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MattFox

“Hubris and Muddled Thinking Have Seen Leicester Spiral Towards Relegation”

By MattFox, in Leicester City Forum

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davieG

davieG

Posted
Posted
10 minutes ago, MattFox said:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2023/05/14/premier-league-leicester-spiral-brink-relegation/
 

Required and Grim Reading

 

Rudkin seems untouchable in the KP structure

 

How has a semi decent youth coach wormed his way into running a football club and a horse racing operation 

I think most people who support the club, well maybe not all but those on here were already aware of most of that. Nothing really new and being regurgitated by plenty of would be and good sports journalists.

 

At least they wont be able to use the headline Top to bottom, First to last etc.

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coolhandfox

coolhandfox

Posted
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Posted (edited)

Funny how the DOF gets all the blame for the last 18 months.

 

But non of the credit for 8 PL seasons, 1 PL title and a FA win.

 

I'm not say he should'nt be under pressure or maybe move on, but just some balance in the conversation.

 

Like this last 18 can't all be bad luck, the successes over the last 8 can't all be good luck.

Edited by coolhandfox
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Foxxed

Foxxed

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, coolhandfox said:

Funny how the DOF gets all the blame for the last 18 months.

 

But non of the credit for 8 PL seasons, 1 PL title and a FA win.

 

I'm not say he should be under pressure or maybe move on, but just some balance in the conversation.

 

Like this last 18 can't all be bad luck, the successes over the last 8 can't all be good luck.

The decline started to happen more than 18 months ago: the boardroom structure changed about that time too. And Top has become distant and reluctant to act, from what we’re told.

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Tuna

Tuna

Posted
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Posted

Funny how the article ultimately absolves Rodgers of most of the blame!

 

Nice to see some heat on Rudkin though, I'm beginning to form the opinion now that Rodgers essentially "conned" King Power hierarchy due to his own arrogance and ego that he was going to turn things round.

 

The point is and the article does make it that the big calls which were always the right ones in sacking Pearson, Claudio and Shakey were no longer being made, and any sporting director worth their salt would have taken these decisions and had the foresight to do it at the right time.

 

Ultimately, Rudkin if he is indeed the main decision maker at the football club as the article suggests has been now finally exposed as being not up to the job - he's paid to make decisions and failed when it was needed. Contracts should never have been allowed to run down the way they were, the successful transfer policy should never have been deviated from, if it's true that Rodgers had free reign over the club this should never have been allowed and he should never have been kept in the job for as long as he was.

 

I can absolutely understand Top's loyalty to him and yes he has presided over great success but that loyalty has ultimately likely relegated the football club and cost us millions of pounds and our star assets.

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Dahnsouff

Dahnsouff

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 minutes ago, Foxxed said:

The decline started to happen more than 18 months ago: the boardroom structure changed about that time too. And Top has become distant and reluctant to act, from what we’re told.

He understandably became more focused on his business interests of the back of the pandemic and struggling economies (I imagine). It was the time to ensure your lieutenants were adept, but you could easily understand his distance even if it is looking very costly.

Edited by Dahnsouff
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davieG

davieG

Posted
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...and there's more

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-12081773/Leicester-ARENT-showing-heart-battle-Premier-Leagues-relegation-scrap.html

 

Leicester AREN'T showing any heart for the battle in the Premier League's relegation scrap while the teams around them are... the Foxes have previously won against the odds but they're now a club in total DISARRAY
Leicester's Premier League status hangs in the balance as relegation looms
The Foxes have previously endured amazing success against all expectations
But are now a club in disarray with plenty of reasons to blame for their downfall 
By JAMES SHARPE and TOM COLLOMOSSE FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 08:52, 14 May 2023 | UPDATED: 09:13, 14 May 2023


A video was doing the rounds on Leicester City fan Twitter this week. It was a compilation of special goals and moments enjoyed by the club in the 10 years since their promotion back to the Premier League.

Jamie Vardy’s screamer against Liverpool in the season they won the Premier League. Wes Morgan lifting the trophy. Youri Tielemans’ winner in the FA Cup final. Lifting that trophy too. 

Vardy and Morgan scoring against Sevilla for a place in the Champions League quarter-finals. Recent hits from Harvey Barnes and James Maddison.


‘I hope we don’t get relegated,’ read the caption, ‘but, if not, it’s been a good run.’

Hasn’t it just. They survived against the odds and won the title against even more. They won the Community Shield. They finished fifth twice. They beat Southampton 9-0. They got to the Europa Conference League semis. And now they’re probably going to be relegated.

 

The supporters know it now too. Acceptance has set in. Shipping five goals in the defeat by Fulham on Bank Holiday Monday followed by wins for Everton and Nottingham Forest made that clear. Then on Saturday Leeds and Forest both took a point against Newcastle and Chelsea, respectively.

By the time Leicester host Liverpool on Monday, if Everton somehow get something against Manchester City today, the Foxes could be three points adrift of safety. Victory, of course, could still lift Leicester out of the relegation zone. 

But the teams around Leicester are showing the heart for the battle. Leicester aren’t.

When Maddison grumbled after the Fulham defeat that the players lacked hunger, regardless of how stringently he attempted to clarify his comments, is it any wonder many who follow them are resigned to their fate?

Leicester manager Dean Smith insists he sees the hunger every day in training. The players just need to make the right choices.

‘When they go into the game their decision-making has to be good,’ said Smith. ‘They have made good decisions because otherwise they wouldn’t have won the FA Cup a couple of years ago and there’s players here who have won the Premier League as well.’

Smith’s words could be directed at those above his head. If Leicester go down, it will be because those who run the club, from owner Khun Top, chief executive Susan Whelan and director of football Jon Rudkin, have been just as negligent.

The reasons for Leicester’s potential fall from champions to Championship are varied and increasingly well documented: missing out on Champions League money two seasons in a row at a time the pandemic stripped them and their owners in the duty-free trade of vital revenue; handing out bloated contracts to average players they now can’t shift and letting the deals of their best players like Tielemans run down so they’ll leave for nothing.


68.4k viewing now
Leicester have eight first-team players out of contract this summer and another nine heading into the final year of their deals like Maddison and Vardy. Letting a leader like Kasper Schmeichel go in a squad lacking in leadership. 

Breaking your policy of selling a key player every summer and then spending more than £50million on duds; leaving it too long to sack Brendan Rodgers and then having no succession plan when you do and hoping you’ll be able to muddle through with caretaker bosses who text friends when they got the job that they felt out of their depth.

Harvey Barnes is one of the club's stars that haven't hit form this season
 

When you’re a club the size of Leicester, you don’t have to get too much wrong in the Premier League to fall behind. For the past couple of years they’ve got it all wrong.

The real question, though, is what happens if — or when — Leicester do go down. They would do so with the highest squad cost and wage bill in Premier League history. 

When Leicester won the league in 2016, they spent £80m on wages. Now, they spend £182m — behind only the Big Six clubs. It’s also 85 per cent of their £215m turnover, a figure that will plummet by more than £130m if they are relegated.

The Foxes posted record losses of £92.5m for the 2021-22 season. They’ve lost nearly £200m in the last three years. They are on UEFA’s Financial Fair Play watch list.

‘It’s going to be very severe,’ football finance expert Kieran Maguire told BBC Radio Leicester. ‘They are looking at a potential two-thirds reduction in income compared to their most recent accounts. There’s got to be a lot of belt-tightening.’

Tielemans will leave on a free. So will Caglar Soyuncu, a former inclusion in the PFA team of the year. Jonny Evans is also out of contract alongside Daniel Amartey — one of three remaining title winners — Papy Mendy, Ryan Bertrand, Tete and Ayoze Perez, who is already out on loan. 

 

Maddison will have his suitors but Leicester are unlikely to get anywhere near his true value. The same for Kelechi Iheanacho and Wilfred Ndidi.

Another concern is the loans Leicester have taken out with Australian bank Macquarie over the past few years that were secured against future Premier League TV rights money. They have at least £70m of that to pay back.

If Leicester go down, it’s likely money from parachute payments will have to go towards that instead of rebuilding the team from scratch. 

That’s hard enough but who will oversee it? Smith’s deal is until the end of the season. Fans may have accepted their fate, but their real worry is what happens next.

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davieG

davieG

Posted
Posted

They'll be more of this the next few weeks then, assuming we're relegated we will drift into oblivion. 

davieG

davieG

Posted
Posted

Here's another

 

https://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/premier-league/flirting-with-relegation-always-likely-to-happen-for-leicester-with-numbers-game-going-against-them/a881222076.html

 

Flirting with relegation always likely to happen for Leicester with numbers game going against them
For a season to be totally fair, it would have to last 35 years

 

Jonathan Wilson
Observer
Today at 02:30
All life, Valeriy Lobanovskyi once said, is a number. This might have made sense for the groundbreaking Dynamo Kyiv manager, with his high-school medal for mathematics, but for most people who follow sport is a little disconcerting.
We want to believe in heroes and glory, in imagination and genius, in fate and curses. Even if we acknowledge it probably is quite important, the thought of football as a series of vast interlocking spreadsheets feels a little dry.

And in the day-to-day, we want ready explanations. We want to know that this game was won or lost because this forward or this keeper was on fire, or because this referee got it wrong, or this left-back was injured, or this winger didn’t track, or this centre-back can’t play in a two, or because the midfield couldn’t shut down the passing lanes.

What we don’t want to believe is that this is all essentially random variation within certain parameters defined by finance — which is a major reason the application of data in football has encountered resistance. Nobody buys a season ticket to watch a pair of balance sheets represented through the medium of 22 players kicking a ball.

All of which makes the idea that Leicester’s battle against relegation is merely regression to the mean unpalatable. And perhaps it isn’t that, or at least not just that. There are plenty of short-term reasons for the 2016 Premier League champions’ decline. But equally, the odd season of feast or famine shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

 

When Leicester twice missed out on Champions League qualification on the final day of the season, some criticised Brendan Rodgers for being unable to sustain the challenge, but most seemed to accept that fifth was a very good finish given resources and that, while fatigue may have ultimately exposed the limitations of the squad, it didn’t much matter when in the season points were accrued.

But what if that process of balance is not confined to one season? What if it goes on over a much longer period? After all, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, once calculated that for a season to be totally “fair”, for the vagaries of form to be evened out so it didn’t much matter when one side played another, a season would have to be 35 years long. Between winning promotion in 2013-14 and the end of last season, Leicester averaged 56 points a campaign. Last season that would have been enough to place them eighth. Which feels about right given that last season they did, indeed, finish eighth.

Newcastle and Aston Villa have risen on the back of recent spending and sensible managerial appointments, while Brighton’s remarkable recruitment has allowed them, for now, to outperform their resources. But, according to Deloitte’s 2023 report into football finance, Leicester were the eighth wealthiest Premier League team by revenue for the previous financial year.

In seven of those eight Premier League seasons, Leicester have been within 12 points, or four games, of that 56-point mark. In the other, they earned 81 and won the league. That was seen as a perfect storm: smart signings, half a dozen players having the season of their lives, other challengers suffering unusually poor campaigns.

If Leicester take one point from their remaining three games of the season — which, given that after Liverpool tomorrow, they face Newcastle and West Ham, is plausible — they would have underperformed that 56-point average by the same 25-point margin they exceeded it by when winning the title in 2015-16.

Which, of course, would be just a coincidence; it’s not that Leicester had some sort of debt that football’s cosmic accountants have now called in. But it does neatly illustrate that clubs have a level and that their points total will vary within certain limits around that.

It is probably not quite true to say that this season for Leicester has been as bad as the title-winning season was good but, just as that success was a consequence of many aspects going right at once, this season has been a consequence of many aspects going wrong at once, which then has a multiplicative impact as confidence waxes or wanes.

 

The start of the downturn was probably the pandemic, which had a dire economic impact on the Srivaddhanaprabha family that owns Leicester because their main business is duty-free shops in airports. There had been concerns that salaries were rising quicker than revenues, bringing the wage-to-turnover burden to 85 per cent for 2020-21 when Uefa’s cost control regulations mean that figure has to be reduced to 80 per cent by 2024-25 and 70 per cent the season after. That has necessitated belt-tightening.

It’s not, though, that money hasn’t been spent; it’s that it hasn’t been spent well. In the summer of 2021, almost £60m went on Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumaré, Jannik Vestergaard and the free agent Ryan Bertrand. None have yet settled.

Bertrand, a victim of the club’s full-back injury hoodoo that has also led Timothy Castagne, James Justin and Ricardo Pereira to miss long chunks of the season, has started only four games since, while Jonny Evans last started a league game in October. Given that disruption, it is not surprising that if Leicester concede against Liverpool, it will be a 21st game in a row without a clean sheet.

Add in the departures of Kasper Schmeichel and Wesley Fofana, age catching up at last with Jamie Vardy and Rodgers seemingly running out of steam just as the club were least financially equipped to replace him, and perhaps an unwarranted sense that a side used to finishing in the top half couldn’t really be in relegation trouble, and the ingredients were there for the downturn.

Reasons can always be found for a blip, whether good or bad, and they are not unimportant: identifying causes and acting to correct or encourage them is how, without a massive injection of cash, the baseline can be edged upward. But as Lobanovskyi would no doubt have acknowledged, a season like this was always possible — which is why even long-term, mid-table sides seem often so paranoid.

That would be no consolation to Leicester if they are relegated and that baseline is yanked sharply, and perhaps irremediably, downward.

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Foxxed

Foxxed

Posted
Posted (edited)
11 minutes ago, Tuna said:

Funny how the article ultimately absolves Rodgers of most of the blame!

 

Nice to see some heat on Rudkin though, I'm beginning to form the opinion now that Rodgers essentially "conned" King Power hierarchy due to his own arrogance and ego that he was going to turn things round.

 

The point is and the article does make it that the big calls which were always the right ones in sacking Pearson, Claudio and Shakey were no longer being made, and any sporting director worth their salt would have taken these decisions and had the foresight to do it at the right time.

 

Ultimately, Rudkin if he is indeed the main decision maker at the football club as the article suggests has been now finally exposed as being not up to the job - he's paid to make decisions and failed when it was needed. Contracts should never have been allowed to run down the way they were, the successful transfer policy should never have been deviated from, if it's true that Rodgers had free reign over the club this should never have been allowed and he should never have been kept in the job for as long as he was.

 

I can absolutely understand Top's loyalty to him and yes he has presided over great success but that loyalty has ultimately likely relegated the football club and cost us millions of pounds and our star assets.

Exactly. Rudkin presided over Rodgers’ destruction while Top looked away.

 


 

 

Edited by Foxxed
Ricey

Ricey

Posted
Posted

Nice to hear that Rudkin spends so much of his time managing the horse racing side of King Power. Wonder if he fancies doing that full time.

Patrick

Patrick

Posted
Posted
37 minutes ago, MattFox said:

How has a semi decent youth coach wormed his way into running a football club and a horse racing operation 

Unsurprisingly the horse racing operation is crap too, they spend big money on it and they've only got a few horses capable of running in big group races and then loads of crap handicappers. They even had one that cost £2.5 mil that never won a race.

splinterdream

splinterdream

Posted
Posted
24 minutes ago, davieG said:

They'll be more of this the next few weeks then, assuming we're relegated we will drift into oblivion. 

Aye, we've gone from the best team in the midlands, too one of the worst in a 2 seasons, it's an incredible fall from grace

Jon the Hat

Jon the Hat

Posted
Posted
56 minutes ago, coolhandfox said:

Funny how the DOF gets all the blame for the last 18 months.

 

But non of the credit for 8 PL seasons, 1 PL title and a FA win.

 

I'm not say he should be under pressure or maybe move on, but just some balance in the conversation.

 

Like this last 18 can't all be bad luck, the successes over the last 8 can't all be good luck.

There are many senior people who are very good under the leadership and tutelage of a mentor like Vichai, who then struggle to continue to achieve once they are exposed.

An Sionnach

An Sionnach

Posted
Posted (edited)

Some people on here seem to respect the views of these cheap hacks. Statements of the bleeding obvious and hindsight opinions are not analysis and are telling us nothing we don't already know. In the end if you fail its because you were not good enough . 38 games sorts out the wheat from the chaff. Every single forum blames  the manager, the players and then the owners in that order. Its football, it will never change.

Edited by An Sionnach
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Edingleyfox

Edingleyfox

Posted
Posted

I find the article in the Telegraph muddled in itself, with all the distractors about horse racing etc.

 

I'd rather concentrate on football until tomorrow night at the very least

 

shiv

shiv

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, coolhandfox said:

Funny how the DOF gets all the blame for the last 18 months.

 

But non of the credit for 8 PL seasons, 1 PL title and a FA win.

 

I'm not say he should be under pressure or maybe move on, but just some balance in the conversation.

 

Like this last 18 can't all be bad luck, the successes over the last 8 can't all be good luck.

In all fairness the article does allude to the fact that Vichai had far more involvement in decisions than Top currently has but I do agree with you to some extent. 

99 Problems

99 Problems

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, coolhandfox said:

Funny how the DOF gets all the blame for the last 18 months.

 

But non of the credit for 8 PL seasons, 1 PL title and a FA win.

 

I'm not say he should be under pressure or maybe move on, but just some balance in the conversation.

 

Like this last 18 can't all be bad luck, the successes over the last 8 can't all be good luck.

Vichai ran the club for 6 of those seasons and had laid the foundations for the clubs success. Rudkin had less power and influence over the running of the club when he was first appointed with Vichai making and getting the big calls right. The foundations for success, overhaul of the clubs ethos and investment into Leicester itself were by Vichai, not his pen pusher Rudkin who reportedly is responsible for advising Top on keeping Rodgers 

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