Just how good is Brendan Rodgers?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind recently about just how good is Brendan Rodgers? He’s certainly the media darling at the moment. This current Leicester side and its success over the first 12 games is all down to him. That’s what the pundits and media would have you believe anyway. They can’t wait to link him to every ‘big club’ position that might be available in the near future and some of the fans of those big clubs are also jumping on the Brendan bandwagon.

Now before I go any further I’d say that I like Brendan Rodgers. I always think that you should give a manager a whole season before you can really judge, but who could not be impressed with the progress so far? He’s fixed some of the issues around lack of creativity, he’s incorporated Vardy into a different style when some thought that wouldn’t be possible and the players are clearly organised and bought into the system. He communicates well to the fans and press and shown flexibility when his initial systems weren’t working.

We’re second in the table and it’s all down to BR isn’t it? Or is it? The current team has one player that can be described as a Brendan signing: Ayoze Perez – who is arguably the lowest performing member of the current team. Dennis Praet also looks a very good signing, but can’t break into the starting eleven at present. Recruitment has clearly gone well in the recent past and the club has managed to re-build following the loss of key players like: Kante, Mahrez, Drinkwater and Maguire as well as losing those older players who were key to our previous success like Morgan and Huth.

If people cast their mind back to 2015/16 then everybody, quite rightly, lauded Claudio Ranieri for the Premier League success. This in turn started a conversation about who really was responsible: Nigel Pearson re-built the team, Craig Shakespeare coached it and Steve Walsh recruited Kante, Mahrez and Vardy. Ranieri, Shakespeare and latterly Puel have all come and gone. We’ve also since gone through different chief scouts and various people within the coaching and scouting teams.

I guess the point of this article is not to undermine the current success of Brendan Rodgers, but to ask how much of this is down to him or our current structure as a club. Clearly the team of Scrivaddhanaprabha, Whelan and Rudkin must be doing something right behind the scenes. If our form continues then the clamour from big clubs to hire Brendan Rodgers will grow and we would be naïve to think that a man who left Celtic on the verge of a treble treble would not be ambitious to grow his CV. This will test our resilience as a club. Will we collapse or will our relative success continue under someone else? There is a suspicion that the current issues at teams like Manchester United, Arsenal and Spurs run much deeper than who is manager. So despite the media love-in around Brendan is he as great as he is portrayed or are we just in a very good place currently in terms of the top to bottom management of our club?