What were Top's & Rudkin's club personal expectations post 24/25?

[The boy Linacre]

My hope, not my expectation was that we would stay up, unless a bigger miracle happens than in 2015, we are going down in a more disappointing fashion than in 2023.

Another thread listed Rudders 20+ cock ups over the last 5+ seasons.  35 months ago we were about to beat Eindhoven in the Netherlands and go to Rome.  We are about to be relegated for a 2nd time since then. 

I think that is the likely result as I was at Fulham, Brentford & most embarrassingly West Ham.  We can't score, we can't defend, its tough to get results from that base, however easy on paper we think the run in might be.

 

When Enzo left what did Top and Rudkin hope for???  They employed Cooper (beggars couldn't be choosers), they spent £60m in almost total wastage, Skipp, Edouard, Michael Golding (who), BDCR, Ayew (are they both a real threat?). 

They sacked him, why??? 

They bought RVN in because "RVN's communication skills and charisma impressed the club's hierarchy, according to sources at United, they liked him from the outset, leading to his appointment at Leicester.  "Top is expecting great things from Van Nistelrooy, signing him to a deal that runs until 2027."

They must have known or guessed ALL ALONG, they had financially mismanaged the club OR they are deluded.

 

Last time out 2023, he came out with this soundbite:

"We share the loss and the pain of relegation together. But we will be back.”  To them what did being back mean??

“Today we share the loss and the pain together. But we will be back. This responsibility that I continue to live is one of the greatest responsibilities in my life and I will continue to put everything into it – my passion, that of my family and the entire King Power community.”  I think most of us would ask really???, The mistakes are one followed by another from last July, don't match up to those statements and "that supposed passion".

 

I feel ambivalent now, frustrated at the wasted opportunity, the stupid decisions one on top of the other repeatedly, angry at the whole structure, the silence or acceptance of responsibility for the owners & decision makers, RVN's repeated interview BS as he sleepwalks through numerous games where we can't score, most of the players laying down their tools at the London Stadium.

 

Having read Foxes talk since Christmas particularly I think I understand what most on here think.  The big question I presume we will never find out as they never communicate is what did Top/Rudkin/the decision makers hope for from this season when Cooper joined/they spent £60m/they sacked Cooper/they employed RVN/they had a net spend of -£7m in Jan

 

How did you deal with that responsibility?  What did you hope for this season?  

 

[Pliskin]

3 hours ago, The boy Linacre said:

spent £60m in almost total wastage, Skipp, Edouard, Michael Golding (who), BDCR, Ayew (are they both a real threat?).  

 

This is possibly the most harrowing stat for this season, considering if you remove KDH from the scenario it’s £80m spent and genuine shit. One good signing, in BEK, Golding is a child and is a million miles away from senior football and the rest are fodder. Cooper holds some responsibility for just horrific scouting, and thinking the likes of Ayew and BDR were good signings. You can make £80m so much, much further than what we’ve managed to.

 

And in answer to your post, I genuinely don’t think they’ve got a clue. I think if you sat Top down now and asked him what his goal was from this day, he would say survival. 
 

I just think they’re utterly deluded, and without Vichai they’re leaderless (excuse the pun)……

Edited 13 March by Pliskin

[Fox92]

I suppose it depends what the board were looking for in a manager in the summer. If they wanted someone to just keep us up then Cooper had history of doing that with Forest, some might argue a worse Forest side. I hoped to stay up and I genuinely believed Cooper would have kept us up, just. 

 

Fair enough if they wanted to sack Cooper but at least go for a better manager. We took a huge backwards step at that point. Van Nistelrooy has never shown any sign of being good enough here and should have gone weeks ago. Even in Van Nistelrooy's opening games we weren't good enough, I said at the time that West Ham and then Brighton had the best chances of each game but couldn't take them, people laughed when I posted that and said I was wrong. There were people posting, when Cooper was here, that this squad would be up the table under a better manager

 

The last two summer's have been poor. People point under Cooper but under Enzo wasn't any better. We wasted £15m on Coady and Cannon (granted, we found a club stupid enough to make a profit on Cannon) but in the Championship we generally signed players that were good enough to get us up but then not good enough to push on in the Premier League, such as Mavididi nearly £7m and Winks £10m (Hermansen aside, of course). The money we've spent has been horrific and ultimately it is recruitment which damages your team.

[Happy Fox]

They thought we would be midtable clueless charlatans the lot of them.

[Les-TA-Jon]

1 hour ago, Pliskin said:

I just think they’re utterly deluded, and without Vichai they’re rudderless (excuse the pun)……

Bloody hell...

[CosbehFox]

Survive - they work from season to season. By hook or crook, the whole Man City line is nonsense. Much like fans, it doesn't matter as along as we are winning. 

[Lambert09]

I think I could accept our on the pitch form if the aim from the start was to fix our financial issues.  If we had just taken this as a lifeline but accepted we were likely going down but in a better financial position, id be fine. But then you look at the type of business. Expensive contracts on players with no resale value. 

 

8m on ayew. 25m on skipp.  Remove these two bits of business and I think id look at it all and say, well we were being smart for business reasons. Get the ffp stuff behind us and allow us room to grow when we are ready to.  

 

But what we actually did was act desperately. Pay players what they want. Pay whatever fees clubs wanted for cast aways  because that was what the manager wanted. Unsurprisingly we acted without a vision. 

This season is the worst its ever been. The decisions have made less sense than ever before and we undid a lot of excellent work from enzo and his team.  We are still very well placed to go up next season, despite how bad it has been.  But we need clear heads and change and a sprinkle of quality from the academy.  The next manager appointment is the biggest in our history imo, get it wrong and we could drop to league 1. We have one chance to bounce back before it all crumbles and the work to establish ourselves over the last 15 years is completely lost.

 

 

[Jobyfox]

My personal expectations were quite low. I knew that we were in a financial hole. I also knew we’d lose our best performing player, from last season in KDH, to try and climb out of it. The squad looked pretty thin for the Premier League. 
 

All I wanted to see were a few signings that excited me. I was pragmatic enough to realise that they might not be enough to keep us in the Premier League but hopeful that, even if we got relegated, they would help build a solid base for some sort of reset in the Championship. 
 

Players like BEK, Abdul, Okoli, Hermansen and Mavididi have all come into the club over the last couple of seasons with various degrees of success. I don’t mind signings like this as, even if they go wrong, it’s an investment in younger players who could genuinely make a difference. They might even find their level after relegation or have significant resale value if they do perform.

 

I’m still pretty frustrated and angry at a transfer strategy that saw us bring Ayew, Edouard, BDCR and Skipp to the club. With those transfers I’m not sure what Top and JR expected. For me it drained any hope I had of a productive season and, as the season has gone on, I can’t think of a time when I’ve felt more disenfranchised in 40 years following the club. There are just too many players now where I have no expectation for them to ever make any meaningful contribution to LCFC - either now or in the future 
 

 

[Les-TA-Jon]

11 minutes ago, Lambert09 said:

I think I could accept our on the pitch form if the aim from the start was to fix our financial issues.  If we had just taken this as a lifeline but accepted we were likely going down but in a better financial position, id be fine. But then you look at the type of business. Expensive contracts on players with no resale value. 

 

8m on ayew. 25m on skipp.  Remove these two bits of business and I think id look at it all and say, well we were being smart for business reasons. Get the ffp stuff behind us and allow us room to grow when we are ready to.  

 

But what we actually did was act desperately. Pay players what they want. Pay whatever fees clubs wanted for cast aways  because that was what the manager wanted. Unsurprisingly we acted without a vision. 

This season is the worst its ever been. The decisions have made less sense than ever before and we undid a lot of excellent work from enzo and his team.  We are still very well placed to go up next season, despite how bad it has been.  But we need clear heads and change and a sprinkle of quality from the academy.  The next manager appointment is the biggest in our history imo, get it wrong and we could drop to league 1. We have one chance to bounce back before it all crumbles and the work to establish ourselves over the last 15 years is completely lost.

 

 

£5m, rising to £8m if we stay up. 

 

Saved ourselves £3m by being relegated 

[Pita]

1 hour ago, CosbehFox said:

Survive - they work from season to season. By hook or crook, the whole Man City line is nonsense. Much like fans, it doesn't matter as along as we are winning. 

They will have a lot of work to survive next season in the championship. Must be one of the worst teams ever 

[Nalis]

4 minutes ago, Pita said:

They will have a lot of work to survive next season in the championship. Must be one of the worst teams ever 

I dont think we'll go down next season nor will we challenge. I predict we will be at Stoke/Swansea levels of nothingness for the next few years.

[Royston.]

Thought we'd struggle, even with Maresca.

Doesn't matter how long you've been in the Premier League, a club our size and finances loses its best players and if you do get back, you're starting from square one, cannon fodder.

 

Top and his cronies couldn't foresee this back when Rogers was sending us down and even if they could, their inept decision making has set the club back years.

 

I'd be surprised if we ever grace the top flight again after this season whilst Top is still the owner.

[Lambert09]

1 hour ago, Royston. said:

Thought we'd struggle, even with Maresca.

Doesn't matter how long you've been in the Premier League, a club our size and finances loses its best players and if you do get back, you're starting from square one, cannon fodder.

 

Top and his cronies couldn't foresee this back when Rogers was sending us down and even if they could, their inept decision making has set the club back years.

 

I'd be surprised if we ever grace the top flight again after this season whilst Top is still the owner.

Well originally I would have agreed. But we are only 6 points away and maresca is far better than cooper and RVN.  The summer looks a lot different if he was in charge. If Maresca was here, I think we  start fairly well, and wed eventually hit a rut when players lose confidence to play his way and he wont change his philosophy. But I think he just wins the games where teams were there for the taking.  Weve been gifted so many occasions where the other side are nowhere near their best this season and by and large weve not even tried to get at them and allowed them to pick up some confidence. 

 

Ultimately we might still have gone down but id think wed actually be leading wolves at this stage and would be crossing their fingers they cant catch us, rather than the other way around. 

 

 

Edited 13 March by Lambert09

[ClaphamFox]

1 hour ago, Lambert09 said:

Well originally I would have agreed. But we are only 6 points away and maresca is far better than cooper and RVN.  The summer looks a lot different if he was in charge. If Maresca was here, I think we  start fairly well, and wed eventually hit a rut when players lose confidence to play his way and he wont change his philosophy. But I think he just wins the games where teams were there for the taking.  Weve been gifted so many occasions where the other side are nowhere near their best this season and by and large weve not even tried to get at them and allowed them to pick up some confidence. 

 

Ultimately we might still have gone down but id think wed actually be leading wolves at this stage and would be crossing their fingers they cant catch us, rather than the other way around. 

 

 

The sharp pivot in our recruitment strategy after Cooper joined is one of the most damning pieces of evidence for the incompetence of those who run our club. We would not have signed Ayew or BCDR, and very likely would not have signed Skipp, had Enzo had stayed. We also would not have signed those players if Graham Potter - our first choice to replace Maresca - had joined instead of Cooper. Ditto Carlos Corberan, who we apparently admired but for some reason were not willing to fork out £4-5m in compensation to prise him away from West Brom despite dropping £25m on Skipp a few weeks later. 
 

The fact that the final two names on our shortlist were coaches as different from each other as Potter and Cooper (one providing clear continuity from Maresca, the other a clear departure) is insane. What was the plan? Did we even have one? If Potter wasn’t committed then we should have waited until July and gone after Corberan or cast the net again to find someone else. Instead we recruited a wholly unsuitable manager in a fit of pique/panic, allowed that manager to target players who we would never have considered under Maresca, then sacked that manager a few months later because - lo and behold! - he wasn’t connecting with the squad. It seems the primary reason Cooper got the job was because he was available for free, which is a mind boggling way to recruit a manager. The managerial appointment is far more important than that of any player - if you try to do it on the cheap, you are inviting disaster. 

Edited 13 March by ClaphamFox