The Fosse Way

Posting this off the TFW account as I've no idea what the login is for my old account. I (David, or Fez on here back in the day) got to know Jonathan a bit over the years so this news has really floored me. I only found out last night, going on the Bookseller Crow website to buy a few books online which I did occasionally, given that it's quite a trek to the shop and because Jonathan would always include a little LCFC-related note in the parcel. It was about 10 years ago that I first got to know him, firstly over Twitter when I was writing about the 2015/16 season as it was happening. He was really helpful with connections and passing on a few tips as someone who had been in the bookselling industry for a long time to someone who had no idea what they were doing. His tweets about the customers who would come into the shop used to make me laugh a lot, like: Lady who always says in the course of conversation, My nephew the bestselling author, whose books you no longer stock... just came in. The first trip down to Crystal Palace to visit the bookshop felt like a bit of a pilgrimage. It was great to meet him in person and we had a long chat about LCFC. This was June 2017 so the Champions League adventures were still fresh in our minds. Although he was a Leicester fan, he had a season ticket at Crystal Palace so when we won there 2-0 in November 2019, I got in touch to ask if I should get my passport renewed for more European adventures. Just looking back at his reply now: "At times we were so brilliant. At half time the fans I sit with shook their heads and said we were terrifying going forward. Can't see a bad player, or a player not pulling his weight in any position... No question this is the best City team I have ever seen - but I'm still haunted by the Heskey Collymore demolition of Sunderland, which was glorious and then became the prelude to years and years of shite." That was a bit of a crystal ball of a comment - either for the failed Champions League bids or the relegation, take your pick. But of course, we did win the FA Cup in 2021. When Leicester fans passed away after the league win, I always felt a bit glad that they got to see something like that happen in their lifetime. Jonathan started going down to Filbert Street in the 60s when we were losing FA Cup finals left, right and centre so it was brilliant that not only did he get to see us win one but he got to see his adopted second team win it this year too. I always had a huge amount of respect and admiration for the way he did things. Basically not compromising, sticking to his principles and calling out people who didn't align to them. You've probably got to be stubborn to co-run an independent bookshop in such an expensive city for decades when Amazon and co are making it harder and harder to keep things going. On that note, the bookshop has got a GoFundMe set up so, even if you didn't know Jonathan, if anyone has a few spare quid to contribute in honour of his love for LCFC, you can donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/bookseller-crow-needs-your-help-to-survive The last messages we exchanged were just over 12 months ago when I asked him what Edouard and Ayew were like as signings. He wasn't far wrong in his assessment... And then the last time I went down to the shop earlier this year, I forgot to let him know I was coming and sod's law it was his day off so I didn't see him. I had a nice chat with his partner Justine who has run the shop with him all this time, but it wasn't quite the same without the opportunity to have a moan about LCFC. One of the good guys. And if you didn't know Jonathan but have got this far, thanks for reading.

Last season they were having a right laugh in the training videos every week and then were 3-0 down inside 20 minutes.

Probably need to stop doing this to yourselves.

If he was remotely close to a move then in the club’s current financial situation, jeopardising receiving millions of pounds in almost pure PSR profit to play a full-back in one game (in which he was poor and then got injured) might be an idea but it’s not a good idea.

Nice that he’ll finally get to play alongside his brother Dan.

“Alright mate, you going to the clash against Sheffield Wednesday?”

We’ve published our season predictions this morning and thought we’d post here so you can add your own. https://thefosseway.net/2025/08/09/leicester-city-fans-big-season-predictions-for-25-26/ Your mood in 10 words? Where will we finish? How many points will we be deducted? Who will be our most important player? Who will be top scorer? What are you most excited about? What are you most worried about? What’s one thing you most want to see this season? Which player is going to surprise us? Which player do you most want out the door? Which player linked with a move are you most desperate to keep? Will Martí Cifuentes still be the manager this time next year?

Time for some voluntary redundancies: https://www.nationthailand.com/business/corporate/40052890 Can think of a few candidates.

Justice for @Ric Flair - imagine if we'd brought in either of these first two in January 2023 instead of Kristiansen... https://thefosseway.net/2022/11/08/leicester-city-transfer-targets-left-back-january-window/

"The Van Nistelrooy era is ultimately an unmitigated failure. Yet a strange kind of failure, largely unaccompanied by the sort of vitriol you might expect for a manager with a record as historically bad as his." https://thefosseway.net/2025/05/23/the-last-days-of-ruud/

Given the brand new information we've had today, can we now have Strongly Disagree in capitals or something? Maybe a new Vehemently Disagree option. Disagree So Hard My Head's Fallen Off

https://www.readytogo.net/smb/threads/chris-mepham.1654216/

The key question here, as always and forever, is whether former Blackburn and Man United chief scout Mick Brown remains very well-connected within the game.

https://www.thefosseway.net/viewpoint/leicester-city-non-league-reconnection

Shape the future? Seven changes please Stolarcyzk, Coulibaly, Coady, Okoli, Thomas, Braybrooke, Skipp, El Khannouss, Evans, McAteer, Vardy (or some slight variation) https://www.thefosseway.net/viewpoint/leicester-city-shape-future-southampton

Last night was evidence you won’t get an angry reaction if most of the angry people have stayed at home.

“These fixtures have a surreal air to them. It’s like tasking ChatGPT to put together a Premier League football team. In a literal sense it has achieved that goal. This is a Premier League team playing Premier League games. On Wikipedia in 20 years time, it will describe Leicester City as having participated in the Premier League in the 2024/25 season. Every match is designed to pass a cursory test. Pop this one into your AI checker and it’ll soar through with flying colours. Manchester City 2 Leicester City 0, a perfectly normal scoreline. Chris Sutton isn’t going to shout about it on TalkSport, no one is going to call anyone a disgrace. It’s just going to drift quietly away, never to be spoken about again, just like Leicester City 0 Manchester United 3, or Chelsea 1 Leicester City 0, or Leicester City 0 Arsenal 2. In fact, to complain about them would actually be a sign of unreasonable expectations at this stage, a sign of your own failings, not ours. Why would you be angry at this set of entirely reasonable results. We stole a record of every result in Premier League history and rubbish teams always lose to good teams, what did you expect? Possibly this is Van Nistelrooy’s masterplan, a genius tactic to perform such feats of dull mediocrity that the most basic acts of competence look like historic success. To flood the market with mindlessly boring results so no one notices that he’s pouring out defeats on an overwhelming scale.” https://www.thefosseway.net/matchday/leicester-city-match-report-manchester-city-away-25

We’ve set up a WhatsApp channel purely to post article links (so usually max 3-4 messages per week) to try to solve this. No chat, replies, waffle. Just the links straight to your phone. Follow the The Fosse Way channel on WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAQS8HCBtxBn82ln12s

You can understand why 99% of non-Leicester think we should be eternally grateful for 2016/2021 and not kick up a fuss about the long decline since. It heightens the fairytale even more if we slip into total EFL anonymity for the next two decades. But for so many of our own fans to care what anyone else thinks is ridiculous.

Cheers. Since Musk took over, the traffic from there dropped like a stone anyway to be honest. Most people either go to the site direct, go via NewsNow or if a link gets posted on here. We’re lucky we don’t have to chase ad revenues so if we’re uncomfortable with something we can just bin it. Always welcome anyone sharing stuff wherever they like though. Especially at the moment when it feels like a lot of us are trying to make the case for change to other fans.

Billionaires don’t like being laughed at https://www.thefosseway.net/viewpoint/leicester-city-the-winds-of-change-are-howling

Her name is Kate

The owner interacting with the players is meaningless if you keep buying crap ones on long contracts. When it was Vichai tweaking Riyad’s ears because he’d told him he was staying for another year then fair enough. When it’s Top walking round the pitch at Preston celebrating winning a league we should never have been in, it’s not the same thing.

Of all the hills to die spectacularly on.

You can’t expect any supporters’ group with minimal backing from the fanbase to start getting regular wins out of a club that doesn’t listen, that isn’t interested in being a trailblazer in anything, that treats fan engagement like a tickbox exercise. It’s not the Trust’s decision to make meeting content confidential. We know that dealing with the club is a nightmare and often seems pointless. I do often wonder what the point of the Trust is, not because of the Trust but because of the club. How do you have any kind of influence over an organisation that treats you with disdain? But you can’t just give up either. For that reason, the Trust clearly needs a win as much as the team does, to justify itself and to show it’s worth reforming in the first place. And it’s still going to sound weak sometimes because it’s one of these organisations where you need sign-off to do anything, so I assume people get nervous and stuff gets watered down before it goes out. You can applaud Union FS statements for strongly condemning the club. But the club is taking the piss out of them on a regular basis, posting photos of their section on social media to try and make the ground look like the Bombonera while simultaneously banning their members without evidence of any offence being committed. Surely hundreds if not thousands of people are furious about stuff like that. Not everyone, or even the majority of fans maybe, but still a lot of people. And that fury should be channelled into strengthening the collective voice of the Trust, Union FS and anything else that comes along like Project Reset if that sticks around, rather than constantly laying into the Trust at the exact time we’ve started to try to drag it into the 21st century. That’s going to take a bit of time, just as Project Reset didn’t look like the Spurs protests today. The Trust badly needs a rebrand in my opinion, as I still associate even that logo with an antiquated way of doing things - which hopefully will change with the new co-chairs, board members and doubled membership numbers. But let’s keep plugging away.