The Fosse Way

The collapse of Stefano Sensi’s move to Leicester on Thursday night reopened all the old wounds about the Foxes’ transfer business over the last couple of years.

In the absence of any communication from Leicester’s recruitment team, and given Enzo Maresca’s furious silence on the issue, we’re left to speculate on the causes of the latest embarrassment. Perhaps someone changed their minds, perhaps the medical turned up a problem that it was better for all parties to cover up, perhaps Jon Rudkin forgot to press send on an email.

The most common guess as to what happened is that financial pressure intervened. For the last eighteen months Leicester have been operating a one-in, one-out policy, like a student nightclub at happy hour. Managers complaining about being blindsided about these restrictions has become a familiar refrain since the summer of 2022.

Faced with this reality, our main focus has been on how unsuccessful Leicester have been at selling off their spare parts. The list of unwanted players who Leicester have frozen out, loaned out, or tried to sell even in the past year or so is a long one.

Caglar Soyuncu, Ryan Bertrand, Jannik Vestergaard, Nampalys Mendy, Marc Albrighton, Dennis Praet, Luke Thomas, Victor Kristiansen, Harry Souttar, Daniel Iversen, Danny Ward, Patson Daka. You can probably think of even more.

To some extent, the criticism might be a little unfair. Lots of English teams struggle to sell players because they pay higher wages than everyone else. The problem has become more acute as the financial disparity between English football and everywhere else has grown. Premier League teams attract players by paying a lot and offering long deals.

Another of Leicester’s problems, though, is specific to them. A longstanding policy of rewarding players who don’t deserve it with long term contracts.

Rewarding mediocrity

On Friday, January 19th, Hamza Choudhury was arrested late at night for driving under the influence and refusing to take a breathalyser test. He has been bailed until a court date on February 23rd, which happens to be the day Leicester take on Leeds in one of the biggest games left on the schedule.

A few months ago, on a random Wednesday in September, Leicester gave Choudhury a long-term contract extension. This was largely met with positivity; Hamza is a local lad, he’s been around the club for a long time, and he’s also an important symbolic figure as one of the few players from an Asian background who play at the highest levels in England.

There’s no doubt that this kind of thing matters to Top, and it mattered to his father as well. They have poured resources into fostering close links to the fanbase and the community as a whole, whether that’s through charitable donations, free doughnuts, or clappers and ‘honesty flags’.

The problem is that too often this has meant we give out contracts based on taking care of our friends rather than the best interests of the football club. Handing out new deals based on sentimental value has been one of the main issues with the Leicester leadership for a long time.

Locking Hamza at the club on – allegedly – £50,000 a week until 2027(!), or paying Marc Albrighton a similar amount for the occasional cameo, is cut from the same cloth as giving Matty James a contract extension in 2017 after he failed to play a single game in the title winning season and was then loaned out the following year.

It is true, to a lesser extent, of giving Wanya Marcal a new contract in December despite the fact he’s barely even a fifth-choice winger in the Championship. The decision to extend Jamie Vardy’s contract for another two years was probably a poor one when viewed through a purely footballing lens. It’s poorer now when he’s the highest paid player in the Championship and not even the first-choice forward.

The footballing argument against rewarding Hamza with a new contract is even more stark. Ignore the fact that he’s a Leicester lad. Last season, he was out of the picture entirely, on loan at Watford. He’s 26 years old and the most league starts he’s ever made in a single campaign for Leicester is 10. Even this season, off the back of a new contract, he starts about a third of the games in total.

He’s not a regular in the Championship, he’s never been a regular in a Premier League side, and he’s unlikely to suddenly become one now. If Leicester get promoted, we’re going to be in the same situation with him as we have been with so many players over the past few years: holding a player we don’t need on wages we can’t shift.

And all that is before you get to the question of whether his conduct merits the loyalty Leicester have shown him. The drink-driving situation is not the first time he’s let the club down. Remember a couple of years ago, when James Maddison was dropped for a critical game at West Ham because he broke COVID protocols by having a party? Two other players were dropped for that game as well. One was Ayoze Perez, the other was Hamza Choudhury.

Here we d’oh

In the modern game, which has bound 86 of the 92 clubs into strict financial limitations, these decisions have repercussions further down the line. When every penny counts for Financial Fair Play, and where Leicester are evidently right up against its limits, keeping fringe players – and, worse, rewarding them with – big contracts directly impacts whether or not you can improve the first team.

The January window has been a perfect example of what happens when you keep making little mistakes. Eventually, they grow into a serious problem. The month began with the now classic Leicester move of suddenly springing a nasty surprise on a manager and a fanbase eagerly awaiting new arrivals. We’ve all heard the words ‘sell to buy’ so often that it now just rings in your ears when you’re laying in bed at night.

All we’ve had to dig our teeth into for a month is an interminable back-and-forth over Sensi, played out live on Fabrizio Romano’s Twitter account. That ended in farce on deadline day. Leicester ultimately ended up, improbably, with a weaker squad coming out of January than what they started with.

Where there have been legitimate talents available this month, the teams around Leicester have snapped them up: Jeremy Sarmiento to Ipswich, Fabio Carvalho and Anass Zaroury to Hull, David Brooks to Southampton. The Foxes have been stuck in neutral, again running the risk of a transfer window spent watching rivals overtake them.

At the same time, Leicester’s own resources have been dwindling. Wilfred Ndidi is out long term, Cesare Casadei has gone back to Chelsea. Abdul Fatawu’s suspension highlighted the fact that in every position bar the central striker Leicester are dangerously thin. The panic that set in when Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was linked to Brighton was in part because there are essentially no alternatives with any pedigree to play in his position for the rest of the season.

For KDH, read Stephy Mavididi and Harry Winks as well. Leicester’s record without Ndidi is bang average, but if any of those were to be absent for a period there would be a serious problem. Ipswich, for one example, realised they were short up front with George Hirst injured, and promptly signed two strikers in January.

Not learning lessons

One of the most frustrating things about modern football is a reliance on the transfer market as a panacea for every problem. Every manager wants new players, all the time. But Leicester’s mismanagement of their playing staff has created needless problems, making it much more difficult to compete in a world where constant spending is the norm.

The relegation came about partly because other teams effectively cheated to spend more on players than they could afford, but it also happened because Leicester forced themselves into a corner by paying so much money to players they didn’t want. Choudhury’s new contract, like the Sensi debacle, shows how few lessons have been learned.

With a number of contracts expiring in the summer that will finally wipe the worst excesses off the wage bill, this might be the final window where Leicester suffer from self-imposed restrictions like this. The reality is, though, that unless you understand why that happened you won’t avoid making the exact same mistake again in the future.

We’ve spent a lot of time on this site joking about the infamous internal review in the summer that never saw the light of day. But it speaks to a serious problem, which is a failure to properly self-scout and genuinely reflect the success of your own decisions.

This problem isn’t purely down to Hamza Choudhury, but he is a perfect symptom of a wider issue. Rewarding mediocrity is dangerous when you have financial limitations. And it’s hard to shake the feeling that nothing’s going to change until there’s a different decision-maker at the top.