Break’s over: Scale of the task at Leicester City means the time for urgency is now
With Leicester’s pre-season campaign just a few weeks away, James Knight is perturbed by the lack of action on Filbert Way since relegation was confirmed.
On Monday, Leicester announced their first domestic friendly of the season: a trip to the Sixfields stadium to play Northampton Town. That match takes place on July 15th, and it’s likely to be the final game on these shores before the Championship season starts in the first week of August. The Foxes take off for our immortal tour of Asia a few days later.
The week before our relegation, Jack Holmes wrote a piece on these hallowed pages outlining the size of the task facing the Leicester boardroom in the event of relegation.
“The season starts again in 75 days (at the time of writing). In that time we have to find a new manager, replace at least 8 players, and balance the books with sales of anyone of any value, with the added challenge of another 7 players out of contract next year.”
21 days have passed since then, and the only tangible sign of progress on Operation Rebuild is the suspicious burning smell coming out of Jon Rudkin’s office and the sudden disappearance of a top-secret document labelled “internal inquiry”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a team whose players took a good ten days to realise we’d been relegated and draft an official Instagram release to announce the fact, we have achieved literally none of the things on Jack’s list.
That game at Sixfields is a month away. The players are likely to report back to training a fortnight before that and there will surely be at least two more friendlies announced for early July. It feels like we should have had more by now.
The urgency many of us feel, and have felt for months, has been completely lacking in the corridors of power. The sedate pace of the managerial search seems out of whack with the fact that we need someone to put out the cones at Seagrave in a little over two weeks’ time, while the complete overhaul of the playing squad has got as far as trying to give Jonny Evans a new contract.
Transfer troubles
Some of our impatience might be unjustified, merely a sign of an age of diminishing attention spans where we all live with half an eye on Twitter, rather than a club gripped by paralysis. Neither of the other two relegated teams have appointed a manager or made any significant transfer moves yet, while only a couple of Championship clubs have signed more than a single player.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Southampton have plucked Russell Martin from Swansea and are only holding off on an announcement until the start of the new league year this week because of a weird bit of financial grappling about whether they’re in the Premier League or not. Leeds have spent the last couple of weeks being sold to an NFL team, so were obviously unlikely to appoint a new manager first.
For Leicester, meanwhile, the only logical reason for a decision to take this long would have been if they were waiting for the Champions League final in order to appoint Enzo Maresca. But that link has cooled in the past week. Instead, we seem to be interviewing managers who are unemployed and could start immediately – Dean Smith, Scott Parker, Steven Gerrard, possibly Carl Hoefkens – and still no appointment has emerged.
The manager is the bottleneck that’s preventing anything else from happening. While there are signs of movement in terms of outgoings, with Timothy Castagne linked to Arsenal, Harvey Barnes to a variety of Premier League also-rans, and James Maddison to petro-states, the incomings are far more important.
We know many players are going to leave, so the club can more or less budget for their departure. Our Head of Recruitment is at work this summer, rather than on holiday. We could get to work on the rebuild right away. Except Rob Tanner reported at the end of last week that “the manager has always had the final say on signings and that won’t change”. If that is the case – and it might not be, as the inner workings of Leicester City FC are a mysterious beast – then we’re stuck in limbo until the manager arrives.
Time to make a statement
The next week is pivotal in setting up the new era on Filbert Way. There are now 54 days until the Championship season starts. We’ve got no changes at the top, no new manager, and little more than some links to Tom Cairney and a chair as far as the transfer rumour mill goes.
In stark contrast to the playing squad, one of our biggest problems over the past couple of years has been the feeling that there simply aren’t enough people to operate a top-level football club. While we have solved that issue in part with a left-field approach of diving headfirst straight off the mountain, it still feels like we’re operating with a skeleton staff given the amount of work to do.
Then there’s the fact that the issue goes beyond a simple problem of task scheduling. Yes, we probably need to sign a couple of players a week to have a team ready for opening day. Yes, we also need someone to desperately flog second-hand squad members to Saudi Arabia. Yes, we need someone to pick the team and stuff. But it’s also about a statement of intent and wiping the slate clean on the last two years.
We can’t move on until the shoe drops. We’ve been waiting for this for 18 months, and even a relegation hasn’t done much to spur the suits into action. The deadline for season-ticket renewals is on Wednesday, and the list of things to inspire the masses into signing up for another year seems to start and end with the return of Marc Albrighton.
Now the internal inquiry has gone the way of last summer’s Great Reset, we’ve been deprived of the blood-letting that would have helped us to move on. As the delay to the next chapter drags into another week, the club has given up the chance to restore faith with the sort of decisive action that was once a feature of the King Power project.
Results this season are the be-all and end-all, and this will be an afterthought if the new manager leads us back to the big time. But with every day that passes we’re falling further behind in the race to be ready for kick-off.
It’s time to get to work.
