Rating our managerial appointments

[LittlethorpeFox]

I have been reading a lot on here about how badly the club is being ran and the lack of aptitude within the Board, Jon Rudkin getting the brunt of most people's anger.   The majority of people, i think are being too harsh. I am just going to talk about my opinion on how the Board have performed when it comes to hiring and firing managers in the last 7 years. I'm not talking about recruitment or player power or backwards and sidewides passing - just purely on the business decisions made by the board regarding the head coach/manager of LCFC.

 

Lets go back to November 2011, the return of NP. Fairly brave decision by the owners to go back to a manager they had forced out the door 18 months before. Obviously a good appointment, taking us from the Championship and leaving us as the best team in the country. Lets not forget that in this period, the owners stood by him during the dreadful run of no wins at the back end of the 2012-2013 season, and during our residency at the bottom of the Premier League in our return year in 2014-15. The appointment and two periods of keeping faith in NP must go down as c4 years of excellent stewardship of our club.

 

Fast forward to Ranieri. I don't even need to mention the footballing side of this. But cast your mind back to the moment you found out he was our manager. How did you feel when you saw the photos of him holding the shirt. "Claudio Ranieiri, really?"  - we all thought it. That managerial appointment must go down as the best and most creative decisions in all of sporting history. So the board are already well up on excellent decision making prior to winter of discontent in 2016-2017...

 

Ranieri's sacking. Another huge decision, took balls to do it. All of LCFC knew it was the right decision - the media and the rest of the football community obviously didn't understand it. Again our owners pulled the trigger at the right time. The replacement this time was pretty obvious, and again it showed with results that the Board had put the right man at the helm, at least for the short term (few days in Madrid anyone?).

 

The end of the 2016-17 then brings about the next key decision. Stick or twist on Shakespeare. By all accounts Rudkin wanted to twist, with David Wagner. Its pretty much common knowledge that advances were made to the German but we couldn't convince him to make the move. Understandably so i think, he'd got Huddersfield to the Premier League and wanted to give it a go with them. If you think about this move by Rudkin, in hindsight, he actually foresaw that CS could be a limited manager and had his doubts about him long term. He moved for a young classy manager, who has done very well in his first season - I'd love to know where we'd be right now had he pulled that off. Rudkin's intentions that summer were good. As the summer rolled on, the Board had to make a decision and i think begrudgingly gave CS a chance. Maybe this is the first decision where they could have pushed harder for Wagner, or maybe somebody else - but it wasn't to be, CS was given a trial and 2 and a half months later was out on his ear.

 

Firstly, the CS sacking, was absolutely correct - no arguments about that. So good and proper decision making again. The appointment of the next manager, is by far the hardest decision to rate. All of the hire/fire decisions above can be objectively rated on fact, trophies, promotions, survival, Champions League Quarter Finals. Puel's tenure so far is a real difficult one to judge - what do we see success as these days? I like to cast my mind back on how i felt at the time, rather than judging the decision now. If somebody told me a top half of the table finish, i'd have snapped their hand off. That was the number one priority. So was Puel the right man to get us out of trouble, yes, fact. Has he done a "good job" i'd say he's blew that himself, it was one of those jobs that was his to lose, which he almost certainly has. 

 

So was Puel a good decision, i would still say that it was. We are safe and in a better position than when he took over. We are now entering a pre-season where we can easily change the manager, who can hopefully take us to a better place than where Puel is likely to leave us - progression. 

 

Lets go back to October 2017, who else really could have done any better. Lets chalk off the non-runners at the time Benitez was never leaving  NUFC with the deal still on the table, Dyche, Howe, Wagner were all settled. So was there another manager out there we should have got? Lets think about the Premier League clubs and how they have faired

 

West Brom - Pardew, Everton - Allardyce, Southampton - Mark Hughes, Stoke - Paul Lambert, Watford - Javi Gracia, West Ham - David Moyes. 

 

So 6 other clubs all changed their managers with a similar talent pool to ourselves, and although i am 100% Puel out at the moment, i still think at the time he was probably one of the best candidates for the job. Again, take yourself back to that away win against Southampton in December after we had beat Spurs, Burnley with ease. We were laughing at Soton, tell me a fan who wasn't uttering the words "8th place and a cup final" that week... it looked like another inspired choice.

 

Now its looking almost certainly that its not going to work out, but do the owners/board/Rudkin carry the full blame for that, i don't think so. And although recruitment and other areas may not be perfect at our club ,  i really think that the hiring and firing of managers isn't one of them.

[Tielemans63]

Nice try John. Good luck at the job centre.

[Ian Nacho]

In simple terms;

Pearson - 9

Ranieri - 10

Puel - 3

[Guest MattP]

Sousa - 2

Sven - 1

Pearson - 10

Ranieri - 10

Shakespeare - 4

Puel - 4

Edited 29 April 2018 by MattP

[bovril]

8 minutes ago, MattP said:

Sousa - 2

Sven - 1

Pearson - 10

Ranieri - 10

Shakespeare - 4

Puel - 4

Ok Sven wasted pots of money but he at least gave us a few months of superb football, more than Sousa. I'd give him a 3.5 at least, just for Andy King's goal against Derby.

[LCFC FOX]

Sousa and Puel are similar in terms of the football they play and both weren’t  suited for the team we had. It takes years to build a good side they want to play. Unfortunately you don’t get years to build a team now.

 

Pearson and Ranieri brilliant for obvious reasons and Shakespeare would of been brilliant too but they made a mistake giving him the job full time after the season ended.

 

the less said about Sven the better, some of his big money signings were really bizarre, makes Ranieri’s signings look like Germany.  Worst manager we’ve had since the Thais arrived 

Edited 29 April 2018 by LCFC FOX

[Webbo]

Sven was head and shoulders above Sousa. I think if he was manager now he would have done a better job than Puel.

[Tielemans63]

Sousa - 3

Sven - 4

Pearson - 9

Ranieri - 9

Shakey  - 5

Puel - 5

[Kitchandro]

Pearson and Ranieri were great appointments, Sousa, Shakespeare and Puel were at the opposite end of the spectrum.

 

Sven was the wrong appointment but we weren’t totally pitiful and boring the whole way through, so he’s more of a 3 or a 4 out of 10.

 

The others were either a 10 or a 1. I personally think the club got lucky with Pearson and Ranieri - one was a former popular manager, the other was the first man to publicly say they were interested.

 

Other managers were hired because they were big names, already at the club or had immediately recent Premier League experience at a similar sized club.

 

This is what worries me - not one of these managers was scouted or investigated in any sort of depth. Nobody behind the scenes knows a thing about football as an actual sport. There is no thought process, they just go for the easy answer.

 

Concerning.

Edited 29 April 2018 by Kitchandro

[shen]

Puel a 1? The guy has led us to a likely top half finish from a relegation position in less than a season, with the same squad as his two predecessors. He has, for once, been a manager who has shown faith in youth. 

He has already achieved a ton more than Sven ever did here.

 

The recent poor form shouldn't overshadow this.

[Mark_w]

18 minutes ago, LittlethorpeFox said:

I have been reading a lot on here about how badly the club is being ran and the lack of aptitude within the Board, Jon Rudkin getting the brunt of most people's anger.   The majority of people, i think are being too harsh. I am just going to talk about my opinion on how the Board have performed when it comes to hiring and firing managers in the last 7 years. I'm not talking about recruitment or player power or backwards and sidewides passing - just purely on the business decisions made by the board regarding the head coach/manager of LCFC.

Sven - 3
Kept us up comfortably (a worse appointment might not have), Kasper and Nuge hugely important signings. some flashes of decent football. But essentially a decision made for the wrong reasons coupled with an outrageous amount of money spent with an awful lot more misses than hits.

Pearson - 10
Most reassuring appointment, suggests they'd learned from the previous appointment, listened to the people who'd worked with him at the club before. Excellent decision and let him build (with the odd thankfully failed attempt to tap Harry Redknapp up thrown in) a team, backroom staff and set-up that we were extremely lucky to have. Shambolic sacking followed thankfully by his reinstatement - for which, if rumours are to be believed (and the subsequent appointment at OH Leuven suggests to me) Top deserves some credit. Ultimately they were extremely fortunate to buy a side he'd previously managed with the success he did, because prior and subsequent decisions suggest they wouldn't have been bringing him to any other club. So a 10, but not sure how long they can take too much credit from it.

Claudio - 9

Yeah, yeah, put your pitchforks down. In terms of the way the transition was handled, magnificent, Pearson didn't deserve to go - but absolutely perfectly managed by Claudio who didn't try to rip everything up as soon as he came in, just tweaked, profited from some incredible transfer business already done/underway, and gave us the best season in our history. I don't think there was a huge degree of foresight with the appointment, or much of a long term strategy behind it, and I think that was probably reflected in what followed. Worth it though, obviously.

Shakespeare - 5
Exactly what we needed at the time to stay up. Don't think he was at all helped by the fixture list this season and probably went a bit too soon, but at the same time wasn't any real reason to think he was going to be much of a success long term. An important firefighter who probably shouldn't have been given the job permanently if a shaky (no pun intended) first eight games of the season was going to be enough to convince them he wasn't the man for the job.

Puel - 4 (so far)
Good start, made sure there was no risk of relegation - and will finish in a perfectly respectable League position. But is also guilty of inspiring the most apathy I've had for Leicester City since Paulo Sousa, so swings and roundabouts.

[Stadt]

Ranieri applied for the job. It worked out unbelievably well but objectively it wasn't a good appointment at the time.

[CslFox]

Sousa - 2

Sven - 4

Pearson - 9

Ranieri - 9

Shakey - 4

Puel - 2

 

Would have been more for Puel a few months ago but I'm not going to defend the indefensible.

[Bezzanator89]

Sousa 2 (Sexy football doesn't suit us, sorry Paulo. Won't forget that 6-1 away drubbing to Portsmouth in a hurry. Wrong man for the job.)

 

Sven 4 (Spent a fortune, but transfers were more misses than hits. Was never a dull moment though.)

 

Pearson 10 (Set the foundations for the fairytale, and always had the backing of the dressing room. Would have him back!)

 

Ranieri 9 (Carried on from where Nigel left off and the rest is history. But the more he tweaked in the following season, the worse it got. Remember the happier times Claudio, we still are.)

 

Shakespeare 5 (Got us out of a potentially dire situation, Nigel would have been proud. Somewhat undone by a harsh fixture list and don't think he had much of a say on our transfer policy. Was never going to be a long-term replacement though.)

 

Puel 4 (His time is running out, dare I say, run out. He is almost Paulo Sousa MkII, with the same problem this time around. The wrong players for the wrong system. But equally, his tactics, selections and substitutions are bizarre at best. Flew out the blocks, but a few tickers later, the system fell apart. And we are only 9th because teams around us are just as inconsistent as we are.)

Edited 29 April 2018 by Bezzanator89

[Guest MattP]

9 hours ago, bovril said:

Ok Sven wasted pots of money but he at least gave us a few months of superb football, more than Sousa. I'd give him a 3.5 at least, just for Andy King's goal against Derby.

For every Derby there was a Millwall and he left us half way up the Championship with a top 6 PL wage bill at the time, I can't give him much of a rating for that.

 

He also somehow only found one PL regular in Kasper despite the outlandish spending, a blind squirrel even finds more than one nut.

 

I'm glad he's finally found his place now in China but I just wish he hadn't stopped off here first. 

[Nick]

Makes me laugh all these 10 ratings for Pearson - Yes he did some good things and some great things and yes he had his faults including his one dimensional media personality but surely people remember the no plan B football? 

[MC Prussian]

9 hours ago, shen said:

Puel a 1? The guy has led us to a likely top half finish from a relegation position in less than a season, with the same squad as his two predecessors. He has, for once, been a manager who has shown faith in youth. 

He has already achieved a ton more than Sven ever did here.

 

The recent poor form shouldn't overshadow this.

Sorry, but you‘re comparing apples to oranges here.

Eriksson was employed in the Championship and working with a much smaller budget. Besides, the damage that season was already done by Sousa with only one win out of his first nine matches, and that by deploying a „continental“ approach to football also. If it hadn‘t been for those first seven losses, who knows where we could‘ve been at the end of the season?

 

Puel has led us to safety - in his first eight matches in charge. Let‘s also not forget that we were 14th after the win against Swansea.

The form since mid-December is highly worrying, and the football on show dire to watch, and usually only exciting when we‘re going behind. There‘s little to nothing for me to get excited about with both this style, our manager or some of our player performances in the past 18 league matches. 18 matches! Plus the FA Cup game against a beatable Chelsea FC.

 

Should Puel stay in charge for the rest of the season, I fear for the worst and three more defeats, which would put him at four wins out of 21 matches. That is relegation form.

Edited 30 April 2018 by MC Prussian

[Guest MattP]

14 minutes ago, Swan Lesta said:

Makes me laugh all these 10 ratings for Pearson - Yes he did some good things and some great things and yes he had his faults including his one dimensional media personality but surely people remember the no plan B football? 

He effectively took us from League One to mid table of the Premier League, building a team in the process that's nucleus won the title in the greatest footballing story ever told.

 

He was also doing it whilst cutting costs and clearing out rubbish others had signed, a ten is the minimum you can give him imo.

[Nick]

48 minutes ago, MattP said:

He effectively took us from League One to mid table of the Premier League, building a team in the process that's nucleus won the title in the greatest footballing story ever told.

 

He was also doing it whilst cutting costs and clearing out rubbish others had signed, a ten is the minimum you can give him imo.

A 9 happily but I guess I’m just a harsh marker - I don’t think we’ve had a 10 yet and I’d only give Claudio an 8! 

[ClaphamFox]

Sousa - 2

Sven - 4

Pearson - 7

Ranieri - 9

Shakey - 3

Puel - 3

[filbertboy]

Sousa - 1 

Sven - 4

Pearson - 8 

Ranieri - 10

Shakey - 4

Puel - 3

[weller54]

Ranieri has to get a 10 from everyone! 

[Corky]

Sousa- 1

Sven- 5

Pearson- 8

Ranieri- 9

Shakespeare- 6

Puel- 5

[STUHILL]

Don't know how anyone isn't given Claudio a 10. 

 

He won the Premier League at Leicester Fookin' City!!!! 

 

Sousa - 2

Sven - 4

Pearson - 9

Claudio - 10

Shakespeare - 5

Puel - 5 dropping to a 4 if he loses next 3 games!

[Mr Mister]

Pearson 9

Ranieri 10

Puel 0