Percy article

[Gamble92]

4 hours ago, Tuna said:

It does not pull any punches.

 

 

Sorry but I used to respect him. He's gone from in the know well spoken journalist because he was sucking off Rudkin to clearly falling out with someone at the club and spouting loads of shit.

 

No morals like the rest of journalists 

[MPH]

5 hours ago, CrispinLA in Texas said:

Seems like all the footballing media piling on Leicester right now.....how sad 😔

 

to be fair, it’s a fairly spectacular fall from grace…

[Chrysalis]

8 hours ago, Tuna said:

It does not pull any punches.

 

 

He has flipped like a pancake, the guy was scared to criticise before we were relegated.

[Sol thewall Bamba]

8 hours ago, lcfc_forever said:

Appreciate Bayern Munich are in a while different echelon to us, but they fired their CEO and DoF after scraping a title win. 
 

Things are just too nice at the club, we need a proper operator in the DoF role. Top has to remove Rudkin. 

This is completely right but respect is a big thing in Thailand so he won't get fired.

[Sol thewall Bamba]

8 hours ago, lcfc_forever said:

Appreciate Bayern Munich are in a while different echelon to us, but they fired their CEO and DoF after scraping a title win. 
 

Things are just too nice at the club, we need a proper operator in the DoF role. Top has to remove Rudkin. 

This is completely right but respect is a big thing in Thailand so he won't get fired.

[hackenbacker]

8 hours ago, weller54 said:

I've heard he's been turfed out. 

nope someone grassed on him. 

[cruzFOX]

Ron tanners article is good:

 

https://theathletic.com/4534497/2023/05/28/leicester-relegated-what-went-wrong/?amp=1

[Cadno'r Cymoedd]

11 minutes ago, cruzFOX said:

Ron tanners article is good:

 

https://theathletic.com/4534497/2023/05/28/leicester-relegated-what-went-wrong/?amp=1

The bit about 'segregation' at Seagrave re. eating facilities etc. is telling. Seems in an effort to create an elite structure, they effectively wrecked a lot of the club spirit. I obviously don't know the set up at Man City training wise, but it is clear that when they celebrated the league win, all their backroom staff were fully involved. 

 

Again, I think Rodgers gets off a little bit lightly in the article in the way it's written, but it appears pretty clear in it and the Percy one that he was a pernicious and negative influence in the camp, as many of us thought on here, once things didn't go as he'd expected. 

[Dan]

11 hours ago, Blue ROI said:

Wasn't this the same man calling for us to stick with Fraudgers in February?

Blocked me for digging it out three games later as well  

[Daggers]

3 hours ago, Sol thewall Bamba said:

This is completely right but respect is a big thing in Thailand so he won't get fired.

 I think you’ll find there is a huge shift in accepted norms taking place. Some would call it a revolution. Something we could well do with.

 

 

 

IMG_7191.avif IMG_7191.avif

[davieG]

Not worth starting another "who's to blame" thread

 

 

https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/how-leicester-city-stood-still-8477813

 

How Leicester City stood still and let relegation engulf them
Analysis on where it went wrong at the King Power Stadium as Leicester City's Premier League era ended on Sunday despite a run of five consecutive top-half finishes

SPORT
ByJordan Blackwell
07:15, 29 MAY 2023UPDATED07:36, 29 MAY 2023

For years, Leicester City were the club that others aspired to be. Imitating Manchester City and Liverpool without huge finances was impossible, so teams turned to Leicester as an example of how to rise the ranks on a more modest budget.

They will continue to learn from Leicester now, but this time about how not to do it. For the supporters who have watched this team over the past two years, it has felt like a slow unravelling, with a new torturous mistake each week. But in reality, City have dropped like a stone. They are the first team in the Premier League era to finish in the top half for five straight seasons and then be relegated.

They are the club that stood still and expected everything to be fine. They assumed the upward trajectory of the past decade would continue or, at worst, plateau. Instead, they have succumbed to one of the most devastating relegations a club has ever suffered, given their expenditure and the huge drop in revenue they are about to experience.

 

Questions will be asked over how it went so wrong. People will want to know the decisions that cost City their Premier League status. Inaction is the main answer. It is not necessarily what City did, but what they didn’t do. They didn’t sell wantaway players last summer, they didn’t freshen up the squad, they didn’t sack an underperforming manager, they didn’t recognise the danger of relegation. Now they have to rip up 10 years of work and start again.

There will be in-house and external post-mortems of this wretched campaign and the most sensible point at which to start is he summer of 2021. In hindsight, it was a disastrous transfer window, bad enough to rival the infamous post-title summer of 2016. Patson Daka and Boubakary Soumare were bought with good intentions, seen as raw talents who could develop into top-level players. Neither improved significantly over two seasons. Then there was a breaking of the ranks from City’s usual transfer policy for the dreadful signings of Ryan Bertrand and Jannik Vestergaard.

Crucially, City did not sell any of their FA Cup winners. For the first time since their return to the Premier League, all of the big names remained. So £60m was spent without much being made in return, meaning that when the next summer came, cash had run dry. City didn’t even have the £12m to bring back loanee winger Ademola Lookman, the biggest success of the 2021 recruits.

That season, an eighth-placed finish and a run to the Europa Conference League semi-finals masked flaws, notably a complete inability to defend set-pieces, to the point that clearances were met with sarcastic cheers, and a vulnerability on the transition, counter-attacking opponents often finding joy.

Then came last summer, perhaps the most significant factor in City’s relegation. Brendan Rodgers, approaching the end of his third full season at the club, felt it was going stale. His ability to affect the players was waning.

His analysis following an inactive January, swiftly followed by a rant after the humiliating FA Cup exit at Nottingham Forest, made clear he was hoping for a revamp of his squad. He was approaching the end of a cycle. For the next three years of his contract, City would need to start anew.

He clearly felt the “healthy shake-up” he desired was coming. In May 2022, he told several of his squad that they should seek opportunities elsewhere. On holiday in June, he started to get in contact with transfer targets and explain his vision to them. When he returned, nothing had happened.

Reassessments of the finances meant City could not spend until they had sold players. But, in a hugely costly error, they didn’t move players on.

Not only were there players at the club who the manager felt had run their course at the King Power, but those who were entering the final 12 months of their contracts. City needed to get rid of them, even if their internal valuations were not met.

Youri Tielemans may not have attracted the interest he assumed he would be neither did City push for a buyer. It was not the club’s fault he did not want to sign a new contract, but once that was clear, they needed to move him on for any fee they could to avoid losing him for free. They may not have been able to sign a replacement who hit the same heights technically, but they could have brought in a player who wanted to be at the club.

It was perhaps even more imperative that City moved on Caglar Soyuncu, given the deterioration of Rodgers’ faith in him. If the manager was not going to use him, why not sell him, even for a small fee?

Rodgers frequently said the club mustn’t be scared to sell, but again, there was inaction. Contracts and sales are the domain of director of football Jon Rudkin. His negligence left the club with a bloated squad of players who did not want to be there or who were told they were unwanted.

So when the season started, there was no fresh impetus. There was no excitement. With a hungrier set of new players, ones keen to prove a point, there would have been, even if they were not as talented as those they had replaced.

There is a lack of knowledge and explanation over exactly what happened last summer, but those with the answers do not seek to give them. It has been a long time since any decision-maker at City, aside from the manager, has spoken to the media. Supporters are not informed anywhere near as fully as they could be.

In the end, City did sell two players, but only replaced one. Wesley Fofana was let go late in the window, the transfer saga reaching a point where the defender was skipping training to force through his exit, his replacement Wout Faes only arriving as the deadline was in view.

And then captain Kasper Schmeichel departed too. On the pitch for a couple of seasons, the Dane had been a solid Premier League goalkeeper occasionally capable of match-winning heroics, but he wasn’t one of their best players, and given he was one of their highest earners, it made sense to sell. However, City missed what he brought off the field, with Schmeichel a driver of high standards who did not let team-mates slack.

On the pitch, he was missed too. The lack of finances saw Danny Ward turned to, and while he had done reasonably well in cup appearances during his four years as deputy, he did not handle the pressure of being number one well.

It was clear for all to see he was struggling, but doubts over the footwork of Daniel Iversen prevented a change between the sticks until it was too late. Yet more inaction, and an example of the lack of ruthlessness across the club.

That was one of many fatal flaws made by Rodgers, who does not escape criticism just because the club’s demise continued even after his departure.

Heading into the unknown having never lasted beyond the first couple of months of a fourth season at a club, he appeared to lose his spark when he didn’t get the signings he wanted. It is not a promising sign when a manager’s words and body language lead them to be asked if they are still happy in their role barely a month into a new campaign.

Neither did he correct the issues that had plagued City previously. The arrival of Lars Knudsen as a set-piece coach helped a little at corners, but the defensive organisation when City lost the ball higher up the pitch was still non-existent. They still couldn’t win matches in which they had large portions of possession, such was their inability to create chances and penetrate against deeper defences. That wasn’t a good look for a manager that wanted his side to dominate the ball.

All of these faults were clear to the naked eye, and yet Rodgers remained in place. At Brighton in early September, City lost their fifth straight match in a performance littered with the hallmarks of a side who would be battling relegation. There were tactical disasters, defensive disorganisation, miscommunication, a lack of running, and team-mates arguing with each other. Those are signs of a side that will not be only fighting the drop, but one that will lose that fight. Still, Rodgers remained in his position, chairman Aiyawatt ‘Top’ Srivadhanaprabha seemingly blinded by the success that came previously.

When the next obvious period for a change in manager came, during the World Cup, there had been a significant enough turnaround that the faith in Rodgers had seemed justified. But in hindsight, it only damaged City’s survival hopes.

Because it wasn’t until they then dropped back into the relegation zone with an utterly awful defeat at Crystal Palace in early April that the board sprung into action. But still, there was no plan nor urgency.

Caretakers Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell were given two winnable home games, and there was even hope of them seeing out the campaign to allow the club a thorough look at who to bring in next. How naive that then seemed when two more losses were recorded.

Dean Smith was the man chosen of the many spoken to. But never had a Premier League club in the relegation zone sacked a manager after March and survived. Smith needed to do something that had never been done before. His own faith in achieving such a feat seemed to wilt immediately, when he said in his opening press conference, after watching the team’s defeat to Bournemouth, that he’d gone from “80-20 to take the job, down to 50-50”.

The players do not escape blame either. It was consistently said that they cared about the club’s plight, and yet their performances left supporters questioning that most weeks.

They did not seem to have much interest in a relegation fight. There were players who saw a relegation battle as beneath them. They’d had two years of sitting in the top four, two years of playing in Europe, and felt that was the kind of stage they deserved to be playing on.

Then, they did not recognise quickly enough the trouble they were in. James Maddison’s “we’ll be absolutely fine” tweet following the loss at Southampton will be remembered for generations as a symbol of the casual approach to the dangers of the drop.

There was a fragility there as well. They lost too many tight games, and gave up too many winning positions across the season. That they had more wins by three or four-goal margins than they did by a single goal. Often, when the going got tough and the pressure was on, they were found wanting.

Once a tight-knit squad, the vast new training ground at Seagrave had not helped in replicating the relationships seen during the title win. Rodgers tried to introduce measures to help with the camaraderie of the side, such as getting large glass windows installed for the recreation room so that players could see in and were more likely to stick around and maybe bond with team-mates, rather than head straight for the exit.

The facilities are so good that the players don’t have to lift a finger. But that brings questions over a lack of responsibility. If you don’t have to show any at training, can you do so on the pitch on a Saturday? Rodgers sought to make changes there too. But asking players to take away their dirty lunchtime plates and put them on a trolley, rather than be waited on by staff, does not seem significant enough to change attitudes.

Add all of those factors together and it’s a recipe for disaster. And that is putting it lightly. Typically, wage expenditure is the best indicator of where a club should finish in the division. Spending £182m a year on paying players and staff, City should have been seventh. Instead, they are heading to the Championship, where it is estimated that their revenue will drop by around £150m. There will have to be huge changes for them to adjust to a second-tier budget.

As in all cases of relegation, it is clear there have been faults across every department at City. But the theme running through all of them is passivity. Everybody from the chairman to the director of football to the manager to the squad stood still and expected not to be overtaken. How wrong they were. That shocking level of neglect has cost them as dearly as can be imagined.

It is the lesson that will be heeded by those sides who remain in the Premier League, and the one that City should take on board should they ever get back into the top flight.

[lfu]

6 hours ago, davieG said:

Not worth starting another "who's to blame" thread

 

 

https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/how-leicester-city-stood-still-8477813

 

How Leicester City stood still and let relegation engulf them
Analysis on where it went wrong at the King Power Stadium as Leicester City's Premier League era ended on Sunday despite a run of five consecutive top-half finishes

SPORT
ByJordan Blackwell
07:15, 29 MAY 2023UPDATED07:36, 29 MAY 2023

For years, Leicester City were the club that others aspired to be. Imitating Manchester City and Liverpool without huge finances was impossible, so teams turned to Leicester as an example of how to rise the ranks on a more modest budget.

They will continue to learn from Leicester now, but this time about how not to do it. For the supporters who have watched this team over the past two years, it has felt like a slow unravelling, with a new torturous mistake each week. But in reality, City have dropped like a stone. They are the first team in the Premier League era to finish in the top half for five straight seasons and then be relegated.

They are the club that stood still and expected everything to be fine. They assumed the upward trajectory of the past decade would continue or, at worst, plateau. Instead, they have succumbed to one of the most devastating relegations a club has ever suffered, given their expenditure and the huge drop in revenue they are about to experience.

 

Questions will be asked over how it went so wrong. People will want to know the decisions that cost City their Premier League status. Inaction is the main answer. It is not necessarily what City did, but what they didn’t do. They didn’t sell wantaway players last summer, they didn’t freshen up the squad, they didn’t sack an underperforming manager, they didn’t recognise the danger of relegation. Now they have to rip up 10 years of work and start again.

There will be in-house and external post-mortems of this wretched campaign and the most sensible point at which to start is he summer of 2021. In hindsight, it was a disastrous transfer window, bad enough to rival the infamous post-title summer of 2016. Patson Daka and Boubakary Soumare were bought with good intentions, seen as raw talents who could develop into top-level players. Neither improved significantly over two seasons. Then there was a breaking of the ranks from City’s usual transfer policy for the dreadful signings of Ryan Bertrand and Jannik Vestergaard.

Crucially, City did not sell any of their FA Cup winners. For the first time since their return to the Premier League, all of the big names remained. So £60m was spent without much being made in return, meaning that when the next summer came, cash had run dry. City didn’t even have the £12m to bring back loanee winger Ademola Lookman, the biggest success of the 2021 recruits.

That season, an eighth-placed finish and a run to the Europa Conference League semi-finals masked flaws, notably a complete inability to defend set-pieces, to the point that clearances were met with sarcastic cheers, and a vulnerability on the transition, counter-attacking opponents often finding joy.

Then came last summer, perhaps the most significant factor in City’s relegation. Brendan Rodgers, approaching the end of his third full season at the club, felt it was going stale. His ability to affect the players was waning.

His analysis following an inactive January, swiftly followed by a rant after the humiliating FA Cup exit at Nottingham Forest, made clear he was hoping for a revamp of his squad. He was approaching the end of a cycle. For the next three years of his contract, City would need to start anew.

He clearly felt the “healthy shake-up” he desired was coming. In May 2022, he told several of his squad that they should seek opportunities elsewhere. On holiday in June, he started to get in contact with transfer targets and explain his vision to them. When he returned, nothing had happened.

Reassessments of the finances meant City could not spend until they had sold players. But, in a hugely costly error, they didn’t move players on.

Not only were there players at the club who the manager felt had run their course at the King Power, but those who were entering the final 12 months of their contracts. City needed to get rid of them, even if their internal valuations were not met.

Youri Tielemans may not have attracted the interest he assumed he would be neither did City push for a buyer. It was not the club’s fault he did not want to sign a new contract, but once that was clear, they needed to move him on for any fee they could to avoid losing him for free. They may not have been able to sign a replacement who hit the same heights technically, but they could have brought in a player who wanted to be at the club.

It was perhaps even more imperative that City moved on Caglar Soyuncu, given the deterioration of Rodgers’ faith in him. If the manager was not going to use him, why not sell him, even for a small fee?

Rodgers frequently said the club mustn’t be scared to sell, but again, there was inaction. Contracts and sales are the domain of director of football Jon Rudkin. His negligence left the club with a bloated squad of players who did not want to be there or who were told they were unwanted.

So when the season started, there was no fresh impetus. There was no excitement. With a hungrier set of new players, ones keen to prove a point, there would have been, even if they were not as talented as those they had replaced.

There is a lack of knowledge and explanation over exactly what happened last summer, but those with the answers do not seek to give them. It has been a long time since any decision-maker at City, aside from the manager, has spoken to the media. Supporters are not informed anywhere near as fully as they could be.

In the end, City did sell two players, but only replaced one. Wesley Fofana was let go late in the window, the transfer saga reaching a point where the defender was skipping training to force through his exit, his replacement Wout Faes only arriving as the deadline was in view.

And then captain Kasper Schmeichel departed too. On the pitch for a couple of seasons, the Dane had been a solid Premier League goalkeeper occasionally capable of match-winning heroics, but he wasn’t one of their best players, and given he was one of their highest earners, it made sense to sell. However, City missed what he brought off the field, with Schmeichel a driver of high standards who did not let team-mates slack.

On the pitch, he was missed too. The lack of finances saw Danny Ward turned to, and while he had done reasonably well in cup appearances during his four years as deputy, he did not handle the pressure of being number one well.

It was clear for all to see he was struggling, but doubts over the footwork of Daniel Iversen prevented a change between the sticks until it was too late. Yet more inaction, and an example of the lack of ruthlessness across the club.

That was one of many fatal flaws made by Rodgers, who does not escape criticism just because the club’s demise continued even after his departure.

Heading into the unknown having never lasted beyond the first couple of months of a fourth season at a club, he appeared to lose his spark when he didn’t get the signings he wanted. It is not a promising sign when a manager’s words and body language lead them to be asked if they are still happy in their role barely a month into a new campaign.

Neither did he correct the issues that had plagued City previously. The arrival of Lars Knudsen as a set-piece coach helped a little at corners, but the defensive organisation when City lost the ball higher up the pitch was still non-existent. They still couldn’t win matches in which they had large portions of possession, such was their inability to create chances and penetrate against deeper defences. That wasn’t a good look for a manager that wanted his side to dominate the ball.

All of these faults were clear to the naked eye, and yet Rodgers remained in place. At Brighton in early September, City lost their fifth straight match in a performance littered with the hallmarks of a side who would be battling relegation. There were tactical disasters, defensive disorganisation, miscommunication, a lack of running, and team-mates arguing with each other. Those are signs of a side that will not be only fighting the drop, but one that will lose that fight. Still, Rodgers remained in his position, chairman Aiyawatt ‘Top’ Srivadhanaprabha seemingly blinded by the success that came previously.

When the next obvious period for a change in manager came, during the World Cup, there had been a significant enough turnaround that the faith in Rodgers had seemed justified. But in hindsight, it only damaged City’s survival hopes.

Because it wasn’t until they then dropped back into the relegation zone with an utterly awful defeat at Crystal Palace in early April that the board sprung into action. But still, there was no plan nor urgency.

Caretakers Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell were given two winnable home games, and there was even hope of them seeing out the campaign to allow the club a thorough look at who to bring in next. How naive that then seemed when two more losses were recorded.

Dean Smith was the man chosen of the many spoken to. But never had a Premier League club in the relegation zone sacked a manager after March and survived. Smith needed to do something that had never been done before. His own faith in achieving such a feat seemed to wilt immediately, when he said in his opening press conference, after watching the team’s defeat to Bournemouth, that he’d gone from “80-20 to take the job, down to 50-50”.

The players do not escape blame either. It was consistently said that they cared about the club’s plight, and yet their performances left supporters questioning that most weeks.

They did not seem to have much interest in a relegation fight. There were players who saw a relegation battle as beneath them. They’d had two years of sitting in the top four, two years of playing in Europe, and felt that was the kind of stage they deserved to be playing on.

Then, they did not recognise quickly enough the trouble they were in. James Maddison’s “we’ll be absolutely fine” tweet following the loss at Southampton will be remembered for generations as a symbol of the casual approach to the dangers of the drop.

There was a fragility there as well. They lost too many tight games, and gave up too many winning positions across the season. That they had more wins by three or four-goal margins than they did by a single goal. Often, when the going got tough and the pressure was on, they were found wanting.

Once a tight-knit squad, the vast new training ground at Seagrave had not helped in replicating the relationships seen during the title win. Rodgers tried to introduce measures to help with the camaraderie of the side, such as getting large glass windows installed for the recreation room so that players could see in and were more likely to stick around and maybe bond with team-mates, rather than head straight for the exit.

The facilities are so good that the players don’t have to lift a finger. But that brings questions over a lack of responsibility. If you don’t have to show any at training, can you do so on the pitch on a Saturday? Rodgers sought to make changes there too. But asking players to take away their dirty lunchtime plates and put them on a trolley, rather than be waited on by staff, does not seem significant enough to change attitudes.

Add all of those factors together and it’s a recipe for disaster. And that is putting it lightly. Typically, wage expenditure is the best indicator of where a club should finish in the division. Spending £182m a year on paying players and staff, City should have been seventh. Instead, they are heading to the Championship, where it is estimated that their revenue will drop by around £150m. There will have to be huge changes for them to adjust to a second-tier budget.

As in all cases of relegation, it is clear there have been faults across every department at City. But the theme running through all of them is passivity. Everybody from the chairman to the director of football to the manager to the squad stood still and expected not to be overtaken. How wrong they were. That shocking level of neglect has cost them as dearly as can be imagined.

It is the lesson that will be heeded by those sides who remain in the Premier League, and the one that City should take on board should they ever get back into the top flight.

Good read.

 

Hope the journos keep it coming. The more of them hammering Rudkin for his incompetence the better.

 

I like these excerpts in particular

"Rodgers frequently said the club mustn’t be scared to sell, but again, there was inaction. Contracts and sales are the domain of director of football Jon Rudkin. His negligence left the club with a bloated squad of players who did not want to be there or who were told they were unwanted."

"There is a lack of knowledge and explanation over exactly what happened last summer, but those with the answers do not seek to give them. It has been a long time since any decision-maker at City, aside from the manager, has spoken to the media. Supporters are not informed anywhere near as fully as they could be."

Edited 29 May 2023 by lfu

[Claudio Fannieri]

Someone is definitely briefing the media and pushing the narrative that Rudkin has been largely to blame for the mess we find ourselves in. I expect they are trying to make his position untenable so he resigns or at least agrees to a much reduced pay off 

[foxinsocks]

Funny... rodgers sees it coming everywhere he goes.

 

Seriously, Rodgers I'd still peddling the I wasn't supported line.  Basically his tactics were out of date... and his teams blew the end of each season.. .. so he blamed the squad... demotivating them.  

Let's be clear... this group of players ...managed my my mum... should have been 10th or 11th this season.  But Rodgers had undermined the whole thing.

He threw the brentford game to try and make his point... all the time fluffing rudkin and top.

 

Yet Top didnt see this.  He didnt react to rodgers buying players like bertraund and westegaard... or players managed by his lad.  These were warning signs.  Rodgers decisive behavior was inconsistant with the Thais happy club...

 But they did nothing.  What wre his advisors saying as this season played out.   Soma fans were screaming for rodgers out and so e saying give him time.  Top backed the wrong line until it was too late.

 

To rebuild them top needs to put in place processes to stop such a situation both at sourse and mid season where the wheels are off

 

 

[foxile5]

Speaking of crap journalistic standards it's going to be obscene having to rely on the dreadful Radio Leicester offerings.

 

Palmer Atkinson is so green that he won't ask a single question of anyone at the club, Piper is half decent but isn't on regular, and there are still some vestiges of bad feeling from within the club.

 

[Bum Scissors]

By a City fan.

https://leicestershirepress.com/2023/05/30/five-fateful-fails-that-sent-leicester-city-to-the-premier-league-scrapheap/