Leicester City’s leading lights are leaving - but we’re the ones laughing
We are a good way into the great Leicester City exodus of summer 2023 now and Jamie Barnard can’t help but find it funny.
Brendan Rodgers sinks back into the familiar, soft leather of his office chair. It’s looking tired now. In the small of his back there’s a crinkle on the leather. He’s conflicted; part of him believes it gives the chair character, another part of him is irked by the imperfection that seems so at odds with high performance culture.
There’s a slight lean. A tilt. And the chair squeaks and squawks as his Gucci belt rubs against the leather while he manipulates the chair to bring it down to a height at which his feet can finally rest flat against the floor, rather than suspended in mid-air.
He’d been on the verge of requesting a new chair just before he’d left Celtic Football Club in a hurry all those years ago. He will do so now. But until then, if you can’t win a new chair, at least make sure you don’t lose the current one. It’ll do.
The chair is not his biggest concern or his most important task. There’s a medical department to see to, a recruitment department to re-vamp and a narrative to be written as to why he finds himself back in the same position he was four and a half years ago.
And then the thought strikes him: how on earth did it come to this?
Meanwhile in the Midlands…
Youri Tielemans punches the postcode of Aston Villa’s Bodymoor Heath Training Ground into the sat-nav of his car. He exhales exasperatedly as ‘B78’ registers as ‘B77’ and puffs his cheeks. It’s always like this. Each time he tries to tap a new destination into the screen of this highly expensive car, his stubby little fingers always seem to land on the wrong square.
At the second attempt he has it right. Just a 47-minute drive. “Not too bad,” he thinks to himself. If he puts his foot down he might be able to get there in under 45 minutes. But then again, why rush? Take it easy. Don’t exert yourself, Youri. Find a comfortable middle gear. Coast.
He has phone calls to make. He’s given notice to the private security firm he uses to protect his house when he is away on match duty. To be honest, he hadn’t expected to remain living in the Midlands area, but we are where we are. And he doesn’t know if they still have availability on Thursday nights. He hadn’t expected to need to ask about that day of the week.
A quick call with his agent and that one should be taken care of. He tries not to feel bitter, but can’t shake the petulant thought that it’s about time his agent earned his money. Monaco to Leicester and now this. “Trust me,” he’d been told.
But he still signs off the call with a “fond farewell’. He’s been practising the pronunciation after being mocked for pronouncing it ‘far-well’ in the video his PR agency had knocked up for him in June 2022 but which only went live a couple of weeks ago. How was he to know? He had simply read the script when asked to.
And then the thought strikes him: how on earth did it come to this?
Conflicting emotions
As a football supporter, one of the hardest parts of seeing your team relegated is the powerless sense of being left with the mess. Hoping that your club land on the right people to clear that mess up - without having any ability to do it yourself - whilst those who trashed the joint sail off into the sunset for their next highly-paid adventure.
The idiom of rats fleeing a sinking ship can often feel apt. But the rats were never in charge of keeping the ship afloat. The rats were never at the steering wheel. And the rats could never have been expected to stick a penalty past Jordan Pickford, in a crucial must-win home game, in the midst of a relegation battle most informed football minds had never expected to occur...
There have, in the past few weeks alone, been a number of conflicting emotions for me.
On the one hand, it’s great to see Brendan Rodgers, the chief architect of our downfall in my opinion, with an ego that likely told him there’d be no stench of Leicester’s relegation attached to him, come nowhere near the Tottenham Hotspur job and end up back in the backwaters of Scottish football. On the other, I hate that he’ll be picking up a decent pay packet so soon after leaving his vastly over-inflated Leicester wage.
There will be European nights where Brendan will live out his fantasy of being an elite football manager. But the trips to Ross County, Kilmarnock and Dundee in between will soon remind him exactly where he is. As we have to endure trips to Plymouth, Rotherham and Hull and inevitably think “surely we shouldn’t be here”, Rodgers will not be free of a similar torment.
Root of the problem
Youri Tielemans, on his day, is one of the finest players to wear the Leicester City shirt. So good on loan that it felt like a massive coup when we managed to get him permanently. A watershed moment that Leicester City were signing a player that had been touted as one of the best young midfielders in Europe. We were having a glow up!
As we sat on our sofas week after week, watching Leicester City play in empty Covid stadiums and more often than not leave with the three points, Tielemans was sublime. If you looked at the pass before the assist (often the one that opened up the space) it was often from Youri’s boot. Rodgers labelled him his ‘coach on the pitch’.
He defied all logic by playing seemingly every game, no matter what the opponent or competition, whilst avoiding the long-term injuries that became our trademark. And he could do things that made you marvel - a no-look pass through to Iheanacho at Brighton and, of course, a 30-yarder at Wembley that gave birth to a beer named ‘Youri’s Thunderbastard’ and granted him Leicester City legend status.
He was undoubtedly, at that moment in time, Champions League quality. Sigh. Oh, Youri, where did it all go so wrong?!
I’m back to being conflicted again. I don’t want to wish him ill fortune. I regret how it ended for him. But I can’t shake the sense that him refusing to sign a new contract, and potentially not being final with the club on that decision early enough, contributed massively to a malaise that has culminated in where we find ourselves now. That as one of the leaders of the group, he set the standard that it was fine to not want to commit fully to Leicester City.
At full-time at Craven Cottage, as he stomped off the pitch and down the tunnel quicker than anyone else in the entire squad despite being captain, it felt like he had checked out. And that, for me, was unforgivable. To see him sign for Aston Villa, a club playing at a lower level than we were at when he refused to commit - and surely paying similar, if not less, than we’d have been paying when we were trying to secure Champions League football - saddens me. But it also amuses me. It shocks me. Sadistically, it pleases me to an extent.
Getting away with it
If there’s a crumb of comfort to be taken from the last three weeks, it’s that there doesn’t appear to be too many ‘getting away with it’. Early signs suggest that clubs are looking at Leicester’s relegation and seeing deficiencies in character or ability from those who were central to the underachievement.
James Maddison, who could feasibly have got a Liverpool or Manchester City move had he continued on the trajectory he was once on, is now linked with Newcastle United or Tottenham Hotspur.
Harvey Barnes, who actually delivered a decent season on paper, could potentially need to force a grin from those big pearly whites as he holds up a West Ham United shirt next to David Moyes.
And someone will end up in Saudi Arabia playing a standard of football akin to Soccer Aid.
While some of the players have come out in dribs and drabs with social media apologies, we are yet to see a single one nail his colours to the mast. Who’s going to stand up and say: “I’m here to put right the wrong that saw this club, that has paid us handsomely and given us a training facility we could only dream of, relegated”?
Even Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, who played the “been here since seven years old” and local lad cards at any opportunity he could for the past two years, couldn’t quite bring himself to say he was here to stay when posting his own apology.
Early signs are that they might be wise to. Because if a carefully cultivated ‘Brand Brendan’ is only worth as much as a return to Celtic - and if Youri Tielemans on a free transfer can only land at Aston Villa - they could do worse than to get onboard with the Maresca revolution.
And that - for those of us who have, in recent weeks, felt those conflicting feelings towards those who gave with one hand but took away with another - to borrow a phrase, is the beauty of it.
How on earth did it come to this?
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