Who was our worst manager and why?

[Silebyfox_89]

1. Taylor

2. Cooper

3. RVN

 

In order in my lifetime

[roblcfc84]

Think putting Cooper anywhere near Taylor and RVN is harsh. 

[davieG]

Four Categories

Best 

Most Liked

Most Disliked 

Worst 

[Guppys Love Child]

4 hours ago, The Horse's Mouth said:

I understand the point it’s just moronic though, he achieved two top 5 finishes and an fa cup. And you’re talking about him amongst the likes of Holloway for partaking in our relegation season. That flawed logic you’re using could be used to argue Brian clough is forests worst manager 

Ok

[Wolfox]

Just to clear this thread up a little for everyone as somehow we’ve managed 7 pages of discussion…. 
 

it’s Peter f@ck#n Taylor…

[OntarioFox]

53 minutes ago, roblcfc84 said:

Think putting Cooper anywhere near Taylor and RVN is harsh. 

Hot take, but if RVN is in that dugout from game 1 and gets the summer window, we sign completely different players and the outcome is possibly different.

 

Not defending his tactical dumbassery, but there's no way we'd have ended up with Skipp, Ayew, BDCR if Ruud was the one at the helm. Cooper is worse than him for that appalling window alone.

[shen]

5 hours ago, The Horse's Mouth said:

I understand the point it’s just moronic though, he achieved two top 5 finishes and an fa cup. And you’re talking about him amongst the likes of Holloway for partaking in our relegation season. That flawed logic you’re using could be used to argue Brian clough is forests worst manager 

Well it certainly puts into question how to quantify or qualify a manager's performance as we really only see him during press conferences and how well or bad his teams play. The rest is mainly hearsay.

There are probably too many factors beyond a manager's control to list when it comes to assessing his tenure.

 

Just look at how many in here attribute player signings to the manager. Yet for a long time, it's been the responsibility of the Sporting Director and the Head of Recruitment. We can only assume how much influence the manager has in these transfers. I suspect, like in many clubs, the manager will have some influence, maybe even a veto, but he will say what profile he needs/prefers and the scouting department will make a draft of potential players while the Sporting Director will work on negotiating the deal. 

 

So in short, it's not strictly appropriate to assess the manager in isolation from the position of a fan with limited inside knowledge.

 

Any assessment is obviously a reflection of all the factors at the club at the time the manager was present, including the start and end points. 

 

When I give a shoutout to Rodgers, it's simply because of the stark contrast during the two phases of his tenure. The damage done in the second phase is far more meaningful and long-lasting than say RVNs half a season in a car crash scenario.

 

So "worst" for me defines what was the most damaging for the club.

[whoareyaaa]

2 hours ago, The Horse's Mouth said:

Cooper was in charge for 10 games and left us in 17th, there’s not much there to consider him the worst with the other competition. 

Cooper destroyed what we built under Enzo had a whole pre season and spent about 35m and we looked awful in most games on the other hand RVN had no pre season or budget and came into a broken dressing room as Cooper isolated most of the better players and had us playing some awful stuff dunno how you can claim Cooper left us in a good position moronic 

[SystonFox]

2 hours ago, roblcfc84 said:

Think putting Cooper anywhere near Taylor and RVN is harsh. 

bUt hE wAs Ex FuRrrEsT

[SystonFox]

in no order... and theres not much in it here for me in my lifetime

 

Taylor

RvN

Holloway

Levein

Allen

[HitchinFox]

In my view, RvN was awful, but, in his mitigation, he was given a bad toolbox. He simply wasn't up for the task of utilising what he had in that poorly-stocked box in any shape or form. More damningly, he also wasn't happy with some of the better tools in the box and decided to not use them. 

Cooper was bad too. Was too young to assess McLintock. 

But the winner for me is between Peter Taylor, who just edges Dave Bassett. Taylor took a decent team, brought in awful players and tried to build around those awful players. However, Basset must carry a lot of the responsibility for that 2002 relegation. That squad still had decent players in it and, although no team is too good to go down – that team should've been too good to go down. 

 

[Miquel The Work Geordie]

1 hour ago, davieG said:

Four Categories

Best 

Most Liked

Most Disliked 

Worst 

 

As a 1990 born fan...

 

Best: O'Neill

Most Liked: Pearson by an absolute mile

Most Disliked: Rodgers or Cooper

Worst: Holloway, Taylor, RvN

[foxfanazer]

Just now, Miquel The Work Geordie said:

 

As a 1990 born fan...

 

Best: O'Neill

Most Liked: Pearson by an absolute mile

Most Disliked: Rodgers or Cooper

Worst: Holloway, Taylor, RvN

Pretty much spot on for me too. Although Nigel potentially the best but not universally liked by Leicester fans (weirdly). Ranieiri has a shout for most liked as does Shakey 

 

Disliked is Rodgers by a distance 

[Guest]

In terms of what they achieved here it's obviously not Rodgers but I can understand those shouts because he's the only one I can remember visibly giving up trying to manage the team in favour of politicking and protecting his reputation. Don't think I'll ever forget him bringing on ****ing Lewis Brunt at left back away at Forest, or conversely not bringing on anyone against Brentford and then blaming the heat. His early 19/20 team was still the one I've had the most fun watching and being at Wembley for the cup win was a special thing to experience so I think I give him a bit more slack than most as a result.

 

Taylor is before my time but he seems the obvious one. More recently Cooper and Ruud were both abysmal, the latter record-breakingly so - given what we saw from him I'm amazed anyone thinks we'd have been noticeably better off if he'd also been given a pre-season and money to spend, the guy was genuinely clueless. Holloway unarguably gets in the conversation too for taking us to our literal lowest point, and Sousa probably also deserves a mention for so quickly stripping our team of all the positive qualities Pearson had imbued it with. 

[murphy]

3 hours ago, OntarioFox said:

Hot take, but if RVN is in that dugout from game 1 and gets the summer window, we sign completely different players and the outcome is possibly different.

 

Not defending his tactical dumbassery, but there's no way we'd have ended up with Skipp, Ayew, BDCR if Ruud was the one at the helm. Cooper is worse than him for that appalling window alone.

Agreed.  Cooper set us up to fail. 

[Guest kristianity77]

Cooper was dreadful but I’ll go out on a limb and say we would have made a better fight of staying up had he stayed. We’d of gone down still for sure, but not in the embarrassing way that we did it.  So RVN for me is worse than Cooper.

 

Having said that, RVN deapite how bad he was, was just just put out up front in the shop to be someone to deflect the years and years of bad decisions that were made above him.

 

So it has to be Taylor, who took a decent side, and screwed it up in mere months.  At least it took Rodger’s a couple of years to do that. 
 

There may well have been worse managers before that, but I only remember from the Brian Little era so that’s all I can base it on.

Edited 5 September 2025 by kristianity77

[inckley fox]

2 hours ago, davieG said:

Four Categories

Best 

Most Liked

Most Disliked 

Worst 

Best: Pearson. Took us up two divisions, kept us up and - in unprecedented fashion given our financial limitations - formed a side on a shoestring that would win the league. If we were treating Pearson I and Pearson II as separate incarnations, then you could possibly argue for O'Neill ahead of him -  and certainly Ranieri - but if you combine the two reigns, he's got to be the most important manager in our history. In fact, his achievement is, for me, the most underrated in modern football. He was the architect, if not the deliverer, of one of the most significant events the game has ever seen.

 

Most liked (by the fanbase): Ranieri. Retrospectively, Pearson perhaps, but while he was actually in charge he was in and out of favour with the fans. It was always 'fine margins', as he'd say. Ranieri was feted pretty much from game one to the rather messy ending. O'Neill was adored, but the negativity towards him in his first six months leads me to lump for Ranieri. My personal favourite? O'Neill just pips Pearson and Ranieri. I should also add that I posted on here under a different name when I was a kid and people thought I was secretly in love with Craig Levein, which is unfair because I thought he was crap and was merely trying to offer some balance here and there. I actually fled the forum for a few years on the back of that! It is true that I had a soft spot for the late Gordon Lee though. I met him when I was little, and he was a good man. And saved us from disaster back in 1991.

 

Most disliked (by fanbase) - Cooper. Ahead of Taylor and Ruud, who were quite popular for brief spells, and Megson, who was gone before the hatred could hit fever pitch. At first it was because he wasn't good enough for us, then because he wouldn't give Alves a chance, then because he wouldn't play Pereira (both justifiable decisions), then because he was to blame for our dodgy recruitment (Skipp, Bobby etc.) even though our recruitment had been awful for years, and then because we should have been in the top half of the table, and weren't, (which was an utterly insane stance, even at the time). I'm sure people are trying to realign their arguments now. Yes, he was the wrong appointment and we'd most probably have gone down if he'd stayed, but it was still disproportionate hatred. People just couldn't get beyond a real gut distaste for the guy, and the tidal wave of negativity - which gave the green light, I thought, for some of our players to express their antipathy too - meant he was doomed from the off. Personally, the one I could least abide was probably Rodgers, but it's an irrational dislike because I think, given time, it's inevitable that he'll be seen as one of our more successful bosses. I also had a serious issue with Taylor. I wrote him a letter telling him how crap Junior Lewis was and, to his credit, he replied. But he wrote, quite brusquely, that anyone who understood the game would see what Lewis had to offer, and he weirdly double-underlined the word 'manager' where it said, beneath his signature, 'Leicester City Manager'. I still have that letter in my parents' house somewhere.

 

Worst - Holloway for me. Taylor at least achieved a 13th place top flight finish. There are only 13 or 14 of our managers who have kept us up for at least a season in the top flight, so even though PT was the manager who perhaps did the most damage to the club in my lifetime, his achievements put him a notch or two above Hamilton, Allen, Megson, Holloway, Ruud. Ollie inherited a side in 17th which, in spite of the chaos, should never have gone down, and his complacency (e.g. saying 'we probably already have enough points to stay up') was key to our worst ever finish. Hamilton, Pleat and Sousa, for instance, were nowhere near that awful or that disastrous. 

[Legend_in_blue]

Taylor - totally inept

Cooper - almost as totally inept

Rodgers - totally negligent

[enmac]

Worst manager by win percentage was Frank McLintock. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Leicester_City_F.C._managers

[sylofox]

On 04/09/2025 at 15:12, Miquel The Work Geordie said:

 

We were a mess behind the scenes but Holloway had 32 league games and a squad (although limited) that was more than good enough to stay up. He was also quite well backed in the Jan window.

 

Incredible how easy he gets off the hook with some folk. 

 

On 04/09/2025 at 17:52, Miquel The Work Geordie said:

 

Oh right, unmitigated success then

Really all I said was not totally to blame.

 

How old are you? Your response is childish.

Not only me I didn't put it first but Mandric put him under pressure who to play. Also posted by another.

 

Always rated you as a poster. Thought you was older.

 

If you are.

 

Fvcking grow up.

[Soar Fox]

9 hours ago, davieG said:

Four Categories

Best 

Most Liked

Most Disliked 

Worst 

Rodgers

Pearson 

Taylor/Holloway

RvN 

[The Horse's Mouth]

9 hours ago, whoareyaaa said:

Cooper destroyed what we built under Enzo had a whole pre season and spent about 35m and we looked awful in most games on the other hand RVN had no pre season or budget and came into a broken dressing room as Cooper isolated most of the better players and had us playing some awful stuff dunno how you can claim Cooper left us in a good position moronic 

He didn’t destroy what enzo had built it was pretty much proven that season that team had a soft underbelly because the vast majority of them got relegated before anyway. We also lost our best player in that time. 35 million wasn’t enough to invest into the team and survive.He objectively did though, he didn’t leave us in a situation like Martin left saints in, we were outside the relegation zone. Those “better” players that were isolated that came back in played a crucial part in us breaking records when it came to not winning and not scoring, so in hindsight he was probably right in that regard.

 

Honestly I think you could actually make a better argument for Sven being worse than cooper, who systematically ripped up everything Nige at built with that team and bringing in old ***** on big money which severely ****ed us with ffp for the years going forward. The only reason we don’t really look at it like that is because Nige actually fixed the club afterwards

[foxinsox]

8 hours ago, The Horse's Mouth said:

He didn’t destroy what enzo had built it was pretty much proven that season that team had a soft underbelly because the vast majority of them got relegated before anyway. We also lost our best player in that time. 35 million wasn’t enough to invest into the team and survive.He objectively did though, he didn’t leave us in a situation like Martin left saints in, we were outside the relegation zone. Those “better” players that were isolated that came back in played a crucial part in us breaking records when it came to not winning and not scoring, so in hindsight he was probably right in that regard.

 

Honestly I think you could actually make a better argument for Sven being worse than cooper, who systematically ripped up everything Nige at built with that team and bringing in old ***** on big money which severely ****ed us with ffp for the years going forward. The only reason we don’t really look at it like that is because Nige actually fixed the club afterwards

I think Big Nige the most underrated of our recent managers. He rebuilt after Sven and all the lacklustre ones that came before. Sure his achievements seem modest with promotion and "The Great Escape", but he built the foundations for our greatest years. Seems a top bloke too.

[Tielemans63]

Not the worst, but a special mention for Levein - he was definitely the dullest. Dull man, dull signings, super boring football. I hated that period.

[filbertway]

Rodgers and Taylor are about equal for me in terms of being absolutely disastrous for the club, but I think Rodgers is an egotistical bellend, so he get's the nod from me.