The Fosse Way

Leicester City are that person at work who waits until 4.59 on Friday to send you that report you’ve been desperately requesting for months.

You hate that person. Everyone hates that person.

And yet here we are, married to that person.

Perhaps we should have known that Van Nistelrooy’s inevitable departure would be handled in the most disorganised way possible.

Throughout a long summer of nothing, we have been forced to concoct our own narratives to explain the strange communication void. All of which have ultimately been proven wrong.

After months of prevarication and inaction, by Friday Leicester were faced with a binary choice. Either Van Nistelrooy was removed from his post that day, or he was taking pre-season training on Monday morning.

One of the main frustrations with the LCFC leadership in recent years is that the mistakes they make are thoroughly avoidable. It is one thing to get things wrong, to buy the wrong players or to hire the wrong manager, these are understandable errors. The cost of doing business.

To make such fundamentally basic mistakes as to start pre-season without a manager, having been relegated for more than two months, is a level of ineptitude designed to raise you, or at least me, to a state of abject, impotent fury.

You might argue that this lack of decision was to do with money, that their hands were tied. Maybe the “mutual consent” wording of Friday’s official statement was crucial to avoid having to pay Van Nistelrooy off. Or perhaps King Power were waiting for their financial shenanigans with the Thai airport authorities to bear fruit.

But none of those arguments make any sense. The axe fell a few days before the PSR deadline. Van Nistelrooy could have been mutually-consented at any point in the last couple of months; it seems unlikely that waiting this long saved Leicester any money.

Instead the club acted at the last possible moment, like a student approaching an essay deadline that they’ve known about since August, out of desperate panic when they had no other choice.

All of which means that at this tipping point in the club’s recent history, with the threat of a serious points deduction looming and promotion about the only thing that can fend off a full-blown meltdown, we kick things off with the players turning up at Seagrave to an empty room.

Even though we are conditioned to expect this sort of absurdity, we shouldn’t stop calling it out. Nine other Championship clubs have sacked or lost their manager since the end of the season, and all nine have managed to replace them.

This is not highly advanced leadership we’re asking for here, this is basic stuff. You are a football club, a football club needs a football manager. If you do literally nothing else, make sure there are some players and a manager.

Leicester’s insanity goes beyond even that basic formula, because over the last couple of years we have seen the powers-that-be oversee a total collapse of the footballing infrastructure. This is the worst possible moment to have chosen to hand the reigns to ‘er well no one, really’.

Once upon a time, even as managers came and went, there was a certain level of institutional knowledge that would have helped in a situation like this.

When Enzo Maresca joined, he brought a whole coaching staff with him. This meant that one of the last vestiges of that knowledge, Mike Stowell, left the club as a result. When Maresca himself then left last summer, he took his coaching staff off with him to Chelsea.

Steve Cooper then brought in his own staff. When he was sacked, half of them were straight out of the door as well, leaving only “Ben Dawson” and “Danny Alcock” to run things until Van Nistelrooy arrived. The Dutchman joined effectively on his own, and was taking training sessions himself until he was able to bring in an assistant, Jelle ten Rouwelaar. He didn’t bring in another first-team coach until Brian Barry-Murphy arrived at Christmas.

Dawson and Alcock were then sacked in February. Van Nistelrooy has obviously left, and Barry-Murphy joined Cardiff earlier this month. Ten Rouwelaar remains as of this moment, but it is plausible the club simply hasn’t told us that he’s left as well; he was already being linked with Brighton before RVN’s departure and it’s doubtful he would stick around.

That means that the entire first team coaching staff for the first day of a new season may well consist of someone called Andrew Hughes, the set piece coach, and Andy King, who has been coaching adult human beings since February.

You may think that not having a manager for the start of pre-season is largely irrelevant. But not having any kind of organisation or structure in place at all is embarrassingly amateur.

We need no encouragement to refer to 2015/16, and let’s make a comparison with the situation at the start of that season. On the face of it, it’s similar; Nigel Pearson was not sacked until June 30th, and Claudio Ranieri only arrived on July 13th, when Leicester were already on a pre-season camp in Evian. King Power were in charge then too, and the likes of Susan Whelan and Jon Rudkin were in situ as well.

The difference, though, is there were genuinely competent people in place around them at that point which meant the lack of a manager was less of an issue.

While Pearson was gone, the core tenets of the football operation remained. Craig Shakespeare would have been in charge of training even with Pearson as manager, Steve Walsh was assistant manager, largely responsible for analysis and running the recruitment operation. Stowell was there, so too was David Rennie, the physio who had been at Leicester for over a decade. It perhaps also bears noting that Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was in overall charge of the club.

The utter gulf in experience and competence between that group and those in charge now is staggering. You could fairly safely trust them to run a professional football team ten years ago, you certainly cannot say the same of the hodge-podge bunch of nobodies who will be wearing the chef’s hat at Seagrave this week.

Most of Leicester’s players may be inept, overpaid, or a combination of both, but these are your most valuable assets. What must they think?

Remember two years ago, when Maresca spent the first couple of weeks of the summer convincing key players to stay at the club in the Championship? Will the vacant name plate on the manager’s office door have the same effect?

The questions don’t end there.

What sort of pre-season training plan is in operation for these players, and who is organising it? Are there even enough coaches at the club to run these training sessions?

Van Nistelrooy has, by all accounts, been back in the Netherlands this summer and has had little to no communication with the club. Was he doing the planning work for the season, despite being the victim of a ghosting the Tinder Swindler would be proud of? If not, who was?

We often hear that the manager has final say on all transfer decisions. If that is the case, what happens when there isn’t one?

This leads us to another binary scenario, where one of the following must be true: Van Nistelrooy has been involved in pre-season and recruitment planning, despite the fact everyone knew he was about to be ditched, which makes any work rather pointless; or he was not, in which case we have to assume that no meaningful work has been done.

The first friendly is on Saturday. The first actual match of the season is in 42 days time. There is an awful lot to do before then, none of which can start until there’s a manager in place. And how are we going to find the new manager?

Even if Jon Rudkin remains ultimately responsible for the football side of things, there are surely some decisions he cannot make on his own. He needs the owner’s input and sign off on any managerial appointment. And we have to ask, given the Succession-esque goings on in the boardroom of King Power, how plugged in is the owner to finding a new manager for Leicester City?

It’s one thing to have an inept Director of Football in place when there are masses of expertise around and underneath him, it’s quite another when there is essentially no one around him.

It is of course possible that none of this matters, that Leicester have enough clout in the Championship to get promoted anyway. That the name brand is strong enough to lure a decent manager despite the off-field problems. That teams can be transformed in quite a short period of time, especially when the transfer window is open for two more months.

But the point is that we don’t know. We have no idea who the manager is going to be, and nor do the players. It could be Sean Dyche or Michael Carrick, or Danny Rohl or Chris Wilder, or someone else. We wouldn’t entirely rule out a scenario where Andy King ends up in charge.

All of these managers are completely different. There is no way to even start planning for the season when you don’t know what the manager wants, and it’s obvious that this is a serious problem.

Every time a coach is appointed in mid-season, or you hear a former manager interviewed about their craft, everyone emphasises how important pre-season is.

It is the time to implement the style of play you want. It’s also the time to build up the squad’s fitness to the necessary level to play the style you want, something that seems to have been an issue for Van Nistelrooy himself at Leicester last season.

Then there are the other bits; analysing the squad and deciding who you want to stick around, getting rid of the players who might not get much game time and might present problems in the dressing room down the line.

Right now, none of that is possible. Every day that there is no manager is a day wasted, a missed opportunity to give the club the best possible chance of bouncing back up to the Premier League.

Worst of all, it all seems completely pointless. There’s no rhyme nor reason why Leicester are this position, beyond a total abdication of responsibility from those who are supposed to make the decisions.

The facts are stark. Right now, we are the only club in the football league that doesn’t have a manager.

Leicester City have a lot of questions to answer as a result. But if we could focus on one to ask of the leadership group this morning, it would be this:

Why?