Afternoon all, posting this from sunny Norway currently on a bit of a tour from the Fjords. I’ve been catching up on all things Leicester and the noises from around the club seem to quite concerning at the moment - particularly in relation to our transfer activity and overall philosophy to be honest
While I always felt Maresca wasn’t the long term fit for a small club in the PL with that playing style, at least at this point last season, the club had a clear direction and were bringing in players to suit the way Maresca wanted to play
Things couldn’t be more different this time around. Now I understand that the club have almost written themselves off through their disgusting financial mismanagement over the last few seasons - but nonetheless, there is some money to do some business. It’s just unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any coherent strategy over player recruitment.
The lack of creativity during pre-season has been alarming. It’s almost as if the club expected they could sell KDH to meet FFP and somehow just rely on having about 16 wingers to compensate for no creativity in the middle of the park
Clearly Matthias Soule was a target but he had absolutely no intention of joining such a basket case club - so we have a £5m kid from Chelsea who isn’t ready and we’re about to loan Brightons Bounanotte to solve our no.10 problems. Except it’s unlikely to.
At this level, you need to have quality in the middle of the park or you are in real trouble. What have we got? Ndidi and Bobby Decordova Reid who is a journeyman winger. Oh and no another winger from Brighton who can’t get a game - but can at least play no.10
This season is going to be horrific for Cooper who isn’t even being given a chance by the hierarchy to succeed. What on earth is any manager supposed to do with such an imbalanced squad and a on impending points deduction?
It could be over before it even starts at this rate, there is a week to go until the season kicks off and we are very far from being ready. Surely it’s yet more evidence that Top and Rudkin are caught in the headlights, unable to steer the club out of this mess and are sinply reacting rather than strategically planning.
It all smacks of a club that has run out of road. We failed to deal with the fall out of relegation last season by holding on to players we couldn’t afford to (KDH for example) and spending the last 12 months kicking the can down the road on FFP rather than dealing with the situation. Well we know have no choice but to deal with it.
Our manager has walked out on us (and would have done regardless of the Chelsea approach and we’ve been finally forced to cash in on players we should have done last season leaving us no financial wriggle room because we’ve now breached last season as well as 2021. It’s all a painful mess and more evidence that the King Power group must sell up before the decline becomes terminal
What is going on at Leicester?
posted on 8/8/24
I’m too bewildered by the number of wingers we are trying to sign.
Pretty obvious to most we need creativity, i.e a number ten and a forward because going into the season with Daka ,Cannon and Vardy is plain crazy.
I thought we might try for Szmodics, not sure what he would cost ? If we were to get him onboard we would be well armed for next season when we will likely be aiming for promotion again.
posted on 8/8/24
I'd like to be able to be surprised by where we're heading. I'm not, we're in a mess and I can't see us having anything other than a horrendous season. Why should anybody be shocked about poor player recruitment - we've still got Rudders in place.
posted on 8/8/24
It’s falling apart big time isn’t it? I’m the biggest pessimist there is when it comes to Leicester and I couldn’t have predicted we’d be in such a state before the beginning of a season.
I can accept having very little money. What I can’t accept is having no plan. And there’s just nothing right now.
Everything Top and Rudkin have done since the Rodgers fiasco has been ultra short-term thinking. Get back to the PL at all costs and nevermind about the consequences or what you might do when you get there. Well now the honeymoon is over, the whole situation and lack of any long term planning is unravelling very quickly
No wonder Maresca was making very public noises about the board at the end of last season. The gravity of the mess was clearly hidden from him until the very end. Top and Rudkin have been moving the cups around, trying to find any way possible to avoid facing reality.
What we’re seeing here is a lack of any serious attempt at strategically rebuilding the club post relegation. It was all surface and gloss. Get the next Pep in, play like Man City, keep an expensively assembled squad together, ignore the sanctions and the warnings, it will all be fine once we go up
You’ve run out of road guys and you’ve run out of excuses and most importantly - you’re running out of patience with the fans. It’s going to get very nasty this season
posted on 9/8/24
This has been the biggest mess of a pre-season I have known. Even 2 years ago wasn't this bad - I mean, we went into it without a proper No.1 and a manager who had his Out of Office set to permanent, but we still at that point had Fofana and a squad that, on paper at least, were good enough for a top half finish.
Everything so far has been bad decision after bad decision, compounded by years of decline and incompetence by the board and ownership. Whilst I was not convinced that Maresca would have kept us up (and I am not sure he will succeed at Chelsea), we at least had a clear identity and philosophy with him that, from pre-season so far, we seem to lack under Cooper. To have a largely successful season under him with his 'idea', with a team that were largely built around that idea, and then lose him but not replace him with a like-for-like manager, just seems utterly bizarre. Last season was the season for us to imbed the idea, but now we seem to be moving away from it.
If you want to stick with the basis of Maresca's idea but perhaps improve it and iron out the creases in the Premier League, the ideal candidate was quite clearly Graham Potter. Yet as soon as it seemed that he was going to get the job, either we or him pulled the plug. Steve Cooper is not a like-for-like replacement for Maresca, or similar enough to Potter. He is trying to take some of Maresca's idea but it's not really worked. Someone on Foxestalk said it best - Cooper has taken Maresca's homework, found the answer but not worked out how he got to that answer. As a result, we have appeared very disjointed, lacking any kind of goal threat and losing the fluidity in the build up that we had last season.
We have also lost our most creative player in KDH, with 26 goal involvements disappearing and these, so far, have not been replaced. Will this new style of play under Cooper get the best out of the likes of Hermansen, Vestergaard, Ricardo and Winks that Maresca's style undeniably did? I very much doubt it.
As for the signings, they are all very meh apart from Fatawu. BDR is a versatile player but not someone who should be a first teamer in the Premier League. Okoli has been slow, cumbersome and unable to find a pass in pre-season. Golding will, I'm, sure, be an important part of our 2027-28 promotion push but probably won't be much help to us this season. Buonanotte brings some much needed creativity but the fact that we are bringing in players from Brighton on loan with no option to buy shows how far we have fallen away in the last 2 years and that we are right at the bottom of the top flight hierarchy now.
Add to this the growing discontent amongst the fanbase. £10 pay per view friendlies. £25 physical season tickets. An average ticket increase of £14. A dodgy, barely legal crypto-gaming sponsor that is currently buying Twitter views from the dangerous Elon Musk. At a time when everyone should be pulling together, the club seem to be doing everything possible to pull the fanbase apart.
Oh, and then there's the likely points deduction. If survival was unlikely before, I suspect this might be the nail in the coffin when it eventually lands and sucks whatever hope is left right out of us.
Unfortunately, all these problems are the result of the owners bad decision making. We have gone from one of the best run clubs in the country to one of the worst and now we are staring at a second relegation in three years before we have even kicked a ball. Top, Rudkin, et al are to blame for this.
Sadly, this is probably the most pessimistic I have been ahead of a new season. Unless we somehow have an amazing start to the season, I fear it may be the worst in the club's recent history.
posted on 9/8/24
Completely agree Foxello. Now I’m not going to defend Rodgers because he acted completely selfishly when he was here and is a big part of our relegation - but when he said toward the end that “this isn’t the same club anymore”, he was absolutely right.
He realised, as did Maresca, that the financial mess this club has quietly tried to gloss over in the fan programme notes was going to unravel. This is the season when it’s finally happened.
I share the concerns over the Cooper appointment, but to be fair, Potter wouldn’t fair much better with the odds so hopelessly stacked. What is any manager supposed to do when the club is sells its best creative asset and replaces them with BCR and a 19 year old kid from Chelsea
Cooper hasn’t got a pot to p*ss in - and any other manager would be stuck in the same boat. I strongly suspect that’s why the Potter talks broke down as the situation to him became increasingly clear. He’s not going to walk into a club with an incoming points deduction, nothing to spend while it sells its best player to meet FFP.
We honestly couldn’t have done any worse in these last 3 years with Mike Ashley at the helm. Look at the sponsorship deal we’ve just signed! The absolute contempt that the board have for the fans - who in Tops eyes are clearly just another lever to get himself out of the financial mess he’s created.
It’s got so bad that even the most staunch defenders of the ownership on this board have in recent weeks cleared off completely. Who can argue against what most of us have been saying since 2021? Something is terminally wrong about the King Powers ownership which is starting to look very much like the conservative governments last 18 months in power….!
posted on 10/8/24
So we are buying wingers in order to give service to our non existent striker's.
Vardy still injured,Cannon seems out of favour.
That leaves us with Daka,who has cost us points over last two seasons and is one of the worst players for us I have ever seen,sadly no one has come in for him recently.
I took have never been to apathetic about the start of a new season.
Really think we are just in damage limitation mode.
Still we are best price 2000/1 to win the league!!!
Think once before we were bigger price than that.
posted on 10/8/24
Yeah it’s just all about the next re-build now. Except this time when we get relegated, we’re not going to have the players we did last time and it’s going to take a new era of smart scouting and implementation of the long term strategic vision that Vichai had.
The problem is the billionaire nepobaby we’ve been left with doesn’t have any of that kind of intelligence. Unlike his father he’s an accidental success and chosen to surround himself with other abysmal failures. Let’s hope and pray this relegation finishes Top off once and for all and he gets out for good
posted on 10/8/24
And 3-0 down against Lens in our final pre-season as I type this. We are looking really bad. No structure, no idea, no identity
We look like a team whose board has ripped the plug out of the socket on the direction they were implementing because the previous manager wanted nothing to do with them
posted on 10/8/24
We've swapped a manager with one idea, to one with no idea. From what I heard on RL, it sounds like the players are genuinely clueless about whatever the hell Cooper wants from them. Ultimately the blame lies with Top and the board but taking a team with a clear identity and turning them into a husk in the space of five weeks of pre-season is astonishing.
Might end up with egg on my face, but I will be amazed if Cooper is still here at Christmas. This season is going to be so grim. It is giving major 2001/02 vibes. Would not be at all surprised if Spurs rip 5 or 6 past us.
posted on 10/8/24
Thing is Cooper isn’t incompetent. What he did with a Forest team sat at the bottom of the championship in the space of a single season was remarkable. The players liked playing for him. He played decent football in that first season and then had to be pragmatic to survive as Forest were a bit of a basket case in that first PL season
He’s no mug. I’m not suggesting he’s good enough for Leicester - but I think what we are seeing here is damage from the board on an unprecedented scale
Foxello is right. While Maresca couldn’t have kept us up playing his style of wide open football at this level, you can’t rip the plug out of the socket and transition to a manger like Cooper when you have been building a Maresca vision and signing the players he wanted over the last 18 months. It’s utterly bonkers
This isn’t on Cooper - he’s just made a very bad decision. The kind of decision potter wouldn’t have made which is why he’s rejected us TWICE. We’re a mess and everyone knows it. That’s why we’re left with the likes of Dean Smith, Steve Cooper and the rest of the C list