The good
Even though the decision came drenched in classic Leicester City communication chaos and he seems like a perfectly nice chap, dispensing with Marti Cifuentes on Sunday evening was a good move.
A club’s wage bill is highly – and we mean highly – correlated with final league position. The clubs who pay the most in wages almost always finish at the top of the league. There are occasional outliers, such as Leicester City ourselves between 2015-2022 (in a good way) and 2023-present (in a bad way), but the overall trend is extremely clear.
Cifuentes was working under many constraints at Leicester. Yet fundamentally he took the team with the largest wage bill in the Championship and delivered performances that have the team 23rd in the expected points table after two-thirds of the season. Bearing in mind that the 24th team, Sheffield Wednesday, are barely a functioning football club, it’s hard to imagine how Cifuentes could have produced a team worse than this.
Leicester’s weekly wage bill is more than double the vast majority of other teams in the league, it’s three times higher than Oxford, who of course beat Cifuentes in his final game in charge. Had he not bothered to show up for work for six months, it’s unlikely that things would have been worse.
Leicester have had poor managers in the past. Steve Cooper and Ruud van Nistelrooy are obvious recent examples, then the likes of Peter Taylor and even Claude Puel have become bywords for awful coaching. All of those men coached in the Premier League, against teams with many more resources. Not against The Likes of Oxford.
Cifuentes has to be filed alongside the Ian Holloways of the world in the bucket of historic crapness. At least that sorry era has come to an end.
Talking of which, another reign of terror is on the brink of coming to an end. Jon Rudkin has finally found the ‘flog to the Middle East’ button on the transfer portal and shipped Boubakary Soumare off to Qatar.
The fact that his Leicester City career seems to have ended with a late cameo as a rush centre back in a home defeat to Oxford United is a fitting epitaph.
He looks positively thrilled. The club officials…maybe they’ve seen the stats and realised it’s not the right Soumare.
There was at least one victory to celebrate this week, as a clean sweep of reformers were elected onto the board of the Foxes Trust on Monday evening.
This is the biggest step forward in the drive to reform the Trust that has been going on for the last couple of years and means we can expect to see much more effort to hold the club to account. The impact has been felt almost immediately, with a strong call for Jon Rudkin to reveal himself delivered on Thursday.
If we’re not going to start drafting him into the first team, then a loan to get actual football is the right move, Jake Evans has joined League One Northampton. They take on Reading at home this weekend.
There’s been a lot of buzz around Lorenz Hutchinson and with another goal scored, he now leads the Under 18 Premier League scoring charts.
The bad
To be fair to Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, his long-awaited media junket has achieved his stated aim of bringing the fans closer to Leicester City Football Club. We’re not distant any more. We’re totally engaged, because this insight into the thinking of the long-time owner of our club has made us all worry even more about its future.
The timing of the interviews, at least one of which took part inside the stadium during an actual competitive match for the women’s side, was bizarre in itself. But perhaps it had all been arranged to neatly follow the expected routine victory over relegation-haunted Oxford rather than the cataclysm that played out last Saturday.
“Highlights” included:
The bit where he said the manager “needed time”, then sacked him two hours later.
A whinge about people picking on his mate, the Director of Football:
“Jon is [seen as] like a bad cop … when we won the Premier League, it’s because of Jon too. But nobody talks about that any more.
The lack of decisiveness inherent here:
“Selling the club is not the way to exit… Then, if some prince comes in, maybe yes.”
A primary focus on blaming the fans for bad vibes:
“The players know a lot; when you stand there on the pitch, the pressure from the stands is huge and they feel it. If the fans are really negative, it’s not easy. But I know that’s not from the performances alone. The club needs to help the fans to get back to that position again.”
The complete inability to understand and learn from the reasons for the catastrophic relegation in 2023:
“I still do not understand why we go down. I have no idea. I talked to a lot of players at that time. I think the main problem was we had no experience of a relegation fight. We were so relaxed that we were going to be OK. What I heard is: ‘Boss, don’t worry, we’ll be OK.’ We were not OK…”
An apparently non-existent understanding of the need to adhere to the financial regulations that have crippled the club:
“I am worried [about the potential charges] too. Every year we try to comply with PSR. The only one [financial year] we don’t know what it is, is the year we get relegated. And when we didn’t plan for that, it hit us hard.”
The slightly ill-advised (although more amusing than damning, in fairness because lol yeah, us too):
“I used to be a football fan”
The ultimate KPFC mantra:
“I told the directors and other people that we used to be a very small club in the Midlands.”
There is a world in which the impending key appointments Srivaddhanaprabha talks about – a technical director, a commercial director, a men’s first team manager – all come good. We’ve seen it before with the likes of Eduardo Macia and Enzo Maresca, whose individual excellence helped cover for the shortcomings of others. But on the evidence of the interviews given by Srivaddhanaprabha this week, that would be sheer luck rather than the inevitable outcome of a brilliant strategy.
Way back in 2016, Jon Holmes, a former chairman of the club, gave his opinion of the King Power group’s management as part of an interview published in The Unbelievables. This was a time when the Srivaddhanaprabhas walked on water for the vast, vast majority of the fanbase.
“The owners have twice got rid of managers without any clear idea who would replace them. Martin George always said to me you need to have two in reserve because your money could lose eight on the trot or he could get poached. You need to have that backup plan. Twice they haven’t and twice they’ve got away with it. With Ranieri, suddenly they hit the jackpot.”
“A lot of successful people don’t know how lucky they are.”
Ten years on, the prevailing narrative might be Vichai: good, Aiyawatt: bad but it was difficult to read and listen to the array of interview content with Aiyawatt this week without seeing confirmation of the belief there has been a damaging overreliance on Jon Rudkin throughout, going way back to the terrible summer transfer window of 2016 and the Adrien Silva debacle the following year, both of which happened on Vichai’s watch without consequences.
The contrast over the past three and a half years in particular has been with the 3 well-run Bs in the Premier League: Bill Foley’s Bournemouth, Matthew Benham’s Brentford, Tony Bloom’s Brighton. All three have regularly communicated with their fans for years and have reaped the benefits. It’s not always rosy but each has managed to lose successful managers and players while continuing to walk the tricky Premier League tightrope between thriving and surviving.
The question is whether you can imagine any of those men giving an interview like Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha did on Sunday. Contrary to what seems to be Aiyawatt’s belief, Leicester City aren’t magically going to return to life as an established Premier League club without a complete rethink. Where we needed reassurance of substance and strategy, we instead got confirmation of what many of us have thought along: this is not a professional operation.
Quite why it wasn’t Jon Rudkin facing questions as part of the overdue interviews on the club’s disastrous decline remains something of a mystery. The club’s communications maestros can’t have thought he’d have done a worse job than this.
The only downside to Cifuentes’ removal is the apocalyptic list of candidates to replace him. The criteria seems to be ‘free, available’ and ‘any tenuous link to Leicester or King Power’.
Sunderland ‘Til I Die’s Chris Coleman is the current favourite. If you, like us, were wondering what Coleman has been doing since his time as a Netflix star, we present the following:
- 2018-2019: Hebei China Fortune
- 2022-2023: Atromitos
- 2024: AEL Limassol
- 2024-2025: OH (no) Leuven
- 2025-2026: Asteras Tripolis
Looks a bit overqualified.
If we assume any new manager has to sit in the middle of a diagram that reads “available with no buyout clause”, “someone the fans might not openly hate” and “desperate enough to take the job”, then the most plausible candidates at this point look like Gary Rowett or giving it Kingeh until the end of the season.
The news that Boubakary Soumare is sadly off to pastures new sparked a flurry of fond memories of our marauding midfielder in The Fosse Way writers’ WhatsApp group. Set the task of coming up with his best moments during four and a half years (!) at the club, here’s what we came up with…
The Community Shield, of course, was Bouba’s introduction to English football. Making your debut at Wembley! And what a debut it was, helping to put the mighty Manchester City to the sword with a swashbuckling 20-minute cameo that struck fear into the hearts of midfield opponents across the forthcoming Premier League season.
Becky Taylor went for “Brighton away 2021-22 season, a classic 2-1 defeat, I saw a Leicester fan with ‘GGB’ no number printed on his Leicester shirt. It was Boubakary Soumaré’s 3rd appearance for Leicester, my pals and I declared GGB must stand for ‘good goal Boubs’, this guy must know something and he’s going to score a banger.
Being so early in his tenure we had heaps of optimism and got excited that ‘good goal Boubs’ was imminent any time he touched the ball anywhere close to the box. It kept us pretty entertained for longer than it should have, admittedly the optimism dwindled as the appearances went on.
Ultimately the main thing he will be remembered for, for me, is never scoring a goal, let alone a good goal to fulfil his good goal Boubs’ prophecy. 111 appearances, barely a flicker of a chance of a goal. What a flop.”
Hmm.
Iain Wright recalls: “The measure of a great player, is the ability to deliver at key moments. With the Foxes a goal down, in midtable in November, a ball was played forward following the restart. ‘Big Bouba’ jumped, allowing the ball to touch his head. Harvey Barnes picked up the ball and curled a worldie into the postage stamp. Assist number one in the bag!
Harry Gregory focused on assist number two, a short pass that enabled Abdul Fatawu to curl in a match-winner at Charlton earlier this season – and a good run he made against Spartak Moscow back in the distant past.
There was also talk of that famous run at Portman Road that led to Jordan Ayew’s equaliser last season and vague memories of a similar barnstorming dribble through midfield that led to a goal against Wolves in the previous relegation season.
A lasting legacy.
The club sending out emails to ask people why they didn’t attend the Oxford game. Must be that quiet couple of weeks we’re having.
The club also sending out emails asking for ‘your matchday experience’ from those who did drag themselves to the Oxford game. Erm, lads, were the chants not clear enough?
Conor Coady found enough free time between podcast and radio appearances to get himself a loan move to Charlton. Having been ousted pretty quickly at Wrexham, depriving us of the chance to welcome him back to the King Power, we now face the prospect of playing him this weekend.
Vardy watch
Cremonese fell to a 1-0 loss away at Sassuolo this weekend (no, Woyo didn’t feature).
But the main takeaway this week was from Rebekah Vardy’s Instagram Stories. When asked if Vardz would return, her simple, scathing answer spoke volumes: “Not while Jon Rudkin’s there.”
Wout watch
You’d think escaping Seagrave and landing somewhere sunny, warm and upmarket might spare you the Leicester curse. Nah. Wout Faes and his centre-back partner, Eric Dier, are out for a couple of weeks. Has anybody checked if there’s a electrical sub-station near the ground?
On the site this week
Misery and a pile of interviews and news brings content if nothing else. Alongside the Oxford match report where cries to ‘sack everyone’ were sort of rewarded, and coverage of Alisha Lehmann’s debut for Leicester City Women, we’ve had submissions and a big question.
Following the news of new Foxes Trust members, we had a good piece covering the work to date and the plans from here on out.
And presented with a less than exciting list of options, we asked our group to share who they want (loose term) as the next managerial appointment.
One last thing
Tomorrow’s home game against Charlton plays host to the 9th annual Union FS food bank. Donations will again go to The Bridge, a homelessness charity in Leicester.
The following items are particularly welcomed:
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