Fantastic if it comes off for you. Seriously deserved to be champions this season. £180 m is massive for the area not just lcfc. FairPlay

Nigels doing much better i said. The average success rate of transfers averages around 50% i can't remember what NP's are,but i am betting they are higher than that.
As for schlupp and Moore i will check but Sven was whatever you think of him good at giving youth a chance both for us as England.

Have you hit on a couple of Nev factoids there BS?

Looks like Nev is admitting you have, who gave Schlupp and Moore their first contracts is the question?

TB despite my desire to tell you exactly who told me i will just day two journalists. I should of asked your dad

Maybe they wouldn't be Nev Factoids if you had!

Time for bed kids see you in the playground for a game of stoney before class.

Blackstarr;

For someone who openly moans about the division between 'pro-Sven and pro-Pearson' posters on this forum, you don't half go on about ensuring those divisions remain. Even on your own thread you can't leave it alone

As Nev said, the likely success/failure ratio of a new signing is about 50/50. Pearson has done considerably better than this ratio, so fair play to him - I have always said that his transfer market ability and scouting network is his biggest strength. The problem with Sven's signings is that, without exception, they came to Leicester City to play for him - nobody else. When he left, their motivation levels plummeted.

You are judging the level of success of his signings based on one season and the majority of his signings did not even play a full season - many didn't even play a third of a season. If we're going to judge signings purely on their first season, then Jamie Vardy and Ritchie de Laet were awful signings, weren't they?

The £5.5m we paid for Mills was about three times what we should have paid for him at that time, but all transfer negotiations were done through Neville, not Sven. Sven gave a list of players he'd like to sign to Neville, and Neville followed it up. If the fee was too high, Neville should have advised Sven that the club could not spend that much on one player and ask him to look elsewhere, like many managers have to up and down the country.

I disagree about £2.5m for Beckford being too much. £2.5m for a striker who'd scored 7 goals in 20 odd matches at Prem level is about right. The problem is that the ink on Beckford's contract hadn't dried before Sven got sacked, and he clearly was not very receptive to Pearson (and vice versa...).

You mention the bad signings, well I'll mention the good ones - Naughton, Davies, Yakubu, Bamba, Mee, Nugent, Konchesky and Schmeichel. And Sven proved he could use his contacts to buy less expensive players when he signed Bamba for a snip at £250,00 - later sold on for over a £1m.

Finally, you say about Sven not doing anything since leaving Leicester. Well the guy is 66 for a start, managers do tend to do less well as they get older. Last I heard he was in charge of a Chinese Premier club near the top of the table.

Is NP a better manager at this level? Yes. Is NP a better manager than Sven at his prime? No, not at all. I'll leave this debate with a quick summary of their respective trophies through out their career;

Sven - UEFA Cup, UEFA Cup Winners Cup, UEFA Super Cup, Serie A title, 4 x Coppa Italia, 2 x Italian Super Cup, 3 x Portugese Liga, Cup of Portugal, Allsvenskan title, 2 x Svenska Cupen, Vastra Svealand.

Nigel Pearson - Championship title, League One title.

Foxello - i'd say that some of Sven's signings came to play for him. I'd argue that all (or at least most) also came for the money.

That I personally believe is the main reason for their lack of motivation and the main downfall of Sven. He didn't motivate players.

To reiterate, I have always maintained that it was too early to sack him and that he may have got success but this doesn't paper over the fact that he bought very poorly and over paid.

Ps. Very good post by the way and as you point out, there is no questioning Eriksson's pedigree before he went to man City. He has had huge success and I still feel he was unfairly judged as the England manager.

Also no questioning that the most successful manager "at Leicester" is Pearson.

Horses for courses. Eriksson was potentially the right horse but he wasn't suited to the championship course!!

One of Sven's great talents was to charm very highly-rated players into joining him at Leicester. I'm sure he tried repeatedly with Beckham, and probably others too. However, he wasn't able to turn them into the kind of team required for promotion from the Championship, and lost his job as a result.

The problem with what he did was that it needed to work too quickly. Pearson has built a squad as part of a long-term plan, but many of Sven's players (specifically the loanees) were never going to stay long term without success. Yet, in the Championship, without a long term plan you don't get success. It was a vicious circle that we didn't particularly realise at the time but this was the main cause of the failure. This, in addition to the facts that his methods were incredibly expensive and that several of his pricier signings were turning out to be heavily overvalued, would have been what made the owners conclude that the situation couldn't continue.

A notable aspect of Pearson's methods is that he's not heavy on transfer funds. He used them, sure - but often for not more than £1m per player at a time, plus the contracts were cheaper. The only major cost that comes with Pearson is his extensive use of backroom staff and sports science, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to what Sven was prepared to spend on players. This, plus what seems to be a good relationship with the owners, will have bought him the time he needed to produce the goods this season.

Would Sven's methods have been more conducive to the Premiership - or at least a top tier rather than a notoriously tight second tier? I expect they would. However, as several mentioned so far, he seems to have reached the end of his career in terms of significant clubs and had started to resemble more a delicate old man that a quiet but canny genius toward the end of his time here.

I still like the man; I've always found him charming and he took far more stick than he deserved for his ultimately decent spell in charge of the national team. But essentially, his time has passed now.

“One of Sven's great talents was to charm very highly-rated players into joining him at Leicester.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who?
Depends on your definition of “highly rated” I suppose and how many really came for him and not for the money. Schmeichel wasn’t pushing to come to us from Leeds and Mickail-Smith and Maynard turned him down.

I’m not saying that SGE didn’t sign some good players, but the Sven-factor (players coming to us just to play for him) has largely been exposed as a myth. When I think about it only Gelsen Fernandes really fits with the theory.

Schmeichel, Ricardo, Konchesky, Pantsil, Mills, Davies, Naughton, Ball, Bruma, Van Aanholt, Fernandes, Johnson, Yakubu, Nugent, Beckford.

All highly rated (or viewed as having high potential) at one time or another. I think there were others as well; this is just off the top of my head. Whether they were any use to us or not is another matter.

Joby players will come to a club based on the manager who signs them three months later he's gone you find in a lot of clubs a lot of players move on or get moved out.

But the sweeping statement brigade( Me to before anyone says anything) will find that to right off everyone he signed in grossly exaggerating again don't i do that?
Can we have Yakubu back please.

There were clearly decent players in there, Nev. However, the category "permanent signings who represented good value for money" is a pretty bare list. I think the Thais recognised this, realised that from a financial point of view there was a lot of money passing through the club with precious little in the way of tangiable assets, and pulled the plug.

Nev,

Certainly wouldn't write off all signings made by Sven. Nugent, Schmeichel and Konch are with us. Bamba was a shrewd investment. I'd also have the Yak back and Naughton. Some differ, but I also thought PVA and Mee had potential.

Dunge,

Schmeichel, Konch, Mills etc. came because we offered their clubs big money for their services.
Many of the loanees came is because we outbid everybody else. The Yak was on £50k a week. We paid a loan fee of £1m for the services of Johnson.

I've seen plenty of evidence that players came for the Sven-tracts, but not a shred of evidence that players came for him. If he really did have the ability to woo high quality players purely on his name I reckon he'd still be here now.

I have my own views on the Sven era, which are probably similar to Mersey's, but much of that debate has now been rendered rather redundant.

Sven................ Whooo?


We are the Champions!!!!!

Foxello: excellent post and largely sums up my thoughts on the Sven era.

I was always a big fan of Sven at Leicester (and as England Manager where his record was actually very good) and I firmly believed he was discarded far too early. Both Foxello and Dungeon have listed many good players that Sven brought to the club, whilst accepting there were a fair few duds as well.

Notwithstanding all that, Pearson has come in and done an outstanding job (just as he did in his first spell, when he too was discarded far too prematurely) and he had achieved huge success on a much reduced budget.

Best Championship Manager of the two - Pearson without a doubt.

Best Manager of the two - jury is out and will remain out until Pearson has the opportunity to preform at the top level.

I think that the common ground for most people is they feel that Sven was discarded too early. I also believe that the blank cheque approach of trying to buy promotion was something that the whole club was complicit in and cannot solely be laid at Sven’s door. It seemed to be let’s buy promotion as quickly as possible irrespective of the consequences. This is one of the reasons I was surprised when Nigel P replaced Sven as there was a clear u turn in direction. The way I differ from some is that I never felt that reverting to Nigel would harm our short term chances of promotion as I hold his managerial record (then and thus far) in high regard.

In retrospect it looks like replacing Sven with Nigel was a good call from the owners. Managing and building a team in the Championship within a budget, under the looming prospect of FFP, seems to be a good remit for someone like NP. It is easy, however, to look back in hindsight when we now know that we’ll be playing Premier League football, which is why I think the argument (Sven v NP) is largely redundant and not particularly relevant anymore.

Nigel has proven himself to be a very good manager in the Championship, but his CV doesn’t bear any comparison to Sven’s. That is fairly obvious. We can only speculate whether Sven would also have delivered promotion. My personal view was that he would have done, but at a cost that the owners were ultimately not prepared to pay.

There was a lot of push internally from some of the coaching staff to support the return of NP and they did a lot to make it happen. I don't believe they where trying to get rid of Sven or have no evidence a nevfact included. But like Joby i thought he was binned to early i am now happy to see NP.

Now wait for the usual suspects to tell us how crap Sven was thts why he got the England job and won the odd pot or two.

Foxello did you get someone to write that post for you because I didn't see that level of articulation during your ongoing tirade against Nigel.

It was you that opened the can of worms on this thread yet again, not me. I should be able to make a reference to the silly spending spree of Sven and Neville prior to Pearson without you jumping all over it.

At the end of the day you still can't leave the Sven argument alone, you bite at every opportunity I always end up responding, that's why I've got tire do this board. I can't even be bothered to counter most of your bizarre points except for saying that the guy has always and always will need millions to throw at a team before he earns success. He's makes Harry redknapp and Ron Atkinson look financially cautious. Look at the money he spent at Lazio, Christ, how many other managers could do the same and get a trophy?

He hasn't been touched by a top club since Man City, he achieved nothing with a very talented England squad except a great qualifying record (so what??) , and managing in the Chinese premier league with his 'record' is a bit like Alan Sugar being offered a CEO role at his local cornershop.

I can't be bothered arguing with you any more on the subject, you're part of the reason I don't wanna be here along with several of your pals who cry foul as soon as 'S' word is mentioned. You were wrong about Pearson and to be honest if I had posted some of the disgraceful stuff about my own manager you have I would hang my head in shame rather than carrying on the debate.

I think Sven should have been given more time. We'll never know if he'd have got us up. The only thing that is certain is making the change did not get us promoted, either that season or the next. It has now of course.

It may be that the Sven sacking episode showed the owners that more patience was required and resulted in Pearson getting more time after 2012-13 when some were calling for his dismissal.

I hope that he's given a reasonable opportunity in the EPL.

I actually feel a little sorry for the "Svenites" such as Foxello, you get the feeling they can't fully appreciate and enjoy our incredible season as they still think "what if ?".and would in all honesty wish that was the case.

Oh well, reality bites

We ARE the Champions!!!!

TB thats BS and you know it,surely you must have more intelligence than that. Lets swap a championship winning season and promotion for the unknow .....Doh

Blackstarr;

I'm not sure what prompted your latest rambling rant at me, particularly when Mersey and Joby, who aren't exactly my biggest fans, appreciated that I made valid points, and another poster openly agrees with me. Whether you disagree with me is another matter, but the level of personal attack in your comments is a bit much. That's probably why you'd be better off following my advice and joining an appreciation site rather than a forum - you cannot debate an issue without getting personal about it. First Nev, now me, who will be next?

Frankly, I'm done to death with this Sven vs Pearson debate. We've been around in circles on this particular block more times than Horatio Nelson in a swimming pool. But if you're going to turn every single thread into an excuse to attack a manager who I, and it seems many others, feel did a reasonable job and was not afforded the time that Pearson was to get the job done, then you can't expect everyone to just stay silent all of the time.

True Blue;

Wot Nev said.

Of course I've enjoyed this season, it's been brilliant. I am disappointed I didn't get to see more of it at a face-to-face level, but nevertheless I am very pleased and proud of the efforts of everyone involved. This season will go down in the Leicester City folklore as our best so far and it will take a massive effort in the future to beat it.

But, if I could do a Doctor Who and go back in time to change the future, and was asked "who would you rather see lifting the Championship title - Sven or Nigel?" then I cannot honestly say. I wanted Sven to succeed, others wanted him to fail from the minute he got the job. And I wanted to see Sven have one last bash at the Premier League and silence his idiotic England critics who don't appreciate what a good job he actually did with the national team. But lo, that didn't happen and we eventually got there under Pearson, which is great.