The Fosse Way

I absolutely love a new manager. I should be a Watford fan really. That tantalising prospect of this guy being the new Martin O’Neill or Nigel Pearson. And we’ve had a lot of practice in the past three years. In that time we’ve greeted Smith, Maresca, Cooper and Van Nistelrooy. We’ve seen Stowell and Sadler. We’ve even briefly glimpsed “Ben Dawson”. What a treat it’s been.

Steve Cooper was a particularly controversial and poorly-received appointment. But the King Power dynasty is requesting that you hold their free can of Chang because if, as reports are suggesting, Leicester City appoint Russell Martin this week, it will be a huge gamble for fan relations at a time of even bigger turmoil than usual for the football club.

This is yet another perfect time to reset the Leicester City identity. To return to the edginess and ferocity our best teams have always had. Therefore, many fans feel appointing another possession-obsessed ideologue would be an opportunity wasted by people who fundamentally misunderstand two things: what the club’s supporters want and what bridging the gap back to Premier League stability demands.

It may not appear that way to outside observers. They might simply see a young manager with a record of gaining promotion from the Championship with a newly-relegated team.

Indeed, when Southampton appointed Martin in the summer of 2023 they had just been relegated from the Premier League with 6 wins, 7 draws and 25 defeats to their name.

Force yourself to look at the final Premier League table from this season and you’ll notice Leicester have the exact same record – same number of wins, same number of draws and 25 in both the defeats column and the points column.

Other people will have been impressed by Martin’s recent appearance on Gary Lineker’s podcast, perhaps the managerial equivalent of falling for the YouTube compilation when a new signing arrives.

Then there’s the obvious Maresca parallel in playing style. Plenty of the current Leicester squad clearly loved playing the Maresca way and seemingly resented having to move away from it when Cooper took charge. Several would welcome a similar style with open arms.

This is presumably why those in charge at Leicester City have identified Martin as one of the primary candidates to replace Ruud van Nistelrooy. A free agent with a recent promotion would always be appealing to a newly-relegated club with financial charges hanging over them, yet it’s the possession-heavy approach that appears most attractive to the decision-makers at Leicester.

That’s neutrals, the players and the hierarchy happy. But is anyone gauging the mood on the ground among Leicester City’s fans? Because that mood, already mutinous, seems to be that Russell Martin would be the final straw.

Do the club realise how many fans hated Enzoball? Do they care? Were they watching as Leicester, deviating from the Enzo way, repeatedly tore Martin’s Southampton to shreds?

And ultimately, does it even matter? There’s every chance Martin can be a success in his first full season should he be the chosen one. His style of play, as shown under Maresca and with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, can be hugely effective as long as you have the best players in the league.

Well, as easy as it is to denigrate supporters’ opinions, this negativity might be very important indeed. The awkward truth is that football clubs at Leicester City’s level generally need the fans to back the manager. In the brief Cooper era, we saw what happens when a manager starts on the back foot.

And while there’s always the vague hope that fans will be won over, there will be such little margin for error next season that it would help enormously if a new managerial appointment galvanised the whole club rather than disregarding fan sentiment. Just yesterday, Ricardo Pereira made the point that something or someone needs to reunite Leicester’s players, staff and fans. He’s right.

There are numerous off-field issues but a new manager will have to focus on what happens on the pitch first and foremost. Leicester wasted a whole season having compiled a weak defence, vacant midfield and woefully uncreative attack.

The answer is blindingly obvious to anyone who has watched Wout Faes, Boubakary Soumare or the Ayew/Reid extravaganza. Get solid through the spine of the team and recreate the spark further forward. Fans understandably fail to see this happening under a manager notorious for a brittle defence and slow-moving attack.

What the majority of the fanbase thinks is more important than what I think. But for what it’s worth, I often quite enjoyed Maresca’s style at Championship level. Dominating the ball worked against most teams and we had the firepower on the counter attack when we needed it.

I had three main concerns.

One was the sense that it didn’t help create the atmosphere that the best Leicester sides have always fostered.

Another was the feeling that the likes of Abdul Fatawu could be even more effective if unleashed rather than shackled to such a system.

The third was big games. Under Maresca, Leicester bottled most of these – the two tussles with Leeds, the trip to Coventry, even the two late concessions against Ipswich.

It doesn’t bode well for any potential Martin reign in LE2 that the two top-of-the-table clashes Maresca’s Leicester were able to end victorious were both against Southampton. Passing back and forth between the centre-backs for 75% of the season is fine until you have to inject a bit of urgency into it all. This is one area where Leicester fans would need to be convinced and the first big test of the fixture list will be key.

Managerial appointments used to be a strength of the King Power era but confidence has all but disappeared after two desperately poor hires at Premier League level.

Of course, we’ll never know what Enzo Maresca might have achieved with Leicester City this season had Chelsea not come calling. There were signs he was tiring of the way things are done at the club so perhaps he would have fallen on his sword at some point rather than compromise.

More likely, he would have faced a similar fate to Martin at Southampton. Wedded to his idea of how to play the game, he would have struggled to keep his job after an inevitable string of defeats.

That may all be supposition but Leicester fans were already starting to worry about the thought of Premier League Enzoball during the bad patch in the second half of the Championship title-winning season. They had Vincent Kompany’s experience at Burnley as evidence, even before Russell Martin pushed Southampton down a similar path.

Like it or not, a lot of fans will already be taking promotion almost for granted, subject to any points deduction. They will be fearing the worst for Martin’s style back in the big league the following season.

The evidence against possession football began to stack up once Leicester returned to the Premier League with Manchester City struggling while the likes of Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest prospered.

Ironically, as the campaign went on, our mishmash of a squad appeared to be shifting towards suiting a more direct style next season. While the squad may be seen as disciples of Maresca, the reality doesn’t match up. There is no strong overall vision from, say, a director of football.

So Cooper’s signings, followed by the sidelining of Jannik Vestergaard and Harry Winks, plus Mads Hermansen’s injury, all led up to the starting eleven we saw at Bournemouth, and on many other occasions – a team incapable of keeping the ball in any area of the pitch.

The difference between the final day starting lineup of 2023 and the eleven men who ran out of the Vitality Stadium tunnel on Sunday is stark.

Iversen, Castagne, Evans, Faes, Thomas, Soumare, Dewsbury-Hall, Maddison, Tielemans, Barnes, Iheanacho.

Stolarczyk, Justin, Coady, Faes, Thomas, Soumare, Skipp, McAteer, Kristiansen, Ayew, Daka.

There are still the bones of a good Championship squad at Leicester but the fact that few of those players were in the lineup at Bournemouth, while again partly van Nistelrooy’s fault, is actually another issue that comes from the top.

Set the culture properly and the manager doesn’t need to ostracise key players. He won’t loan youngsters who could have played. He will be bolder in starting the youngsters he does have available. He will have similar alternatives to call upon out wide rather than resorting to ageing or out-of-position players.

Looking at those two starting lineups, the midfield and attack have deteriorated but the defence wasn’t any good to start with. It’s why we were relegated in 2023 and it’s a large part of why we were relegated in 2025. To appoint a manager who seemingly struggles to ally his style of play with enough defensive organisation when you’ve barely got the defenders for any style of play is worrying. It’s another large part of why this would be such a gamble.

Those of us who have had one eye on next season’s Championship starting eleven for months have already been looking at the likes of Jakub Stolarczyk and Ben Nelson as key starters, not just squad members. Can they play Martin’s style? It would be a big ask for young players in their first full season at the club.

Martin will, like his predecessors, face bigger issues from his own bosses than from his players. We’ve spent the past three years on this site tentatively suggesting the club needs some kind of major reset rather than pretending it’s being run well.

Appointing a new manager who will face the same squad-building and structural communication issues raised by Brendan Rodgers, Enzo Maresca and Ruud van Nistelrooy is avoiding the cold, hard truth. 

Someone has to be held accountable for the signings and contract renewals made over the past three years. Someone has to be held accountable for the PSR problems dragging on, reducing our options both in the managerial market and the transfer market, and the near-constant threat of slicing our ability to compete through points deductions or embargoes. Someone has to be held accountable for the decline.

We’ll leave you to make your own A3 signs on that front. The point is that Leicester’s squad has been diminishing in quality year-on-year for a long time now and it doesn’t matter who’s in the dugout until that trend is reversed.

It’s a long road back from here to a competitive Premier League squad, involving buying well, selling well and excelling at contract management. Part of the blame lies with previous managers but the overall vision and strategy, if these things exist, come from the top.

Like Ruud van Nistelrooy waiting to hear if he’s “aligned”, we won’t hold our breath. We’re already holding this lukewarm can of Chang and dreaming of everything working out, whether the new man is Russell Martin, Danny Röhl, Sean Dyche or somebody else entirely.

You’ve got to love that new manager feeling.