- 3 years ago
Not two seasons on from a 5th-place finish and winning the FA Cup, Leicester City face the very real prospect of relegation. But is this merely the result of ban on-field management, or have world events conspired to shape their destiny.
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00:00 Following the departure of Brendan Rodgers with the club sitting perilously above the
00:07 relegation zone, Leicester City openly wanted Graeme Potter, publicly spoke to Jesse Marsh
00:11 and ended up getting Dean Smith.
00:13 Now with just 7 games left to go, they sit second bottom of the Premier League table
00:17 with no win since the middle of February and all this a mere 2 years since they narrowly
00:22 missed out on Champions League qualification.
00:23 Hello there everybody, Adam Cleary 442 here and I know on the face of it you can watch
00:28 any club's descent towards the yawning maw of the championship and just think well, simple
00:33 case of good team is bad now but just to illustrate something right at the top of this video,
00:38 this is the Leicester City team that not 2 seasons ago lined up to emphatically win the
00:43 FA Cup against Chelsea off the back of a second consecutive 5th place finish, narrowly missing
00:49 out on the top 4.
00:50 And this is all the players still at the club who were involved that day.
00:55 So I think the question whether you're a Leicester City fan or you're not is simply...
00:59 Right, so I'll get straight to the point here, the very long version of this is many weird
01:05 things all happening somehow at exactly the same time and the short version of this is
01:10 Covid.
01:11 Leicester City operate a high risk, high reward strategy designed to consistently allow them
01:15 to disrupt the top 6 and get access to the money in European football but for several
01:20 reasons, some within their control and some without that has spectacularly disintegrated
01:25 around them in the last 2 years.
01:27 And just to give you a bit of an insight on what this strategy actually is, if you cast
01:30 your mind back to when they won the Premier League, this was a massive cash windfall for
01:34 Leicester City the likes of which they'd never seen.
01:36 But the problem with it was in order to get that same money next year, they would have
01:40 had to go and win the league next year or at the very least stayed in the top 4 and
01:44 of course they didn't.
01:45 And what that meant was while they wanted to go out and buy these big players and put
01:48 them on big wages as befitting a club of their new status, they had no real way of sustainably
01:53 paying for that.
01:54 But what it also gave them which proved to be way more financially viable than simply
01:58 winning the competition itself was a squad of players whose reputations had been massively
02:03 enhanced across that campaign but who were originally bought for relatively little money.
02:08 Over the next few seasons, Riyad Mahrez, Danny Drinkwater and N'Golo Kante, 3 players who
02:12 had been signed for a combined fee of around £10 million were sold to both Chelsea and
02:17 Man City for around £140 million.
02:20 And that's when all the lightbulbs went off at the King Power Stadium because if you're
02:23 one of the smallest clubs in the league in terms of actual revenue, it's very difficult
02:27 to get into the top 4 consistently.
02:29 But one thing you'll always be able to do is sell a high value player every summer provided
02:34 you've got one.
02:35 And so from that point on, Leicester City's strategy was to allow one high value asset
02:40 to depart every summer but then immediately reinvest all that money into several young,
02:45 up and coming, affordable new players.
02:47 In 2018, they sold Mahrez to Man City for around £60 million and used that money to
02:52 bring in 21-year-old James Madison, 24-year-old Ricardo Pereira, 22-year-old Calgo Sanchu
02:58 and 21-year-old Filip Benkovic.
03:00 Following season, Harry Maguire was sold to Manchester United for £75 million and the
03:04 money was invested in 22-year-old Uri Tielemans, 25-year-old Jose Perez, 25-year-old Dennis
03:10 Praet and 21-year-old James Justin.
03:12 Following year, Ben Chilwell departed to Chelsea for £45 million and in came 19-year-old Wesley
03:17 Fofana and 24-year-old Timothy Castagna.
03:20 This was the Leicester City way and for a time, it was good.
03:24 And Brendan Rogers was absolutely key to all of this, by the way.
03:27 They went out and got him at great expense, I might add, because he's a manager with
03:31 such a clear and defined tactical ideology which would mean, from a recruitment perspective,
03:35 that whether you are the furthest flung scout or the nerdiest data analyst, you know exactly
03:40 the kind of player you're looking for to go into his squad, reducing the chance of
03:44 one of these young and up and coming players being a flop.
03:47 And again, that was the Leicester City way and for a time, it was good.
03:51 They ended the 2020/2021 season looking every bit the serious contenders to be a consistent
03:57 force in the top six of English football and then COVID happened.
04:01 Now the pandemic affected every single football team, not just in this country but across
04:05 the world.
04:06 Those at the very top with the million pound turnovers and those at the very bottom who
04:10 are entire volunteer led, it affected everybody.
04:12 But it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it affected Leicester City probably more than
04:16 any other club in the country.
04:18 And the reason for that is twofold.
04:20 First of all, that first transfer window immediately after COVID was weird.
04:24 Teams were just a little bit more reluctant to go out and chuck money on unproven prospects
04:28 and put them on long term contracts when the threat of another shutdown did kind of linger
04:32 over us all.
04:33 And that meant that Leicester City simply did not get one of these major offers for
04:37 one of their prize assets and thus that stream of income, a really important one, just wasn't
04:42 there.
04:43 Of course, that was always going to be a possibility with this model and Leicester City's owners
04:45 were well aware of that.
04:46 They really cared about the club, they were really invested in what they were trying to
04:49 do so they were always at the position of, well, if there's one summer where we don't
04:53 get a massive win for from selling a player, we'll just put the money up.
04:56 Don't worry about it.
04:57 And they did.
04:58 Leicester City went out and bought 22 year old Patsan Daka and 22 year old Bubakai Samare
05:02 with only Rashid Gezal leaving for a paltry three million.
05:05 But the thing is, while this represented a sizeable cash injection from the club's
05:09 owners, it was one they couldn't really afford to make.
05:11 Now, if you don't know much about King Power, the easiest way to explain them is they are
05:15 a massive force in tourism, they're based out of Thailand and they make most of their
05:18 money there.
05:19 But the thing is, I don't know if you remember this, there wasn't really much tourism going
05:22 on between 2020 and 2021.
05:26 We're all just kind of sitting in the house.
05:28 And that meant that a country that normally had between 40 and 50 million tourists in
05:32 2019 had less than 10% of that by 2021.
05:37 Official records showing that their turnover fell from almost two and a half billion before
05:41 the pandemic to under 500 million during it.
05:44 Just to really hammer this home, Forbes have claimed that Leicester City's chairman was
05:47 worth almost six billion before the pandemic and is now worth less than one third of that.
05:52 But that's the thing, isn't it?
05:53 That's why I said it's long and complicated and just weird at the start of the video,
05:57 because the impact that COVID had on the Taiwanese tourism industry is not why Leicester City
06:02 can't win the ball back in the final third anymore.
06:04 It's several things all happening at once and all of them probably just being fine if
06:08 they were happening in isolation, but the fact they're all happening together, just
06:11 being absolutely catastrophic.
06:13 Not having the financial bravery to now go out and get the exact kind of high risk, high
06:16 reward young up and coming players they wanted meant that Rodgers got more influence in the
06:20 scouting department.
06:21 He asked for a few ready made types a bit nearer their 30s.
06:24 They went and got like Bertrand, they went and got Vestergaard and that obviously annoyed
06:27 a lot of people at the club because that's not what they're supposed to be about.
06:31 That's not what all their hard work is for.
06:32 And then of course, they were both complete flops at the club, which annoyed the players
06:36 that they replaced and massively dulled Rodgers mystique within the dressing room.
06:40 And then all of a sudden you've got a backroom staff who aren't particularly happy.
06:42 You've got a few first teamers who've been dropped for players who haven't worked.
06:45 They're not happy.
06:46 You've got a couple of big stars who came here on the expectation that a big offer from
06:49 a big club would materialise and it just isn't.
06:52 And all of a sudden that's a bad dressing room.
06:55 Rodgers then started relying more and more on players who he felt would actually listen
06:58 to him rather than players who were necessarily the best fit for his system.
07:01 And as a result, results just started to drop off.
07:03 The business model did finally kick back into life this season, but it happened so late
07:07 in the transfer window they couldn't really do anything about it.
07:09 Like Chelsea put an enormous bid for Wesley Fofana, which was accepted with like days
07:13 or hours to go.
07:15 And that meant they couldn't even spend any of that money in that window.
07:17 Victor Christensen, Harry Suter and Wout Vast did eventually arrive in January, but none
07:21 of them appear to be of the required standard to ever really massively grow their reputation
07:26 and do what they're supposed to do, which is get sold for a lot of money.
07:29 And that's why, and I'm really sorry Leicester City fans here, things look so precarious
07:33 for them right now.
07:34 Why a relegation could be so devastating.
07:36 Perez, Soyoncu, Amartey, Tielemans, Mendy, these were all players brought in with a huge
07:41 resale in mind, but whose contracts expire this summer and could all leave for nothing.
07:45 And beyond those, the two players you would probably say had the most resale value compared
07:49 to what they spent on them are Ionaccio and Maddison.
07:51 And they both have one year left on their contract.
07:54 So you combine deals that are running out with the fact they desperately will need to
07:57 get those wages off their books in the championship, and all of a sudden they're probably going
08:01 for relative buttons.
08:03 And that's before we even get into Leicester City's existing wage budget as a percentage
08:07 of turnover, which at 85% is one of the biggest in the league and literally butting its head
08:12 right up against the wall of FFP.
08:13 And the thing is Leicester City fans could tell you another five, possibly 10 other just
08:17 mad things that have all gone into this, which most other fans haven't even heard of, but
08:21 have contributed to what a mess it is.
08:23 There was the changes at the training ground, which apparently got rid of the sense of community
08:27 and made everything really weird.
08:29 There was them wrangling with Southampton for that new head of recruitment, meant they
08:32 were devoid of direction in that department for the better part of six months.
08:36 All things that in isolation are not really a problem, but for Leicester have all happened
08:41 within the space of 18 months.
08:43 So what the f*** happened to Leicester City?
08:45 Well, just everything.
08:46 Everything, everywhere, all at once.
08:47 But the thing is there are only two points off safety and they've still got loads of
08:52 the teams around them to come to the King Power.
08:54 And if you watch those last 25 minutes against Manchester City, you will know there is still
08:59 life in this team, yet they could improbably pull themselves out of it.
09:03 It's just, Christ, where do they go from here, even if they do?
09:06 But anyway, Leicester fans and non-Leicester fans alike, please, by God, what an absolute
09:10 mess.
09:11 Please get in the comments below, of course, and forget to like, share and subscribe.
09:13 But until such a time as we know the fate of the deer foxes, I've been Adam Cleary
09:19 and I will see you soon.