Leicester City and the gathering, perfect storm

A conflation of issues hanging over Leicester City are pushing supporters to protest, as the team continues to atrophy on the pitch.

The condition of Leicester City is starting to resemble a perfect storm. On the one hand, the team on the pitch is atrophying, while there have also been rumours of difficulties in relationships behind the scenes and financial difficulties from the other side of the world. The club’s financial position is such that PSR has become an issue, while the Gambling Commission has started to take an interest in their shirt sponsors. They’ve already sacked their manager and replaced him with one with really very little actual management experience to no gain of note. There is, in short, an air of decline hanging over this club at the moment.

The obvious place to start with such a story would be those sun-bathed shots of their team with the Premier League trophy in 2016. The 5,000 to 1 shot that came in. It was a footballing achievement that may be the greatest that any club achieves in any of our lifetimes. But the real start of the decline became noticeable on the last day of the summer 2017 transfer window, when the club spent £22m to bring the midfielder Adrien Silva to the club from Sporting Clube.

With almost 250 appearances for the Lisbon club over the previous ten years, Silva seemed like a decent signing. Except there was a catch. It was established by FIFA that Leicester had missed the deadline for registering him by 14 seconds, meaning that he would not be able to make his debut for the club until the start of the following January. It couldn’t even really been argued at Silva was a rush of a choice. His interest in joining the club had been trailed more a year before he finally arrived there.

He made his debut on New Year’s Day 2018 wearing, appropriately enough, the number 14 shirt, but over the next three seasons Silva would make just 16 Premier League appearances for the club, eventually being loaned out to Monaco for most of the 2018/19 and 2019/20 seasons. He left permanently in the summer 2020 for Sampdoria.

This particular debacle could be considered emblematic of much that’s gone wrong this few years within the club since. Bad signings—missing the registration deadline by 14 seconds made Silva a bad signing in an unusually literal sense—on wages so high that moving them on when things haven’t worked out has proved to be difficult, leading to the club being unable to spend in the transfer window because of financial regulations. Not accepting bids for players whose contracts were running low and then seeing them leave on free transfers a few months later is precisely the sort of financial incontinence that PSR rules are trying to do something about in the first place.

There is a feeling that the second chance given to the club at the start of this decade, when they won the FA Cup and threatened to qualify for the Champions League for two consecutive seasons, has been spurned. When Leicester were relegated from the Premier League in 2023, it was with the seventh-highest wage bill in the division, and while promotion straight back was probably to be expected, there was little love lost when head coach Enzo Maresca was snaffled up by Chelsea during the summer.

Steve Cooper arrived in his place—a decision with its own complications, considering his recent history with Nottingham Forest—and £77.5m was spent on new players (a net loss of £47.5m), only for the manager to be given the push after twelve games and replaced by someone with a big name but only a season and a bit’s experience of actual management, none of which had come in the Premier League. Under that new manager form has crashed, and a team that was 16th at the time of the previous manager’s departure is now in 19th place, firmly ensconced as one of the four teams fighting to avoid the three relegation places.

And what of Ruud Van Nistelrooy? Well, he’s now been in charge of Leicester for twelve games too now, and his record is even worse than that of his predecessor. While Cooper had won two, drawn four and lost six, Van Nistelrooy has won two, drawn one and lost nine, with seven of those defeats coming in consecutive games. Cooper’s record as Leicester manager was hardly stellar, but Van Nistelrooy has managed to do worse.

But to what extent is this his fault? By the third week of the January transfer window rumours were starting to circulate that Van Nistelrooy was unhappy that money that he’d been told was going to be available for new players in the January transfer window had not been forthcoming. By the end of the window, he was talking in press conferences about the players that he already had at his disposal, and by the first week of this month he was talking about the lack of money as having been no great surprise. Full-back Woyo Coulibaly turned out to be the only player to arrive at the club during that window for £3m, while they lost Tom Cannon to Sheffield United for £10m.

Of course, the death of chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a helicopter crash outside King Power Stadium in October 2018 hit the club extremely hard indeed, but broadly Leicester are otherwise being run by much the same organisation that was there when they won the Premier League in 2016, albeit under the arguably slightly more reluctant leadership of Vichai’s son, Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha, who’s also the chairman and CEO of King Power.

But King Power found business difficult since the pandemic, and as recently as this week there have been suggestions that their “liquidity issues” could be quite severe, with the company seeking an 18-month deferral on payment due in relation to ‘minimum guarantees’ for their airport duty-free concessions business. It should be added that this didn’t prevent the owners from converting £194m of the club’s debt to them to equity at the end of 2022 and doing the same over another £124m last month.

Of course, it can be easy at such points to thank the owners of the club for their munificence over doing this, but this rather overlooks the fact that those losses were incurred on their watch in the first place. And let’s be absolutely clear, here; while it’s easy to get dazzled by the financial numbers that get attached to football in this day and age, Leicester’s financial returns have been so dismal over the last three years that it’s tempting to start wondering whether they’ve been holding £50 note burning parties at the ground on quiet days.

As they were relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 2022/23 season, they lost £89.7m, an amount all the more exceptional because it included the £75m of profit generated from the sales of James Maddison and Wesley Fofana, with Maddison having been sold for £40m to Tottenham two days before the 30th June accounts cut-off in 2023 and Fofana having joined Chelsea the previous summer in a deal worth around £75m.

So was relegation responsible for these losses? The fact that the club had lost £92.5m the previous season, a loss which came in spite of them finishing eighth and a run to the semi-finals of the Europa Conference League (which in itself brought an estimated £20-22m into the club), suggests not. Add in the £33m (£) they lost the year before that, and they’ve lost £215m over the last three sets of accounts combined. That’s… sub-optimal.

There are also questions to be asked about Leicester’s shirt sponsorship deal with a ‘community-based, online cryptocurrency gaming platform’. That business’s parent companies were declared bankrupt in Curacao in November leading to them having their license to trade revoked in this country. Leicester still wear their name on their shirts, though The Athletic reports (£) that the Gambling Commission is to write over them their continuing advertisement of a company without a license in this country.

The letter will reportedly “warn that ‘club officers will be liable to prosecution and, if convicted, face a fine, imprisonment or both’ if they promote an unlicensed gambling business”, and the reasoning behind this is straightforward. Even websites that are banned in the UK are easily reached through, say, a VPN.

Forest and Leicester’s position, according to The Athletic, “because Kaiyun Sports is not available in the UK and as such they are not promoting unlicensed gambling to UK consumers”. Broadly speaking, it is somewhat eyebrow-raising that any club(s) should be apparently seeking to tell the regulator how to regulate. Why do these sponsorships mean so much to them?

The playing side of things hasn’t been going so well either, and this is where we come to arguably the main target of the ire of supporters at the moment. Jon Rudkin has been at Leicester City for a long time. Indeed, they were still playing at Filbert Street when he was appointed as Academy Manager in June 2003. He’s been the Director of Football since December 2014, so he was there when they won both the Premier League and the FA Cup, but was also responsible for the Adrien Silva episode.

So why is Rudkin the target of protests? Well, there’s an article on Foxes of Leicester which sums up the feelings of those who are unhappy far better than I could ever express in a couple of paragraphs here. But perhaps the key phrase concerns what is considered to be the “immune or immortal” aspect of his role. Directors of Football don’t seem to be hired and hired at the same rate as managers. If they do have such a pivotal role within a football club, why are they so infrequently replaced in comparison with the coaches, who have to face most of the flak and deal with the press, too?

It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. He’s been there a long time, including one of the most extraordinary feats in the recent—possibly entire—history of English club football. But it also seems fair to say that mistakes have been made, and that those have been on the increase in recent years. There are clearly more people to blame than Rudkin alone for what has happened to Leicester City in recent years, but he seems to have become something of a lightning rod.

The worry is that Leicester could become a club who can’t afford relegation. Over the last three seasons they’ve finished 8th in the Premier League, gotten relegated, and got promoted back as champions. We’ve all seen the state of the club’s books and it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be getting much money in the future from their current shirt sponsors. Can they afford another vertiginous drop income of the type that comes with falling from Premier League television and prize money to EFL parachute payments?

That sense of entropy feels very real. The owners of the club seem to have lost the sharp focus that they seemed to have when they took ownership of the club. Plans to expand the stadium capacity to 40,000 have been put on hold until 2026 at the earliest, even though they have final, confirmed planning permission. The books have been very bad indeed for a long time, and the owners have reportedly had financial issues for several years. Money was clearly not available for the January transfer window, and it may even be that this was a broken promise to the manager.

The long-standing Director of Football, who enjoyed such startling success early on, has ultimately overseen a team falling from challenging for a Champions League place to one which could be relegated from the Premier League for a second time in three years. He has made high profile mistakes, while the club’s transfer policy has become muddlede and financially profligate.

The current manager, even taking into account what may or may not have been said to him about January when he took the position, hasn’t done much to indicate that he’s got what it takes to keep them up. The main talisman on the pitch is 38 years old, in his own way a symptom of the club’s malaise in both the transfer market and bringing through their own players.

By the standards of most football clubs, Leicester City have had an incredible decade. They’ve won the Premier League as many times as Arsenal, Manchester United, Spurs and Liverpool combined, and they’re the only non ‘Big Six’ winner of the FA Cup over the last ten years, too. They’ve reached the semi-finals of a European competition and finished 5th in the Premier League for two successive seasons.

But concerns over the condition of the club do feel real. This doesn’t feel like ‘entitlement’ on the part of the supporters. The owners are having a tough time, financially. The team has undergone a pretty sharp decline on the pitch, The numbers are bad and the manager isn’t great. There is still time to salvage something. Leicester are only two points from safety with a third of the season left to play.

That’s what the Leicester fans are protesting for, not only for the present of the club, but also for their future. Previous glories belong to the past, and have to be put on the back burner when the present is looking like this. There are elements to this story that have been shaped by actual horror, but there is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon that. The club needs to be pulled out of this drift.

Mistakes have been made and money has been squandered. That has to be accepted and dealt with. But the future looks misty. Leicester City may never get back to where they were nine years ago again, but their place in 2025 feels uncertain, as though the club is missing something, no matter what division they’re in. The club’s supporters seem to be losing faith that this can be regained without serious, structural change. It’s difficult to argue that the club don’t need it.

Accompanying image by Arne Müseler - arne-mueseler.com - and licensed under the CC-VY-SA-3.0 licence.