys — including cricket and Formula 1 — have found that can be an obstacle to building, or even retaining, an audience. This W.S.L. deal is rich reward for all those involved in the undoubted success of women’s soccer in recent years. But lack of access is not, necessarily, a price worth paying.

Correspondence

Last week’s column on the folly of signing Eden Hazard prompted an impassioned and, if we are all completely honest, quite accurate defense of Real Madrid’s transfer dealings from Sebastian Royo.

“If you look at the players they have hired in the last few years — Vinicius, Rodrygo, Luka Jovic, Martin Odegaard, Ferland Mendy — they are all in their teens or early 20s,” Sebastian wrote. “If anything, Real can be accused of getting players who are too young and not ready to start, and not giving them enough opportunity to play and grow.”

This is a valid rebuttal. Real Madrid has spent a lot of money on young talent; so, for that matter, has Barcelona. But perhaps the problem is that, at the same time, both teams have been unable to resist signing ready-made superstars, which has to some extent limited the young players’ chances.

A great point, too, from David Hamlyn on the surprisingly enervating issue of quick free kicks’ being discouraged. “In this era of scripted play, the offensive side will still want to do their setup, thereby slowing play down,” he noted. This is right, I think: Teams work doggedly on set plays. I’m not sure they would automatically take them quickly, even if they could do so more easily.

Lynton Smith was in touch on the evergreen subject of video assistant referees and offside, which I’ll be returning to again in the near future — put a note in your diaries for that one — but one (throwaway) comment caught my eye. “We want as many goals in the game as we can,” Lynton wrote, “and the new precision disallows goals which in the past would have stood.” I don’t know if I agree with that assertion. Do we want as many goals as we can? Would that not make them less special? Is the gratification not in the delay?

And finally, Atticus Proctor asks a very good question. “Why is soccer so obsessed with always restructuring its tournaments and leagues? I’m only 25, but just in recent memory, Concacaf has restructured World Cup qualification, teams were added to the European Championships and the World Cup, the Nations League was created, and the Champions League has changed format four times since 1999.”

The glib answers, obviously, would be a) to make more money and b) to reflect the ever-shifting currents of the sport’s politics. But the endless flux is, in itself, interesting, because I wonder to what extent a prior willingness to be flexible leads to an assumption that everything is permanently up for grabs.

That’s all for this week. Any thoughts at all should be sent to askrory@nytimes.com so that I can steal them for easy content. Much the same happens on Twitter, and some of it invariably ends up on Set Piece Menu every week, too. This time around, we’re discussing what “international level” means, if anything.

Have a great weekend, and keep safe.

Rory

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