So now we know: it was all down to Mandaric...

[jimmeh]

Who was the one who appointed Pearson in the first place. How many of you were moaning when this happened? Not experienced enough for many. If we had stayed up then Holloway would have kept his job. Who sold the club to these new owners? Mandaric was great.

[Manwell Pablo]

When Mandaric announced he was interested in buying City we'd been just two years out of the top flight, we'd never been in the third tier of football and we were a mid-table outfit under Rob Kelly.

 

Within eighteen months he'd worked his way through four managers, one of which lasted four games, another of which lasted six weeks, and got us relegated to League One. Yes he appointed the guy who got us out of League One - and who will return us to the Premier League after a ten year absence - but he also let him go and appointed one of the most financially wasteful managers in our history in his place.

 

We shouldn't give him too much credit for getting us where we are today.

 

 

Now now, thats a bit of an exaggeration isn't it, we were bottom half flirting with the drop for years with no money no interest from investors, Rob Kelly wasn't fit for purpose (backed up by the fact he's not had a job since) and we were, generally, fcking awful to watch. He got us to the play offs and got the owners interested, he had a far from perfect tenure but a dread to think what would have happened without him because relegation was coming eventually due to the fact that our players were crap and we didn't have a pot to piss in. 

[Corky]

This. It frustrates me everytime I see people speaking as if we owe the man something. I don't think we were near combustion (it certainly wasn't something being touted in the press at the time from my memory) and there would still have been a Leicester City Football Club here today - maybe with our proud record of never having dropped to the third tier staying in tact.

 

Credit for appointing Pearson? 1 - because Nige was hot property at the time after successful caretaker spells at Carlisle, Newcastle and Southampton, he was hardly and unknown name and 2 - because he sacked him for Sousa, a move which took the club two years to recover from.

 

Similarly credit for 'finding' our owners? He was a businessman, he wanted to sell, he found a buyer. Where's the need to attribute credit?

 

Pearson wasn't hot property, hardly anyone mentioned him in connection with this job, and given the fact Mandaric went through several managers in one season and once claimed "I'll go through 20 if it means being successful", I doubt potential managers were queueing up to take over.

 

If Mandaric or whoever did their research and got Pearson in I'll give them credit for that, I wonder how far down the list he was originally.

[HesNotGudjonsonn2]

Well I think we can all certainly agree he divides opinion.

[smudgerfox]

I do find it amusing that Mandaric gets the blame for the signings under his reign but the Thais don't get the blame for Sven's signings.

Well they work in completely different ways. So why should we criticise them for the same things? I said nothing about the Thais but it's perfectly obvious that the mad fart signs players even though he knows next to nothing about football as it is played only about its finances. He was an unmitigated disaster for our club. His signings were absolutely unbeleivable - many of them never ever going to make it in English football as events since have proven.

As for the Thais, the first part of their reign seemed like they would be more of the same - the Sousa appointment (although it's not clear that was their doing) followed by Sven and the mother of all spending sprees which led precisely nowhere and took the best part of two seasons to correct.

It says it all that the mad old fart - having appointed a series of clueless managers and saddled them with squads of useless players - stumbled on a good one then drove him away. That is the measure of the man.

[LC/FC]

Correct me if my memory's a bit shakey but didn't a large majority of Leicester fans actually want him to take us over at the time?

I remember him making an enquiring interest and then suddenly everyone jumped on the Milan bandwagon like it was the football equivalent of ****ing Candy Crush. I'm pretty sure the Mercury was full of articles about us wanting him to buy us because we were broke as **** at the time.