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davieG

Ex Players - They used to play for us

By davieG, in Leicester City Forum

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davieG

davieG

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https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/sport/football/leicester-city-world-cup-cambiasso-5623138

 

Not a player but......

 

 

Ex-Leicester City talent spotter lifts lid on Cambiasso and World Cup winner who got away
Robert Mackenzie, formerly Leicester's head of technical scouting, is now in a similar role on the opposite side of the Midlands at Premier League rivals Aston Villa


ByJohn Townley
17:50, 7 JUL 2021
SPORT

Robert Mackenzie was a key driving force behind Leicester City’s dramatic revival from Championship promotion hopefuls to Premier League champions in the space of two years.

Now leading Aston Villa’s recruitment department, the former Leicester talent spotter is using similar methods to what he used at the King Power Stadium to identify players to become big successes at Villa Park.


He worked as Leicester’s head of technical scouting from 2011 to 2015, and after an impressive four years at the club, Mackenzie held roles as head of player identification at Tottenham Hotspur before returning to the East Midlands as director of recruitment at Derby County in 2016.


More recently, Mackenzie headed Leicester City’s sister club and Belgian side OL Leuven’s recruitment team by introducing a modern, data-driven approach which helped them win promotion to the Belgian Premier League in 2020.

While Mackenzie has made a name for himself by unearthing a number of rough diamonds from across the length and breadth of Europe, it’s also for his knack of anticipating a player’s spike or decline that has served his career well so far.

When Leicester managed to convince Esteban Cambiasso to move to the King Power in 2014, eyebrows were raised after the Argentine had just spent the last 12 years of his glittering career at Real Madrid and Inter Milan. Mackenzie saw the then 34-year-old midfielder as much more than simply an opportunity to add a wealth of experience to Nigel Pearson’s dressing room ahead of the 2014/15 Premier League season.


"People might have had the idea that Cambiasso was over the hill, but his profile didn't reveal that at all," Mackenzie told Sky Sports. "The reality was that he had played in 80 per cent of Inter's matches in his final season at the club.

"That suggested he was still doing the business. When we delved deeper into his character, the references were spot on. I remember the first day that he trained with us, as there was a real buzz around the training ground.

"We even had players who were injured and in the process of doing rehab ask if they could take their exercise bikes pitch side just so they could watch him in his first session with the club.

 

"Upon meeting him, Cambiasso was the one quizzing us on our fitness preparations. It was clear this was a driven individual who wouldn't want to have the black mark of a relegation on his CV let alone sit on the sidelines. It proved to be a key signing for the club.”

Cambiasso averaged more than 31 Serie A appearances throughout his 10-year stay at Inter and so the Argentine duly featured regularly for the Foxes - making 31 appearances as Pearson's side beat the odds and the drop come the end of the 2014/15 campaign.

Mackenzie added: “These are the types of things that become particularly important as players get older and their risk of injury increases. Miroslav Klose is someone whose record shows that he could be relied upon - he played at least 30 games for club and country for 16 consecutive seasons. That impresses scouts.”

How do you think Klose and Vardy would have worked as a strike partnership in 2014/15? Let us know in the comments section below...
Mackenzie was never too far away from signing Klose towards the back end of the German's career, and after attempting to bring him to Leicester with Cambiasso in 2014, the all-time World Cup top goalscorer scored 16 goals during that season with Lazio in the Serie A.

The following campaign, Mackenzie saw the fruits of his labour having considered how the players he identified in the summer of 2014 and 2015 would compliment the current make-up of Leicester’s squad, instead of introducing a player unfamiliar with the existing culture at the club.

"I think effective recruitment is all about finding the right balance and complementing what you already have while also being able to bring some additional qualities to the group. If, for example, you had a high influx of foreign players within your squad, it might be that you would actually look at the English market as one that you wanted to target in order to try and bring in players who had a different mentality and experience to your current players.


"When I was working with Nigel at Leicester City in the Championship we had a predominantly British core and if players weren't actually British a number of them had played in England for a long time so they were fully acclimatised to the respective level and the expectations placed upon them - Kasper Schmeichel, Chris Wood and Ritchie de Laet for example.

"I think that British core actually contributed to us feeling that we could bring in some foreign players at that time - Anthony Knockaert, Marcin Wasilewski and Riyad Mahrez for example - as they could provide us with qualities that we were perhaps lacking a bit, whether that be creativity or high-level experience and leadership.


"Similarly I think that strong and consistent group contributed to the smooth transition that those three experienced and it directly underpinned the respective success that they experienced with Leicester at that time.”

 

Mahrez arrived at Leicester from Le Havre in France's second tier and while his rise to supremacy needs no introduction, he wasn’t the only player who Mackenzie had been tracking from French football. Leicester would return to sign Kante from Caen in the summer of 2015 and the club’s former transfer guru used a mapping tool to identify him.

"A hard working and honest Caen side who themselves had experienced promotion to the French top flight in 2013/14 and who survived in their debut season, finishing 13th, probably represented a good fit for a Leicester side who won promotion in the same year as Caen and who finished 14th on their return to the Premier League,” Mackenzie added.

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Lesta2014

Lesta2014

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4 hours ago, moore_94 said:

Layton Ndukwu is on trial at Portsmouth and played for them in a friendly at the weekend

 

https://www.hampshirelive.news/sport/football/ndukwu-portsmouth-leicester-city-trial-5652888

Says we entitled to compensation as he's 22. Thought that only applied if offered a contract? That mean we did offer one and he turned it down? 
 

just checked his Instagram and he’s done a gray and deleted all posts 

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UniFox21

UniFox21

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19 minutes ago, Koke said:

Stil not worth £80m but maybe it's about time we respect Maguire as a player. He's turned things around since his debacle in Greece. 

 

 

The only real reason he lost some respect was the ridiculous fee United agreed to pay followed by his Greece incident. 

 

He was respected when he played for us as we moulded to his strengths, whereas United haven't played to them for a while and seen him be exposed on the big time, becoming a meme. But he's started to show his talents again. 

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Master Fox

Master Fox

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28 minutes ago, Koke said:

Stil not worth £80m but maybe it's about time we respect Maguire as a player. He's turned things around since his debacle in Greece. 

 

 

Let's be honest, as much as we want to believe that Cags is a better player, he really is not. Maguire is a much better player. 

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UniFox21

UniFox21

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4 minutes ago, Master Fox said:

Let's be honest, as much as we want to believe that Cags is a better player, he really is not. Maguire is a much better player. 

They're different types of player. Soy fits our style better than Maguire does, hence appears a better player in our side. 

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Koke

Koke

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16 minutes ago, UniFox21 said:

The only real reason he lost some respect was the ridiculous fee United agreed to pay followed by his Greece incident. 

 

He was respected when he played for us as we moulded to his strengths, whereas United haven't played to them for a while and seen him be exposed on the big time, becoming a meme. But he's started to show his talents again. 

 

Agree up to a point. There's been a lot of revisionism about Maguire since he left, that he wasn't that good anyway and he wouldn't get into our current team. Clearly not an £80m player but certainly not a bum like he's portrayed to be by dome City fans. 

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