The Fosse Way

Yesterday, Leicester City signed a player. It’s only the second time this has happened since last August so it would have felt truly momentous had the player in question not been a 38-year-old goalkeeper. But then the only other signing over the past 11 months now appears to be the fourth-choice right-back.

In the same period, Leicester have sold just one player for a transfer fee.

It’s never healthy to stand still, even during periods of success. Look at Liverpool reinforcing their squad having just strolled to the Premier League title. Leicester aren’t just at the other end of the scale, or even on a different scale. There is no scale. It’s a dead club. Where other clubs are decisive, take action, show what the plan is… we have nothing.

It is, on one level, staggering that the league season begins in 11 days and no meaningful progress has been made to refresh the current squad. But the time has passed when, as a Leicester City fan, you can be surprised by a lack of action. This seems to be our identity now. Change the fox on the badge to a sloth. We’re a football club performing at the speed of a slow-motion replay.

In other circumstances, all hope would have been lost before the big kickoff – even if that kickoff will come against a club in unquestionably what is an even worse situation than our own.

The current scenario is giving us hope though – for three reasons. 

Firstly, we have a new manager and the early signs have been promising. Martí Cifuentes has something of a clean slate with Leicester fans, in the same way that a promising youngster or a signing from abroad hasn’t had the opportunity to fail in close proximity yet. 

Secondly, we still have one of the strongest squads in the Championship even if supporters would love for a lot of the players to move on. 

But as the departure of Enzo Maresca demonstrated, a manager cannot define an identity for long before success sees them move on or failure sees a clamour for change. And although the squad is strong, it’s already shown it cannot compete at Premier League level and most players at the club over the age of 25 have no place in a successful long-term strategy.

The third reason for hope is the one that Leicester City’s decision-makers must embrace more than anything else: perhaps the most exciting collection of young footballers this club has ever had.

Leicester’s long-awaited first signing of the summer may have been a 38-year-old but the future of this football club lies with players half his age – and, in some cases, even younger than that. Because while there’s always room for a voice of experience, Leicester have proven with recent business that signing older players does not automatically guarantee any kind of stability. 

In fact, these days it mainly means that you have fewer players whose sales can make you the money to comply with the financial regulations. That was the true disaster of spending £7.5million on Jordan Ayew. Dead money for a dead club, heaping even more pressure on Mads Hermansen and Bilal El Khannouss to perform because otherwise there’s nobody anyone would want to buy.

Leicester have shown signs of realising this, fielding 15- and 16-year-olds in the Premier League to show the pathway, secure the contract and glimpse the future. Now both club and manager have to show they can push to new heights of bravery. They can do this by starting Ben Nelson and keeping faith with him as he learns the pressure of playing regularly for a club that’s expected to win, instead of picking senior centre-backs with no long-term future at the club. They can do it by recognising the almost unique abilities Will Alves possesses, pushing him to fulfil his undoubted potential in the shirt he wants to wear most of all. They can do it by including the likes of Olabade Aluko, Louis Page and Jake Evans as genuine squad members with important roles to play. 

And it almost goes without saying that they can do it by putting Jeremy Monga on the pitch and giving him the ball over and over again. That has happened in pre-season and the results have been pretty spectacular to watch. Of course there’s a bit of end product to add to the buzz when Monga gets the ball but his decision-making is already startlingly good for someone who has just turned 16.

Without wanting to read too much into the club’s social media output, there have definitely been signs that the club want to position other, slightly older Academy graduates as senior players in waiting – Jakub Stolarczyk, Luke Thomas, Hamza Choudhury and Kasey McAteer have all been front and centre over the past few weeks. 

Meanwhile, more experienced players at the top level – the likes of Conor Coady, Jannik Vestergaard, Wout Faes, Boubakary Soumare, Harry Winks, Oliver Skipp, Wilfred Ndidi and Patson Daka – have been background figures. We know these players aren’t the story fans want to hear, but the fact they are not the story Leicester want to tell either is a sign that maybe the club are gearing up to push the boundaries with the Academy angle in terms that have a real impact: minutes on the pitch.

It’s been speculated that Leicester are unwilling to let Coady, for example, leave until an experienced replacement is found. The club’s fundamental opacity means it’s impossible to know whether this is true or not, but Leicester’s fanbase have lost faith in “leaders”. Between Coady’s podcasts, Vestergaard’s dog and Winks’s Aperol Spritz, the much-fabled leadership group at Leicester City has been reduced to a joke as we begin our first season without a Premier League title winner since the miracle nine years ago.

Of course, that title was won with something of an old guard – characterised by Morgan and Huth at the back. But instead of harking back to how things were done then, there’s a sense now that Leicester City have been there and done that. This is a time to try something new and there’s never been a better set of circumstances. Masses of exciting youngsters, a fanbase in desperate need of reinvigoration, a league unaware of what’s about to hit it. Let’s be bold and brave and throw out convention. The new Foxes are ready to be unleashed.