D-Day for Leicester City - but whatever happens, we must demand change
Today, Leicester City - our football club - need a win to have a chance of staying in the Premier League. It’s a morning that would feel ripe for a rallying cry in any normal circumstances. But this is no ordinary season.
The Athletic revealed yesterday that the club would be conducting a review of what has gone so badly wrong this season.
The answer is obvious: almost everything.
The people ultimately responsible? Well, they’re carrying out the review of course.
Dreams and decline
We’ve already tried to jinx Leicester into action on the pitch so here, in the spirit of the club’s review regardless of relegation, is something in place of a rallying cry.
Plenty of people who have the misfortune to support less interesting clubs than Leicester City have been asking recently what on earth has happened to us. We have to weigh up how much they want to hear in response - some get a concise summary, others get a rambling monologue - but the answer is not a simple one.
You can tell how complex and wide-ranging the problems are because we’ve been largely resigned to relegation for weeks despite the points totals appearing to show hope and the players having pedigree. As fans, we’re ahead of the curve. We’ve talked about how much there is to be done. We’ve talked about the financial implications. We already want people to be accountable for this.
Because the kind of rapid decline in standards we’ve seen throughout the football club takes spectacular mis-management at multiple levels.
At this point it feels only right to say there are people in the boardroom, and among the current interim management team, and among the first team squad, who have experienced extended periods of getting things right for Leicester City.
It wasn’t all a dream. We were a well-run club that challenged the elite through sheer cleverness on and off the pitch. We recruited well and we sold at the right time and we generated a spark and we retained that spark despite success along the way.
Then it all went wrong and the decline has, so far, been completely unarrestable. We don’t know how much further we have to fall. By half past six this evening, we’ll know a little more. But unless there are meaningful changes, it’s hard to see how things will magically turn around even at a lower level.
We don’t demand a procession of titles, cup wins and European football. We should feel able to demand a basic level of competence for the wages we are contributing towards and a team that cares.
By George
You don’t fall this far this fast by making one or two mistakes. There isn’t any one thing you can point to that explains the decline, as much as people often try. Clearly, there are particularly obvious examples which fans attempt to hold up as the one issue that changed everything, like the handling of Kasper Schmeichel’s departure and the timing of the decision to dispense with Brendan Rodgers.
Ultimately though, the decline started before both of those events and could have been halted afterwards and along the way we got so many things wrong.
It brings to mind an episode of the 1990s American sitcom Seinfeld, and a short speech made by the lovable perennial loser George Costanza.
“Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise. I was personable, I was bright. Oh, maybe not academically speaking, but... I was perceptive. I always know when someone's uncomfortable at a party. It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every area of life, be it something to wear, something to eat... It's all been wrong.”
The following realisation George comes to is one we can only wish one of the board had experienced at some point during the vast expanse of nothingness that was the summer of 2022.
“Yes, I will do the opposite. I used to sit here and do nothing, and regret it for the rest of the day, so now I will do the opposite, and I will do something!”
My kingdom for a shovel
This isn’t just about the inactivity and indecision of last summer. You could apply it to hundreds of situations from the past year or two. Imagine if Dean Smith - instead of doing nothing to sort out our midfield issues in recent weeks - had done something.
You could tell it from the Fulham game in particular. The teams around us have been so poor that we still had a card to play despite already frittering so many out of the window. If that game had been tight and marginally gone against us then it would have been a slightly different story if still not the result we wanted and needed.
But we’d made so many wrong decisions over so many months that we’d ended up with a team that could contrive to go 5-1 down to a newly-promoted side missing key players.
No wonder we had no hope at Newcastle, when again we’d been given yet another card to play. But then we did do something different, albeit frustratingly too late.
I’ve seen one fan online likening us to a deer that’s been run over and is waiting for someone to come along with a shovel and put it out of its misery.
I’ve also seen some Leicester fans talk in the past few weeks about how a regular relegation is just part of the club’s DNA, that we should be grateful for the good times we’ve had and share posts about how lucky we’ve been to experience trophies, Europe and some of the best players ever to wear our colours.
Obviously, that’s sparked a vociferous reaction from those who think this shows a loser mentality that has contributed to our downfall.
The way I’d sum it up is that those great Leicester teams of the past few years made us feel things we’d never thought possible, and unfortunately this one has done the same. What stood out for me in recent weeks was an admiration for the teams making a fight of it - Bournemouth, Everton and I can barely believe I’m writing this but even Nottingham Forest.
This feels like a new low. I really don’t want to feel like that about any other team, let alone Forest, and I wouldn’t if ours had put up any kind of fight themselves up to now. Sadly, I welcomed the reminder that competitive football is possible. Players who care do exist. That has been absent from our own club for so long.
Foxes’ pride
This isn’t to say anyone could do Jon Rudkin’s job, or that it’s simple to maintain a football club’s Premier League status without huge cash injections every summer.
I actually have little interest in targeting individuals like Rudkin for vitriol. That’s one reason why TFW’s debut season has been more about railing against the culture within the club from top to bottom without singling out the people responsible.
For one thing, I don’t think many of us know exactly who does what. For another, this has been so ingrained on and off the pitch that you can see the same arrogance, complacency or lack of care in so many departments.
But perhaps most of all, we don’t know what is happening in individuals’ private lives that might be affecting their decision-making. I’ve heard bits and pieces to that effect about one or two of the club’s employees. We’re not in it for that.
Nor is this to say that the majority of fans would have done things differently at every major staging point in this decline. There’s no question doing the opposite of what we actually did a year or two ago would have involved some incredibly difficult decisions that would have caused uproar among the fanbase, but they might still have been the right ones.
The main lesson we’ve learned is surely that we should never keep players who don’t see their long-term future at the club. We should be a prouder club than that. We shouldn’t allow the running down of contracts. It makes a mockery of what it means to pull on the shirt.
It certainly wouldn’t have been popular to sell a star player for less than we all thought they were worth, but even at the time it felt like we were kicking the can down the road. Short-term gain but long-term pain. Perhaps more accurately, short-term ease but long-term disease. Selling then might have resulted in a hungrier player coming in as a replacement.
We’re going to need a whole team of hungry players, a hungry management team and even evidence of hunger to succeed in the boardroom next season. That lack of hunger has unquestionably been the difference. Other clubs have either been organised or desperate. We’ve been neither.
The fact that even if our team is either organised or desperate this afternoon, it still might not be enough - that’s a sad indictment of a season none of us can wait to see the back of.
But before we can hit the beach, it’s once more unto the breach. One final push from the stands, one final attempt at signs of life from the pitch, one final chance to save this most miserable of seasons.
We will forget everything else and give our all in these 90 minutes to support Leicester City. Then, whatever happens, things need to change.
