When David Moyes was sacked by Manchester United in April he and his wife, Pamela, decided to get away from it all for a few days and took a flight to Atlanta and then a connection to Naples in south-west Florida, where they have a holiday home among the palm trees and Gulf of Mexico beaches and probably thought they could escape all the noise and commotion.

The problem is it was more than their bags waiting for them at the airport. Driving along Highway 41, Moyes noticed a car tailing them in his wing mirrors. He woke the next morning at silly o’clock and tried to shake off the jet lag by going for a run on the beach. Already, there were paparazzi outside. They got him on the sand and they were clicking away again when he went for breakfast with Pamela. “She said: ‘I hope they don’t get me on the beach,’” he later joked. But it was no fun at the time and a jarring lesson straight away about how that awkward prefix – ex-Manchester United manager – is always going to shape his life.

A group of us football writers met him the next time he was in Florida, in the same week England were at their World Cup training camp in Miami, and at least by that stage he had some colour back in his cheeks. He was already talking about getting back into the business and for those of us who had the chance to break bread with him at his favourite Italian, Carpaccio in Bal Harbour, it was enlightening to be in his company and be reminded, close-up, that when a manager with his acute knowledge of the sport is talking freely, with the shackles off and no time constraints, those are moments to soak up.

If that sounds like we were being seduced into forgetting his 10 months at Old Trafford, then no, that is always going to be there. It is unshakeable, unforgiving, grievous. He will forever be obliged to live with it and there may never be a plausible explanation why United – or rather Sir Alex Ferguson – chose him for the job when José Mourinho and others were on the market. Some of us can recall asking one Old Trafford executive whether Moyes might be a realistic candidate a few weeks before it became a reality, and the laughter the question generated resonates even more now. So it was always a perplexing choice and an awkward subject for Ferguson to confront when his updated autobiography is published later this month.

Yet Moyes is not suddenly a dud. It might be hard pushing that argument at Old Trafford on Sunday when United play Everton and the two sets of supporters both seem grateful to refer to him in the past tense. Yet the Evertonians who belittle his achievements seem to have airbrushed out of history the fact they applauded him out of Goodison like football royalty. Nothing can ever mask the blindingly obvious: Moyes was out of his depth in Manchester, he seemed to have aged every time we saw him and, plainly, it is going to be a long way back. Yet there are mitigating circumstances if people are willing to listen, and it is not excuse-making or splashing on PR perfume to raise them on his behalf.

Ferguson offered his first public thoughts on the subject during a question-and-answer event at Lancashire County Cricket Club last Thursday and the message, essentially, was that Moyes was always on a hiding to nothing. “It was going to be difficult to follow me, whether it had been David or anyone else,” Ferguson told his audience. United, he pointed out, were simply unaccustomed to change. Moyes had been parachuted into a club “where the staff had worked with me for 26 years”. Of course it wasn’t going to be seamless.

It doesn’t answer everything – Mourinho, one imagines, would have backed himself to improve the team – but it is a reasonable point. Everything Moyes did was judged against the last man. Photographers at Old Trafford jostled for position so they could get Ferguson into shot, 30 yards over Moyes’s shoulder.

The players initially might have respected him, on the basis he was Ferguson’s pick. But it still wasn’t Ferguson and that, always, is what it came back to. “It wasn’t even that Moyes made one big mistake,” Rio Ferdinand says in his latest autobiography. “It was an accumulation of mistakes. He slowly lost us. It made me appreciate a lot of things about Fergie I’d taken for granted.”

At least two of the players, this newspaper has been told, became so disillusioned with Moyes they complained to the chief executive, Ed Woodward, about him. Another one remembers his half-time lecture during the 3-0 home defeat to City demoralising, rather than invigorating, the team (again, with a reference about what it used to be like under Ferguson). Ferdinand’s book is brutal, accusing Moyes of bringing a small-club mentality of “negativity and confusion”, of lacking the necessary force of personality and failing to understand that the first requirement at United is genuinely exciting football.

One story is of Moyes calling in Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic early last season to go through what the defence had done wrong in a 4-1 defeat to Manchester City. Moyes had put together around 15 video clips but neither player gave an inch and, flicking through that passage, the thought occurs that there is absolutely no way they would have dared gang up on the previous manager the same way. “We never got past clip five,” Ferdinand says. “It got pretty heated and I had the feeling he just wanted to cut the whole meeting short because he didn’t like confrontation.” Just compare that with the hold Ferguson had over his players.

Yet Ferguson did not find his successor by simply chucking a load of names into a bran tub and picking out one blindfolded, and we did not imagine it that 18 months ago the Metro newspaper ran an online poll for Arsenal supporters to vote who they wanted as manager and Moyes (21.7%) finished ahead of Arsène Wenger (19%) and Mourinho (15.4%). Now, if someone suggested he might be a candidate for, say, Newcastle United, the chances are there would be supporters at St James’ Park shifting uneasily. It is remarkable sometimes how quickly this business can unravel a manager’s reputation.

It was June when we met him and, four months on, he is still out of work. “I got my real first taste of the Champions League this year and I thought I showed I can manage at that level,” he told us. “I would like somewhere that would give me a chance of being in the Champions League or a club that has ambitions of being in the Champions League.”

In an ideal world, perhaps. Unfortunately, the stigma of failure at Old Trafford carries heavy consequences and Moyes, one suspects, might have to reassess. In his position, any Premier League job should be tempting.

Frank O’Farrell turned up at Cardiff City, then bottom of the Second Division, in his first job after his 1972 sacking from Old Trafford and then had spells with Iran’s national team, Torquay United and Al-Shaab in the United Arab Emirates. Wilf McGuinness, having also failed to make the changeover from Sir Matt Busby a successful one, wound up at Aris Salonika and it was there his hair fell out and he was told it might have been the trauma of losing his job at United. McGuinness wore a woman’s wig, trimmed to length, and threatened to fine his players if he caught them laughing until a game at Olympiakos Volos when one director, celebrating a goal, shook him so vigorously the hairpiece flew off and the pandemonium it caused persuaded him to ditch it for good.

Moyes’s indignities have been of a different kind but soul-destroying all the same. It has been 165 days since the guillotine came down and he will probably never get it out of his system. Yet Steve McClaren has shown it is possible to rebuild a reputation after taking more whacks than he will care to remember and however unfashionable it might be to say it, this weekend of all weekends, Moyes still has time, at 51, to do the same. Ferguson, funnily enough, always did say the best way to judge a man was how he reacted to adversity.

Empty stadiums better than empty gestures

When Diniyar Bilyaletdinov signed for Everton in 2009 a night out was arranged and the captain, Phil Neville, rang him just before he left to explain it was customary for all the players to wear a suit. The £9m signing from Lokomotiv Moscow was in jeans and trainers but, keen to make the right impression, he ironed a shirt and turned up looking crisp and business-like only to find everyone else in casual gear and realise he had been the victim of what is known, in dressing-room parlance, as banter.

Bilyaletdinov got his own back, emptying a plate of left-overs into the inside pocket of Neville’s coat, and later explained that back in Russia it was common there as well to play cruel stunts on one another. “What sort of thing?” someone asked. And the story Bilyaletdinov told was of a player putting a banana in the bag belonging to one of the black footballers.

It is a different culture but let’s not be fooled into thinking Russia are alone in having a problem. It can be found pretty much every day in a football context via Twitter and Kick It Out still have the emails and threats that were sent to their chairman, Herman Ouseley, for supporting Patrice Evra and Anton Ferdinand during the Luis Suárez and John Terry cases (Ouseley, incidentally, tells me he received an apology from Liverpool’s chief executive, Ian Ayre).

Yet Russia have established themselves at the top of the league table of serial offenders and at least Uefa, after all their previous pussyfooting, have finally shown some backbone by making CSKA Moscow play their next three European home fixtures in an empty stadium.

It is hardly fair that Manchester City’s followers will not be allowed into Arena Khimki on 21 October (though if they are enterprising enough they will copy Bayern Munich’s fans and hire the top floor of the adjacent tower block). Yet there is a bigger picture here. The punishments are finally carrying some weight and at least it spares us a repeat of what happened on City’s last visit to the Russian capital. On that occasion it was difficult to know which was worse: the monkey noises directed towards Yaya Touré or CSKA’s attempts to pretend it never happened.

Do the 2018 World Cup hosts understand the seriousness of the problem? Evidently not when Christopher Samba has been banned from Dynamo Moscow’s next two games for raising his middle finger in response to another round of that primitive ooh-oohing from Torpedo Moscow’s fans.

Time for Forest tribute to Taylor

After all the recent tributes for Brian Clough, the weekend should not pass without pointing out it brings up the anniversary of Peter Taylor’s death, the other half of their managerial partnership. It will be a quarter of a century next year, at the same time as Nottingham Forest commemorate their 150th anniversary. That surely is an opportunity for the two-times European Cup winners to do what many think is overdue and create a permanent tribute for Taylor. Clough, I would imagine, would have fully approved.