ClaphamFox

I certainly agree that if we've not made an appointment by early July it will strongly indicate they've completely bungled it yet again.

Is he? A few reports suggested his contract ran until the last game…

"Please sit down, darling. I've got some news to share with you. I'm afraid there's no easy way to say this, but..."

I'd describe myself as open-minded rather than positive. There has been a restructure of sorts and although it has been nowhere near as extensive as we all hoped for, there are at least some new people involved in making decisions. There might be a change of direction, there might not. I'm curious to know which. I think you're right about Rowett. He's basically in the same position now as he was in the weeks before he was appointed in February: a back-up option. If he was first choice for the role, they'd have announced him by now; however, if he'd been completely ruled out they'd have probably issued a statement thanking him for his efforts, etc. As neither of these things has happened, we can only assume that we want somebody else but have not secured their services yet—and are not 100% sure whether we will do so. My best guess? The club has a couple of ambitious options in mind and are negotiating (or seeking negotiations) with them, but are waiting for: 1) those individuals to give us an answer; 2) the play-offs situation to be resolved; or 3) the new financial year to start. And while the club doesn't really want Rowett, they also think he'd be a better option than some of the other names out there so don't want to burn any bridges with him just yet. This is far from ideal, I agree. But I'd prefer us to at least explore a few ambitious options rather than rush to appoint an inferior candidate just because they're free and available.

We're all nervous, and with good reason. But personally I'd rather remain nervous for the next seven weeks than wake up tomorrow to discover we've appointed Russell Martin or Will Still.

Do you know for a fact that this is happening? In other words, you're 100% certain that: a) the club has learned absolutely nothing from our recent terrible managerial appointments and catastrophic relegations; and b) the appointment of McCarron will make absolutely no difference to anything? I understand why people are cynical after the shit we've been through, but this assumption that literally nobody at the club is capable of reflecting on our mistakes and seeking to improve things, including our new sporting director, seems a little bit overdone to me.

But what if the club knows who it wants but is not in a position to appoint them until after the play-off situation has been resolved or the new financial year has begun?

The problem is, while rushing to get somebody in may appease an understandably impatient fanbase, it wouldn't necessarily lead to us appointing the best candidate. Obviously the ideal scenario is that we get the best available candidate in and we do it soon, but IF the choice was between appointing a mediocre manager this week or waiting until July to appoint a very good manager, I would prefer us to do the latter.

It won't be as late as this, but I can see it being early July if we need to pay compensation for somebody already in a job.

We’re never going to see Ayew in a Leicester shirt again irrespective of who takes the job. You can make a strong case for why we shouldn’t give the job to Rowett without making up daft stuff like this.

It’s looking almost certain now that we complied in 2024/25. We won’t know the current season‘s financial results until next April. However, all clubs in the Championship have to submit a PSR projection for the current season and if the EFL suspects a club is heading for a breach, it typically seeks to take preventative action via as business plan, transfer embargo, etc. That’s what they tried to do to us in 23/24 because they suspected (correctly, as it turned out) that we were heading for a breach. We challenged this and ultimately did not have a business plan, although we did have a transfer embargo for a short time. This all became public because of our legal challenge. There have been no reports of the EFL seeking to take any such action against us this season. This may be because they don’t think we’re going to breach, or it may be that they believe we ARE heading for a breach and have taken some action agains us, but it hasn’t become public because we’re not legally challenging it this time. It will be interesting to see if there is a mad scramble to sell players between 15-30 June…

Sorry—this is the depressives’ support group, mate. The rational group meet further down the corridor on the right.

Semi-finals will still be over two legs.

I mean I hate Farage with a passion, but I've got to hand it to him: positioning himself as the solution to a problem that he played a major role in creating takes some chutzpah. Astonishingly, people actually seem to be falling for it.

There are absolutely no credible rumours linking us with anybody. People can decide for themselves why this might be.

He's being linked with Bristol, albeit from a crap source. I don't think it will happen, but I'll be gutted if it does. https://x.com/SportsPeteO/status/2052697756301504701?s=20

As a society we are becoming more fast food. Social media, which was once hailed as a great liberating force, has sharply reduced the public’s attention span and ability to absorb complexity. Literacy is in decline. Nuance has gone.

I’ve been advised not to do that until the ankle tag comes off mate.

I suppose it's because players are regarded as assets that can increase in value, whereas compensation paid to obtain a new manager is just a risky expense (you could pay a few million to get somebody and end up sacking him a few months later). Nonetheless, I think it's a risk we will probably have to take if we want to get somebody decent in. I hope the board has learned that targeting only the cheapest candidates can be a very false economy.

If we want to break the cycle of poor managerial appointments we may well have to pay compensation for somebody currently in a job. Hopefully we won't have to wait until 1 July to be able to afford it, but I wouldn't rule it out.

The story was reported on a betting-affiliated website in an attempt to generate betting activity on our next manager. We're not going to employ a manager who was sacked a few months ago when his club was bottom of the division we will be aiming to win next season. That's why nobody remotely credible has touched the story with a barge pole.

We’re not interested in Ferguson.

He's become a lot more popular with their fans after following the Youri Tielemans and James Justin path of initially being very poor at a new club before improving dramatically once the influence of Seagrave starts to wane...

I suspect that there are relegation clauses in place that will reduce players' wages next season. The important question is by how much, and whether they will be enough to encourage the likes of Vestergaard to look for another club.

The source of the Darren Ferguson story appears to be the SportsBoom website, which published a story last week claiming that the club has “made contact’” with Ferguson about the role. SportsBoom is heavily linked with the betting industry—on its own pages it says that it “earns commission through affiliate links” to betting operators. In other words, its business model is tied to generating betting traffic and engagement around markets such as “next Leicester manager”. The story has now been dutifully trotted out across other media outlets, but most seem to shy away from the claim that we’ve actually spoken to Ferguson. TalkSport—which also coincidentally has a betting site —claims that Ferguson “has been mooted” as a potential candidate, which just means that somebody somewhere unconnected to the club has raised it as a possibility. It seems they’ve then spoken to Ferguson or his agent and been told that he’d be “open” to it if offered, which does not sound like the kind of language somebody would use if they actually in talks about the job. No credible journalists with a track record of breaking Leicester-related stories have bothered to pick up the story. I suggest there is a good reason for that.