Flashes of greatness and unfulfilled promise: James Maddison’s Leicester legacy
James Maddison’s Leicester career is over. As the Chosen One moves to Tottenham, James Knight wonders what to make of his legacy.
James Maddison was one of my favourite players from the moment he signed from Norwich, five years ago. He was one of the leaders of the second great Leicester side that emerged in the shadow of the title winners, one packed with youthful vigour, excitement, and swag.
For a long time he was underappreciated, by England and by the wider footballing world. Languishing behind bigger, more glamorous names like Jack Grealish, Phil Foden, and Mason Mount in the public imagination.
In that, he was symbolic of Leicester City as a whole, consistently outperforming bigger brands while being largely ignored by everyone who wasn’t paying attention.
Yet he leaves the club in its worse position for a decade. His relationship with some fans soured as the end neared. He was too arrogant, too flash, too… Coventry? He became the big name brand himself, his reputation overshadowing the rest of the team and clouding over his own responsibility for relegation.
This is the great contradiction of the Maddison era. The same mix of emotions that hang over Youri Tielemans’ exit hang over Maddison as well. In time, we will probably remember them as two of the best players to ever play for Leicester, yet perhaps too as symbols of a lingering sense of frustration, failure, and missed opportunity.
The good old days
It’s tempting, when a player leaves for better things, to focus on the negatives. That’s even more true when he’s part of a team that has just been relegated and all our most recent memories are bad ones. But Maddison never did Leicester dirty and doesn’t deserve to leave to chorus of quote tweets and dark muttering about how people from Coventry can’t be trusted.
He was an incredibly fun player to have in your team. Deprived of wingers capable of taking anyone on, Maddison has been the one player to get us out of your seat, capable of suddenly playing someone in, or simply banging a shot in the top corner out of nowhere.
Even in the dying embers of last season we saw it. The goal to put Leicester 2-1 up against Everton is a classic of the genre: Tielemans interception, two touches for Maddison to get it out of his feet and bang, Jamie Vardy’s in on the ‘keeper. The last glimpse of a dying era.
When I thought back over some of my favourite moments of Maddison in a Leicester shirt, it’s striking how early in his time here many of them were. A time when he was the figurehead of a young, exciting team that was going places. That Everton assist had echoes of the outside of the boot through-ball for Vardy at Sheffield United. One minute the opposition had the ball, the next we were burying it in their net. But that one was all the way back in August 2019, early in only his second season at the club.
The late strike from range to complete a come-from-behind win over Spurs at the King Power a month later was just his ninth for Leicester. The second in a 2-0 win over Arsenal six weeks after that was his 13th. He’s always been good at capturing the emotion of a moment, and both times his tearaway celebrations spoke to the excitement and possibility of that period in Leicester’s history.
The Arsenal game, one of the most electric nights at the KP in recent(ish) memory, came in the middle of a run of eight consecutive wins that took us to the top of the table. He made his England debut against Montenegro a few days after that.
If you had told any of us then that he wouldn’t play for England again for three and a half years, we’d have laughed in your face. But for long spells after that it was hard to argue that he really deserved a place in the side. That extraordinary gap speaks to the way it took a long time for him to mature from prodigy to a genuinely consistent performer.
Maddison ultimately ended up with 55 goals for Leicester, often scored in batches and most of them since Covid first hit, so a majority of them were scored in front of empty stadiums or, after crowds returned, in a team flailing around in a forlorn search for its mojo.
That’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult to pinpoint a canonical, truly iconic goal in a Leicester shirt that everyone will agree on. The most obvious recent candidate, the equaliser in Eindhoven, was promptly outdone by Ricardo’s winner a few minutes later.
Last season, he overtook Riyad Mahrez, the man he came to replace, on the club’s all-time scorers list. But the difference between Mahrez’s defining moment at the Etihad and Maddison’s great goal at the same venue, a long-range strike to put us 4-1 up late on to the roaring acclaim of fake crowd noise on Sky Sports, rather sums it up.
I'm going missing for a while
Then there are all the other parts of Maddison’s Leicester career that we haven’t touched on yet. To focus on the positives alone reeks too much of Rodgers to countenance here. For all the flashes of greatness, it’s hard to deny that Maddison had a habit of going missing when you need him around and, like that goal at the Etihad, his best moments often came with the pressure off.
In the first top four challenge, in 2019/20, he scored eight goals before Christmas. His only goal after that came on New Year’s Day. The following year, he scored nine times by January 24th and twice afterwards as his team blew the Champions League again.
Some of the problem has been injuries. A chronic hip problem, a knee problem, issues that would suddenly flare up and mean he’d vanish from the line-up with no warning. In 2021, he was part of a massive injury crisis that deprived us of virtually every attacking player at the club. When he returned, his first act was to break Covid protocols with Ayoze Perez and miss a defining game against West Ham, which we promptly lost.
The more you reflect on his Leicester career, the more this sort of thing crops up. His goal in the 4-1 win over Spurs this February was his ninth of the season. He scored only once more as the wheels came off, an 81st minute penalty against Fulham when we were already 5-1 down. The week after he’d missed from the spot with the chance to give Leicester a two-goal cushion against Everton, who stayed up by two points at our expense.
That’s without even mentioning the tweet, or his pin-point through ball for Phillip Billing to score Bournemouth’s winner at the King Power. Or the fact that for the penultimate game of the season at St James’ Park, with Leicester’s Premier League status hanging by a thread, he was left on the bench, and no one was that shocked or disappointed.
A riddle wrapped in an enigma
Rodgers always used to describe Tielemans as his ‘coach on the pitch’, but Maddison is the one who best channelled the spirit of the leader. The second half of the season is when the great teams and players separate themselves, that’s when titles are won. Both Maddison and Rodgers would only kill you in the first half.
The highlight of his Leicester career was, undoubtedly, the FA Cup win. It’s a triumph he immortalised with a tattoo of himself with the trophy. Yet far from putting the doubts to rest, it’s the perfect encapsulation of his legacy because, of course, he didn’t start the final. He was on the bench for the semi-final as well, and entirely absent for the quarters. His only start of the entire run came in the fourth round.
I don’t doubt that his joy over that victory was genuine, but it all plays into the feeling that he was never quite there when it mattered. When Leicester needed someone to salvage the top four bid or go out there and win us a trophy, it was Kelechi Iheanacho and Tielemans who stepped up. This season, despite all his excellence in the early stretches, it was Iheanacho who (allegedly) won Player of the Season and - revealingly? - Timothy Castagne who won the Players’ Player award.
Despite that, he deserved better than what the team and the club gave to support him this season. It’s possible to interpret the last 12 months as the point at which the penny dropped and he drove himself to another level. He forced his way back into the England reckoning by giving Gareth Southgate no choice, and had a leadership role thrust on him at club level as more senior figures went AWOL.
His performances kept Leicester above water until after the World Cup, and once Rodgers left he became virtually the sole public voice at the club. With Jonny Evans missing, Dean Smith playing dumb, and Tielemans busy choreographing his Insta-friendly farewell video, Maddison was left to answer for the team’s problems alone.
A lot of the stick thrown in his direction over the years has been because he’s been a visible presence. A couple of years ago it was because he turned up to training with objectively horrendous backpacks in tow and signed deals to be the face of boohoo, in more recent times it’s been because he was the only player willing to go in front of the cameras and answer questions.
When I look back on Maddison at Leicester, it’ll be those thrilling early years that I remember most, the feeling of having a team that was capable of doing anything. Similarly, the run to the World Cup, when he was dragging a sorry team out of the mire on his own and striving to get to Qatar. The fleeting moments where he would link up with Iheanacho or Tielemans or play in Vardy and deliver flashes of quality as good as anything I’ve seen following Leicester.
But I will always feel like we got slightly less out of him than we could have done. I’ll remember how frustrating it was to suddenly see a team sheet without him on it for a crucial game, how when the second Champions League challenge was slipping away we were having to play Sidnei Tavares where Maddison should have been. And how when he had the chances to give himself a moment and save us from the drop as his final act, he blew them all.
With all that in mind, it’s hard to believe we ever thought he’d ever end up anywhere other than Spurs.
