Leicester City’s grand plan finally revealed: Do nothing
As the final hours of the January transfer window ticked down, relegation-haunted Leicester City sat by and watched as rivals strengthened. What message does that send to a fanbase losing hope that this team can be competitive at Premier League level?
Gazing around at the majestic Tottenham Hotspur Stadium while revelling in Leicester’s glorious comeback victory, it would have taken a very cynical soul to think this moment was in fact Tottenham’s most elaborate and effective attempt at revenge for the misery they experienced in 2016.
Losing at home to one of the worst top flight Leicester City sides in living memory was a masterstroke. It ended the Foxes’ run of seven consecutive defeats, which in turn both killed off the gathering momentum of planned protests and briefly quietened the clamour for new blood at the end of the transfer window.
Desperate to harness any kind of positivity, Leicester - both club and fans - went into overdrive for a couple of days. The club’s response was understandable up to a point. Wheel out the GOAT content. Do an interview with Jakub Stolarczyk. Sweep Bilal El Khannouss into “The Box” and ask him to relive his winning goal.
Reading and listening to some of the fan opinion, you’d have thought Boubakary Soumare was up for the Ballon D’Or and Bobby Decordova-Reid was the answer to all our creative problems.
Meanwhile, we called it an “accidental triumph” and were hounded on social media for not “getting behind the lads”.
At Goodison Park it took just 10.18 seconds for reality to hit: sadly, this is a terrible football team representing a terribly-run football club and it would be astounding if relegation is somehow avoided.
When games against the two teams we’ve been trying to target have come along, we’ve lost 3-0 to one and 4-0 to the other. Both defeats were surreally catastrophic in the visuals they presented.
Across those two, we had Danny Ward lying flat on his back as the ball rolled over the goalline; Abdoulaye Doucoure skipping through to score in exactly the same time the best male British sprinter qualified for the 100m final at last year’s Olympics; Soumare - a man Ruud van Nistelrooy described as “exceptional” after the Tottenham game - being breezed past for the nth time this season.
Yet neither of these had quite the same “fold the club” energy as the 2-0 defeat at home to Fulham, an almost carbon copy of the 2-0 defeat at home to Crystal Palace three days earlier. Watching the same thing happen twice in such short succession had a visceral effect - the resignation turned to anger and the anger prompted a sense that something had to happen.
In that moment, it felt inconceivable that nothing would change. Albeit this is Leicester. Semper Eadem and all that. But the ferocity of feeling seemed sure to set events in motion.
Trudging back down Raw Dykes Road, four things occurred as possible ways to lift the gloom that had descended on the club: change the formation; play the kids; buy some players; sack Rudkin.
All very different actions, none of which would make our current players much better but each of which might have created a spark.
Leicester have seemingly chosen option 5: Do nothing. In that time, of course, the win at Spurs also added three points to the season’s tally. A win that masked the many issues.
The formation, with this set of players, should clearly be some variation of 3-4-2-1. More centre-back cover, more in the middle of the park and a way to play El Khannouss and Facundo Buonanotte without being exposed out wide.
We have continually seen that we don’t have the personnel to play 4-2-3-1. The centre-backs can’t do it. The central midfielders can’t do it. And the wingers don’t exist. But for now, at least, nothing has changed in this respect. Not even at half time of the calamity at Goodison Park, which adds to the feeling that everyone’s given up - from players to manager to leadership.
Playing the kids is a popular call that rarely bears fruit but the logic is actually more sound in these days of PSR. If you have talented young players, better to play them and try to increase their value than to waste valuable Premier League minutes on veterans whose monetary value is practically nil anyway.
The other reason to try the youngsters is to make it look like you’re trying, even if they prove not to be good enough. What’s the worst that could happen? A 4-0 defeat to another poor Premier League team? But no. Will Alves is packed off to Cardiff and it’s Ayew and Reid on the wings. So easy to defend against, so little for the opposition to worry about.
The mad trolley dash at the end of the January transfer window is the last resort of the poorly-run football club. Buy some players and hope it all works out. If this wasn’t Leicester City, it would be scarcely believable that even this hasn’t happened. That we’ve got ourselves into such a horrendous state with PSR that we can sell a player for £10million and still not spend any more than £2million during the entire window.
This may feel familiar from the Brendan Rodgers era but it’s the first time a January transfer window in the top flight has combined a ridiculous lack of activity (see: the Champions League-chasing years) with the stench of relegation (see: January 2023). As with the nature of the defeat at Everton, it somehow feels both like deja vu and a new low.
There’s a distinct grubbiness to the transfer window. The idea of clubs having good windows and bad windows, the Sky Sports and Talksport and Fabrizio Romano circus of it all. It must be hell sometimes to be inside, to work for a club and to sift through all the rubbish to the work of value. But that is the job. And it’s the most important one of all, especially when your team is as uncompetitive as ours has been this season.
Sadly, all the evidence suggests that our football club is simply not set up to excel at the most important work. Never mind working towards the previously stated aim of challenging the established elite of English football - it doesn’t even give the appearance of a competent Premier League outfit.
January may be a difficult time to do business, if you ignore the fact most other clubs manage it. But the lack of PSR wiggle room is down to bad decisions made in the past, not least in the summer when tens of millions were spent on players who can’t get in a dreadful team.
For those fans who can’t decide who exactly to blame, or can’t bring themselves to target the Srivaddhanaprabhas, it is nonetheless baffling that the owners are seemingly putting personal relationships ahead of sound business decisions.
This is not a one-way problem either. Not bringing players in is one thing, but to fail to sell our weakest squad members when we have had offers reflecting their value has been bizarre. It leaves the impression that almost every player at the club is overrated, and that it’s one big, cushy, overpaid family enjoying spa treatments at their big resort in the country.
No dynamism. No difficult decisions. No big statements. Just Conor Coady on a podcast saying there’s an unbelievable atmosphere in the dressing room. It’s little wonder. This is the easiest gig in the game. You can be terrible for years and still get a money-spinning free transfer or another three-year contract at the end of it.
Off the field, you can sit in an office at a £100million training ground and do almost nothing of note for weeks on end while every other club is scrambling to sign players. You can communicate nothing. You can change nothing. You can achieve nothing. And that, apparently, is fine.
There must be people within the club who are unhappy about all this. But nothing is forthcoming. Yesterday’s media line about PSR concerns obviously didn’t make it to Ruud van Nistelrooy before any of his countless recent press conferences at which he talked about the club working hard to bring players in. It may have felt like a throwaway line but it set an expectation.
It doesn’t help that the manager is the only person who speaks. As ever, the C word looms large when discussing Jon Rudkin… communication.
Without it, the end result is that at the exact time in a football club’s life cycle when you need the fans onside, you have alienated them in every way possible and given the impression that it’s too late to do anything about it. So instead of turning up for our remaining games ready to roar our hearts out to try to carry our team to victory, many supporters feel like we’re deciding between getting angry and giving up ourselves.
Fans will continue to be labelled entitled. But eventually, surely someone will have to assume culpability for the vast distance Leicester City feels from being an established Premier League football club. Forget the league win, the cup win, the European exploits. Just being a settled top flight team is a modest ambition and last Saturday, like so many before it this season, rammed home the gulf that has opened up.
So as we look back on Ruud van Nistelrooy’s comments in the past few weeks about the club working hard to bring in players and think back to when we heard the same from previous managers, there’s a familiar feeling taking root. If the club’s approach feels like resignation, then the concept of the manager doing exactly that doesn’t feel too far-fetched either.
Most damningly for our football club, the number of fans angry at him for walking out at our time of need would surely be smaller than the number who would wish him well and chalk it up as another item on the charge sheet for the leadership at Leicester City.
That famous banner about the time for action springs to mind. But again, it seems to already have passed.
