As they eventually did with Rodgers towards the very end of his tenure at Leicester, the media are starting to figure out that the Leicester hierarchy might not be the stewards of a brilliantly run club after all. Lots of interesting articles starting to dig into how on earth a top 6 PL and FA cup winning club has nosedived to the championship inside 2 years.
As with Rodgers earning plaudits from far and wide when he was performing abysmally, Top, Rudkin and Whelan were showered with praise after the FA cup win with Leicester given the title of the PLs best run club. Except it turns out that really wasn’t the case at all. Infact even before that FA cup win, the very ethos of the club under Vichai was starting to fall apart
Here’s an interesting take from MailSport
“The spectacle summed up the sorry state of Leicester City's season.
After yet another pitiful display and defeat at Craven Cottage where Leicester were to slip two points adrift of safety with three games remaining, Maddison said – with typical candour – that Leicester had not been 'hungry enough to want to win the game.'
Few could deny that, and Maddison did not seek to exclude himself from blame. That did not stop the inevitable social media pile-on, though, and instead of stepping away from his phone, the England midfielder went in for another go.
'What is wrong with social media, say 1 thing in an interview straight after a game and it gets taken way out of context,' he wrote on . 'When I say not hungry enough I mean aggressive and on the front foot in duels, not us wanting to win or realising the importance.'
The problem here is that lacking aggression in duels sounds suspiciously like a side without the stomach for the fight – something Leicester have struggled to find throughout the season. James Maddison attempting to clarify a post-match interview summed up Leicester’s season
The Foxes are sleepwalking towards Premier League relegation after Monday's loss at Fulham
Dean Smith's arrival had an initial impact, with Leicester taking five points from games with Wolves, Leeds and Everton. But with fixtures against Liverpool and Newcastle to come, that haul looks insufficient and – just seven years after winning the Premier League title – Leicester may already be relegated by the time they take on West Ham on the final day of the campaign.
Here Mail Sport examines how the Foxes – FA Cup winners two years ago – found themselves in this mess.
Recruitment
In early August 2021, as chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha carried the Community Shield around the Wembley pitch after the win over Manchester City, Leicester felt like one of the best-run clubs in Europe. Yet this was the summer that marked the start of the slide.
Leicester committed about £60million on Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumare and Jannik Vestergaard, as well as bringing in Ryan Bertrand on a free transfer. No major player was sold.
Leicester have had no return on that investment and the failure to make a significant sale caused problems the following summer, when then-boss Brendan Rodgers feared the players were tiring of his message but was unable to overhaul his squad due to Leicester's Financial Fair Play concerns.
Management decisions
Hope for the best while planning for the worst. By sticking with Rodgers for so long when he had clearly reached the end of the line, Srivaddhanaprabha – known as 'Khun Top' – did the former but forgot about the latter.
Brendan Rodgers (left) was not backed in the transfer market and Leicester failed to prepare for life after their FA Cup-winning coach before sacking him
When Rodgers sat down with the hierarchy for a pivotal meeting in January 2022, there were two options: change the coach, or change the players. Support Rodgers' vision and give the squad the 'healthy shake-up' he felt it needed to stay competitive, or try to move forward with the same group but a different leader. Leicester did neither and even when they did sack Rodgers on April 2, there was no plan for what happened next.
Khun Top and the board hoped coaches Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell could muddle through until the end of the season and when that did not work, they interviewed numerous managers before settling for Smith on an eight-game deal. It was fuzzy thinking that did not match the severity of the situation.
The media are circling
posted on 13/5/23
Yep, that article sums up what has gone wrong.
posted on 13/5/23
Has your view of the club shifted during this season Mersey? Mine has. I started off concerned, but with each passing week that concern turned into alarm. I’m now at the stage where just like Brendan Rodgers, I don’t feel like there’s a way back with the same people in charge of the club.
You were, understandably defensive of the board given the achievements, honestly how do you feel about it these days?
Ps I’m not going to jump down your throat, regardless of the response!
posted on 13/5/23
It’s a really hard one to judge 99. What we can’t deny is this season has been horrifically managed from top to bottom.
I understand a lot of decisions but they’ve backfired spectacularly. The decision to stick with Rodgers was the most terminal. With hindsight he should have been sacked in the summer when he started throwing insults out against the players, club and fans. That for me is the biggest regret.
Do ai suddenly have no faith in the club’s lead ship structure. Well no, I can still see how the mistakes were made and I don’t think you can go from a well run club to an abysmally run club with the same structure in place.
However, it’s clear change is now needed to remove the rot that has clearly set in across the club. I think the best thing to do is bring in a new DoF and Manager with a project to rebuild in the championship and go again.
I’m happy for Top and Whelan to stay and to give them a chance to restructure this. But if they fail then I will agree with you and believe it’s time for full change. But I’m not there yet.
It’s so depressing isn’t it.
posted on 13/5/23
It’s hard to disagree with 99’s observations. In the final analysis the buck rests with Top. Vichai would surely have sacked Rodgers probably in the summer when his dolly exited the perambulator and certainly after the first few games of the season. In my relatively uninformed opinion, Rudkin must come in for almost as much blame as Rodgers but Top should really have done something positive about the whole situation before it got too late, as it would appear it has. Sitting on your hands and hoping for the best is never a good choice unless you’re also planning for the worst.
posted on 13/5/23
I've never been too keen on Rudkin who I understand does not have a background as a DoF. However the only person who we really can point the finger at is Top.
We don't know what discussions went on in the background, but we are aware that it went wrong when apparently a decision was taken to gamble on keeping our better players and investing in the squad to keep us challenging for Europe. That Ridsdale style gamble backfired spectacularly with us not making a European spot last season and putting us and the manager in a poor position with no new players coming in. We should not however have dived from a top eight and FA cup winning side into the relegation mire. That we are in such a situation is down to the inadequacy of the manager initially to be able to deal with circumstances he hadn't experienced previously, compounded greatly by a lack of action by Top and the management.
Nothing really new in the above, but my point is a query - were Rudkin and/or Whelan driving forward the 'plan' with Top acquiescing to it, or was Top insistent on going forward with a risky strategy against strong advice from Rudkin and/or Whelan, or was it something in between? I doubt we'll find out exactly what happened although any forthcoming replacement of Rudkin and/or Whelan might give an indication (but the word 'scapegoat' might also come to mind here).
In any event, Top cannot escape criticism whatever the actual scenario. It is inconceivable to me that we'd be in this mess if Vichai had survived.
Our owners still have brownie points for me so I've still got hope that Top is on a steep learning curve and will improve rapidly. He'd better, or us in the doldrums of the Championship or League 1, administration or even liquidation beckons.
I'll give him a bit more time but am so depressed to acknowledge for the first time that maybe 99p's thinking that we need a complete reset with new owners might unfortunately be the way forward.
I'm feeling that gloomy I'm going to add an extra
posted on 13/5/23
Agreeing with anything written in the Daily Mail makes me feel very dirty, but you can't really disagree with any of it.
The media are certainly a bit slow on the uptake and have been all season regarding our demise. It feels like our impending relegation will be a massive shock to everyone in football, apart from Leicester fans who have been predicting it since September.
One thing I will say on the ownership - if you go from competing for European football to imminent relegation in the space of 18 months, you can't call yourself a well-run club. That's the antithesis of a well-run club. The demise was set in motion when we started turning away from the strategy that made us successful in the first place - a transfer strategy which was largely independent of the manager, buying young, hungry players who could grow, and selling one star player every summer to fund the next 2 or 3 players. Once we started to move away from that, the whole house of cards started to collapse.
There is a lot of support and sensitivity towards Top, particularly because of the circumstances which saw him acquire the ownership. The truth is that he has overseen this gradual, and then sudden, collapse, not through maliciousness, but incompetence and neglect. He has failed to address the issues as they arose and put his personal loyalty to the previous manager ahead of his loyalty to the club.
I suspect that fans perception of him will change after relegation and that questions will start to be asked more forcefully, in a way that would have seemed unthinkable only a few months ago. Only he can decide whether he has the fight and appetite to rebuild the club and start again, or chooses to sell up. But whether he stays or sells, the next few months are absolutely crucial for the future of the club and whether we can start again or continue on the path of decline. If Top can't guarantee that he can make the right decisions, it would perhaps be better for all parties if he left.
posted on 13/5/23
Interesting points Mersey. Many people said the same when defending Rodgers. How could a manager go from being so brilliant to so abysmally awful? Surely that makes no sense - in the same way that we appear to have gone from a brilliantly run club to a terrible one
I think the truth is that we weren’t actually a brilliantly run club two years ago and haven’t really been since Vichais death. That’s what the articles are pointing to. In the same way that Rodgers started brilliantly but fell apart whenever he got tested, so have Top and the board.
The mystery behind how we have fallen apart so quickly for me is very similar to how Rodgers did - you find out how good someone is when things aren’t going well, not when they are. The King Power ownership as Foxello says has to be looked at in two parts - under Vichais ownership and under Tops. Vichai laid the remarkable foundations and had the ruthlessness to take decisions that were best for the club. Top on the other hand inherited that success, but when tested took irresponsible gambles and failed to show the same decisiveness. The truth is, he’s no chip off the old block sadly
Two years ago we looked like the model club. We weren’t. We were starting to fall apart from the inside and now the cracks are visible to everyone
posted on 13/5/23
Interestingly, there is an article on The Times website today (can’t link it as behind a paywall) almost identical to the ones about us except it is about Southampton. A club with an admired business model, punching above their weight that could be relegated today.
Also read somewhere recently that aside from the established Prem teams who have been in the top flight over twenty years, Southampton are next on the list with eleven seasons followed by West Ham and us. Most of the rest are less than ten years. Seems to me that without massive financial backing it is difficult to become established.
Having said that, I believe that if things had been done differently, we could have been safe now and able to regroup in the Prem. The gamble to stick with Rodgers failed, what I can’t forgive Top for is not having a successor lined up to replace him.
posted on 13/5/23
Looking at how Allardyce has got Leeds fighting like tigers against Newcastle, does anyone think he would have been a better interim appointment for us than Smith? Smith isn’t getting that fight out of the players - he isn’t even getting a defensive improvement from them
posted on 13/5/23
By the way good comments from Bowstring and Nuneaton. It’s a tough one with Top. I get why people are willing to give him a chance but the reason I know longer am is because I think he’s already financially snookered the club. Even if he suddenly starts acting like a responsible and competent owner, he’s crippled the club financially to such an extent that we’ll be lucky not to be in breach of FFP with the wages we’ll be paying out. That includes Vardy on a reported £160k a week with another year still left on his deal.
Part of the reason we went into administration originally was being lumped with high earners. We’ve got loans based on PL TV rights and while the parachute payments will help, we have to try and clear a hell of a lot of players off the books