West Ham boss David Moyes admits job pressure has increased with improved results in recent seasons.
West Ham meet Fiorentina in the Europa Conference League final tomorrow night, but struggled in the Premier League.
Moyes told London Evening Standard: "I witnessed something similar when I was at Everton.
“You build up, then drop off, build up, drop off, until, eventually, you find a consistency level. We're still trying to find that.
“This is a different time, though. Maybe there wasn't the interest back then that there is now. For West Ham to be sixth and then seventh in the Premier League before dropping off has attracted an awful lot of attention.
“When you are building something, you are rarely going to get a regular upward curve, whoever is in charge of whatever club. There will be a season or two when things are going well, followed by one where it doesn't go as good and you haven't quite found the solution.
“If I had to, perhaps, name one reason, it would be the number of games we played the season before last. I think the achievement of finishing sixth, seventh and reaching the semi-final of a European competition, with certainly not a big squad, has probably gone under the radar a little.
“Our plan, in the light of that experience, was to build a bigger squad, and I would say that, in many ways, that plan worked, because the larger numbers have helped us reach the Europa Conference League Final.
“Where it hasn't worked as well is that those players who came in last summer have taken time to settle into the Premier League and we maybe didn't have everything in place right from the start.
“We probably had our worst period of the season just before the break for the World Cup, and that was a terrible time personally, because then I had to go through six weeks when nothing happened. We tried to be more attack-minded when we came back, but it didn't necessarily work. It was more just the players taking time to come back to form.
“We had been doing well again in Europe, though, and that was helping the positivity around the club."
