Fixing the Foxes: Leicester City need to stop the drift and turn the tide
Enhanced expectations and dismal decisions have collided to make many Leicester City fans feel detached from our club. This is a reality we need to recognise and an important point in the club’s history to start getting things right again.
3rd May 2016. I woke up early and before I went to work, I lapped up all of the adulation Leicester City Football Club was receiving as if I had achieved something myself. They had been “we” for so long that it almost felt like I really had contributed over the previous few months by willing it into reality.
The Daily Telegraph were running a liveblog for the occasion and I fired off a quick email to them, which they swiftly published. The part I remember most is: “I'm so happy for anyone who cares as much about this football club as I do. We'll have an undercurrent of happiness for the rest of our lives because we'll always have this.”
As it turns out, that undercurrent hasn’t always been prominent. For much of the 2022/23 season it was somewhere near the seabed, buried under waves and waves of anger and frustration.
But 2016’s Premier League title and the 2021 FA Cup win that followed had elevated Leicester City forever - the nearly club that had never won the league or cup won both in the space of five years and suddenly there was a precedent of success. Expectations to be met. A thirst for more.
Supporters that were previously content with mid-table top flight finishes were now baulking at finishing fifth twice, or a lowly eighth.
I was one of them, standing in the Stadio Olimpico and bemoaning Leicester’s inability to overcome Roma.
Was this a lack of gratitude? Or simply ambition?
The spectrum of a fanbase reflects the spectrum of humanity and for every supporter who felt frustrated by falling at each hurdle, there would be another pointing out just how high that hurdle still was for a club like Leicester.
Even so, most knew we needed a reset - we’d been talking about it for months, even before relegation began to look likely.
So what does that reset actually look like? Is it achievable? Or is this just something that will keep cropping up when we’re not winning?
There are clearly off-field issues that need a reset, many of which grew in the minds of supporters last year - despite winning most weeks.
The discontent last year shows that this isn’t a fickle thought. It’s now a long-standing acceptance among supporters that it’s been years since we were a well-run club on and off the pitch, and high-performing individuals have papered over the cracks.
When Leicester set out to appoint a new manager in the summer of 2023 ahead of a gruelling Championship campaign, it seemed pretty clear we needed a big personality for that exact reason.
Only someone with stature could override all of the failings behind the scenes and impose themselves on the club. There were some fans who disliked Enzo Maresca’s playing style from the start and the numbers of the disaffected grew both as the season threatened to unravel and when he left at the first opportunity - but Maresca fitted the bill perfectly.
In the absence of a grand plan, he was a sticking plaster.
In one sense, it was something of a gamble to appoint such an inexperienced manager. He should have been grateful for the opportunity and the club deserve credit for such a successful appointment.
In another sense, he very quickly began to look like an SAS soldier dropped into an episode of Dad’s Army. He’d stride into his office only to learn that our finances were so catastrophic the Football League had taken up arms against us. Or that we were sending an Italian midfielder home in the final minutes of transfer deadline day. Or that one of our players turned down a major international tournament call-up only to get sent off and miss all our games anyway.
There always seems to be an element of the absurd for anyone associated with Leicester City to deal with.
I once read an article where the celebrity chef Tom Kerridge reviewed the film Boiling Point and said that all of the events in the film would happen in a restaurant but not all on the same night.
Leicester City remind me of that quote every so often. The things that happen to Leicester do happen at football clubs, but for them all to happen to one club?
Perhaps other clubs are the same. After all, Brighton and Brentford have had their own issues despite being held up as models of perfection. Brighton spent £25million on a midfielder who promptly got his leg broken within 9 minutes of his debut in a Carabao Cup game. Brentford lost their star striker for nine months to a gambling-related ban while advertising a betting company on the front of their shirts.
The key difference is that, even though unforeseen situations might cause them problems, they have both managed to maintain a modicum of top flight success and retained the respect of their fanbases. Their supporters trust those in charge, because they hear from them regularly and they know what the long-term vision is for their clubs.
Meanwhile, we muddle on with no communication from anyone in the corridors of power who are too busy churning out £200 jackets and sending out trophy lift invites to influencers.
We lack clarity about what Leicester City want to be in any realistic sense.
We had previously been savvy wheeler dealers. Then we began to get practically every transfer decision horribly wrong at the very point in the game’s history when new financial rules made clever dealings crucial to each club’s success.
My suspicion is that there’s no scope for us to hear the specifics of a long-term vision when there’s a very real possibility it will go up in flames at the end of the season with another costly relegation.
During the 2022/23 season, I remember repeatedly thinking we just had to get through it. Hope there were three teams worse than us. Admit our mistakes, sack the manager and the director of football in the summer and start again. Two years on and my thoughts are alarmingly similar.
We need to feel pride again.
Winning more would fix this, but in the absence of that, playing in an exciting or inspiring style would do. Getting it right in the transfer market, something that feels further away again as Steve Cooper strays from playing our summer acquisitions.
Fielding our most promising youngsters occasionally would help - instead our run of Academy players in matchday squads has ended and we’re padding it out with veterans.
Making fans feel wanted and important and listened to. I’ve felt more like a nuisance by wanting to support my club in the past few years, just another potential troublemaker for them to have to accommodate.
Doing things right off the pitch plays a huge part in whether you feel pride in your football club. Leicester City do some of this well, but there’s so much more they could be doing.
It’s all felt a bit lazy and complacent in recent times, similar to how our transfer approach has seen us overtaken by heavily data-driven clubs. These clubs have been able to replace key personnel and continue their progress because of their strategic view from the top.
There may still be an undercurrent of happiness at what this club has given us in the recent past. Meanwhile, there’s a tanker to turn to make Leicester City fans optimistic about the club’s long-term future.
For now, Cooper and his players are just trying to stay afloat because the way the club have taken on the authorities makes relegation a terrifying prospect.
It should be all hands on deck to support them. But the language used by many supporters on social media and messageboards is more reminiscent of a vessel slowly drifting away on the tide.
People who have only ever known being completely obsessed with this club are becoming detached and distant. It’s sad to see and to feel. It’s not going to be fixed overnight. It’s up to Leicester City to stop the drift with a series of decisions that bring us closer to our club once more.
