The howls of fury that formed the soundtrack of the opening stages of this lunchtime kick off and the vast swathes of empty seats that served as its backdrop told their own story. Marti Cifuentes is in deep trouble and this season is in danger of coming off the rails.
This was the fifth time Leicester City have been 3-0 down at half time in 2025. If one first half calamity is unfortunate and two looks like incompetence, perhaps five should be the cue for a mass citizens arrest that sees the entire club rounded up and thrown in the slammer.
Three of those games have come at the King Power, so it’s hardly surprising that, by the time 11 chastened blue shirts disappeared into the bowels of the stadium at half time, the sheer volume of empty seats diluted the angry reaction that followed them down the tunnel.
The second half revival of sorts means this result doesn’t look as bad as the Southampton game. The first 45 minutes, though, were undoubtedly far worse than Tuesday night. It’s hard to know whether a manager has ‘lost the dressing room’, but it’s clear that the dressing room isn’t listening to this manager.
For all the talk about delivering a reaction, the team showed no sign of any new resilience, or even any vague sense of application or professionalism. Instead, they conceded a horrendous goal inside 60 seconds.
Players are going to make mistakes every now and again. Bade Aluko’s mistake the other night was acceptable to some extent given his age and inexperience. Even a mistake like Asmir Begovic randomly passing the ball to Gustavo Hamer, as he did in the final minute of normal time here and which the Blades attacker put over an open goal, is understandable. These things happen, it’s not realistic to expect every player to play flawlessly.
What is far less acceptable is the sort of collective mistakes that we keep seeing. For all that those on the pitch have to take personal responsibility, it’s hard not to think that there are plenty of managers out there who would do better than be buried in the bottom half with this group. Either this club is uniquely unmanageable, or someone could do a better job.
We should at least expect the basics. Some leadership and a culture of accountability would be a start. A semblance of tactical nous and defensive organisation, neither of which were in any evidence here, wouldn’t go amiss either. Perhaps one or two players would improve under new management, rather than continually get worse as they are doing now.
If there’s no leadership, no tactics – what are Leicester City actually trying to do in any given game, does anyone know? – and none of the players are improving, then it’s hard to pinpoint any reason to keep the manager.
The first goal of this game should be framed and put in a vault, preserved for future generations to savour the Class of ’25. There are so many nominees for the worst goal this team has conceded all year that we’d be here all week listing them, but Tom Cannon putting Sheffield United in the lead after a minute has to be in the top three.
With the Blades in possession in an unthreatening position in Leicester’s left back spot, almost every blue shirt in close proximity proceeded to vomit all over themselves until Cannon – of course – slotted in at the back post.
First it was Luke Thomas giving the ball away, then Stephy Mavididi, then Thomas weakly failing to win the ball back, then Wout Faes hacking the cross into the centre of his own box, before Harry Winks delivered the coup de grace: A heavy touch, followed by a huge swipe at thin air, followed by a full Bambi-on-ice routine before falling flat on his face to allow Cannon a free shot at goal. It truly gets worse every time you watch it.
From there the direction of travel was only going one way until the half time interval. Barring a couple of brief forays forward from Mavididi and the odd threatening cross, Leicester produced absolutely nothing of note. They managed no shots on target before the break yet again while Sheffield United ruthlessly exposed a gaping chasm between the defence and midfield.
At times there were six white shirts running at Leicester’s back line, in situations which should never see you exposed to that sort of overload. These weren’t counter attacks, just straight passes into Callum O’Hare or Sydie Peck in the middle of the park. As soon as they turned, they had the freedom of the pitch to drive towards Leicester’s box.
A little like Southampton, Sheffield United let Leicester off the hook with the way they wasted some of these situations. At times in the first half they went too direct, so they went over their midfielders instead of into them, which was what caused the majority of the danger. At other times they got the final ball wrong, choosing to shoot instead of playing in runners on the overlap, and had a lot corners thanks to blocked crosses that felt like opportunities to do better.
Two of those corners still resulted in goals, as free players on the edge of the area pounced on the second ball to fire home. Both had a slight element of luck – a little deflection of Jairo Riedewald saw him become the latest entrant into the ‘he’s scored his first goal for the club!’ hall of fame, then there was possibly a push on Patson Daka just before Peck hammered home Sheffield United’s third.
It’s hard to quibble too much with this, 3-0 was a completely fair reflection of the game, and it could have been worse. With Faes off the pitch in first half stoppage time, Jordan James was filling in at centre back(!) only to get caught in a 1v1 with Tyrese Campbell, who put him in a blender before firing a golden opportunity wide.
To give Cifuentes and the team some credit, they did battle gamely in the second half. The substitutions he made – introducing Boubakary Soumare, Oliver Skipp, and Jordan Ayew – looked apocalyptic at the time but made a big difference. Soumare in particular seemed to solve the key problem, which was the total lack of blue shirts in midfield, while also playing a number of threatening forward passes to Mavididi and Abdul Fatawu.
Skipp has had an implausibly good week, as he put in probably the best left back performance of any Leicester player this season on Tuesday, and followed it up with a solid 45 minutes in a lesser spotted big man-little man centre back partnership with Jannik Vestergaard here. Though it must be said that when it came to the last five minutes and you were watching a team play Skipp at centre half and Vestergaard up front, it was hard not to think that something may have gone a little wrong somewhere along the line.
By that time the feel of the game had totally changed, as Leicester, backed into a corner, responded with an intensity that has been lacking all year. They moved the ball quicker, kept feeding the wingers in dangerous areas, and pinned Sheffield United on the edge of their own area.
Sometimes when a game is over by half time the winning team is playing at arm’s length, controlling the game even if the score makes it seem like a comeback is possible. That wasn’t the case in this one, as the Blades were rattled and couldn’t get the ball. Suddenly Leicester players were routinely winning it back and recycling the ball, while all their opponents were doing were hoofing it back.
Ultimately, all this pressure failed to produce enough quality chances to salvage a result. For all the defensive failings, this is the killer. You can’t be bad at defending and bad at scoring goals. The defence might be a lost cause, but there are quality players in advanced areas who just aren’t creating enough.
There were flashes: Fatawu and Mavididi combined extremely well to create the first goal – a Mavididi header at the back post – and to create a good chance for Fatawu on the opposite side, which he tamely shot straight at the goalkeeper when he could have laid it off to James. Another deep Fatawu cross eventually found its way to Thomas, who scuffed his shot from a dangerous position.
The second goal came a little out of nowhere, after Patrick Bamford – in the midst of a truly appalling substitute appearance – lost the ball to Skipp and Soumare. The latter fed James, who hit a swerving shot from distance that flew into the centre of the goal. Even the ball seemed a little confused at why the ‘keeper made no effort to save it.
With 10 minutes to go it felt like there was one more chance in this game to grab a point, but that chance never came. Jeremy Monga’s very belated introduction – his first appearance of any sort in November – failed to have much impact. Julian Carranza is apparently so bad he can’t even get on the pitch ahead of putting Vestergaard up front, and Ayew is not a penalty box striker, so the wingers have to do everything themselves. Thanks to a fair bit of cunning gamesmanship, the Blades saw things out surprisingly calmly.
The second half display meant the team at least managed to take the air out of the balloon a little when it came to criticism at the end of the game. Even so, it was jarring to watch the likes of Skipp and Ayew laughing and chatting to opposition players at full time. The sort of thing that feels it shouldn’t happen after the week the club has had.
Cifuentes, at least, seemed angry afterwards and spoke like a man who knows how precarious his position is. The service he and the club are selling is now about long term fixes. But he also talked about being accountable for mistakes, which only emphasises his weakness in failing to hold his team to that standard.
The age-old problem for the manager is that while the players might be more at fault than you, you can’t sack the players. He’s been unlucky with injuries to players like Aaron Ramsey and Ben Nelson, who may well have both played this game were they fit, and would give the team a fresher look than Faes and Bobby De Cordova Reid. He’s also been a little unlucky in the timing of the games this week, playing two of the strongest squads in the division – despite being in the relegation zone, the Blades have a far better bench than Leicester – under new management and just as they look to be turning it around.
At the same time, he’s shown very little sign of being worth sticking with. Leicester have rarely looked remotely close to being any good, and only when the crisis has reached existential levels – away at Norwich and at half time in this game – has the handbrake come off and they’ve shown signs of what talent might be there.
This time of year is the period at which reality tends to converge with the underlying data that offers up your expected performance. The real league table starts to reflect expected goals and points between roughly the 15th-20th games of the season. Well, Leicester’s expected goal difference had them 16th ahead of kick off. Following this defeat, they are 16th in the real table as well. There are not many reasons for optimism there.
Data like that only backs up the evidence of our own eyes. Leicester have spent a lot of this season looking like a poor team that has been bailed out by moments of individual quality or fortune. There are hardly any games that you look back on and think they should have won, and far more where they got out of jail. Like the away win at Swansea that required two screamers, or West Brom’s Nat Phillips deflecting in an injury time own goal to save a point. The Foxes ‘lost’ the xG in both of those games – comfortably, in the case of the game at the Hawthorns.
Eventually that starts to even itself out. In a sense, this week has been an example of exactly that. Southampton and Sheffield United have been two of the biggest ‘underperformers’ of the season so far. The meeting of those teams under new management, riding the crest of a mini wave, versus a Leicester side that looks like a house built on sand, has delivered a cold slap of reality.
The fact the Championship is so tightly congested is a good thing because it offers hope that you can quickly turn things around. Virtually everyone can still dream of a run top the top six and potential promotion, and it’s true that a lot of teams who end up in the playoffs come from a long way back. It’s about timing your form.
To some extent though such congestion can also be a mirage, one that tricks you into thinking you are only a couple of wins away from those playoffs so you don’t need to make a change.
Leicester’s next three games are against teams above them and the next home game is against Ipswich who, despite Friday’s defeat, might be the second best team in the league. This is a very dangerous period. The season could go down the drain in the next fortnight.
Maybe Cifuentes hobbles on, either because of the leadership vacuum at the top or because a team seven points from the relegation zone with a points deduction hanging over its head is not an attractive prospect. But something has to change.
The Fosse Way 
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