It’s time for changes at the top at Leicester City
Last week saw the men’s team approach financial collapse and the women’s team engulfed in scandal once again. It’s a sign that nothing has changed at Leicester, even after the shock of relegation last summer.
The great hope among Leicester fans after our relegation in May was that a dramatic fall from grace would shock the club into life. Maybe, the theory went, getting relegated would be a net positive, allowing us to clear out the people whose decision-making had resulted in that relegation, reset the playing squad, and forge a new path back to the big time.
This hope was almost entirely based on wishful thinking. At no point did anyone at the club communicate a new vision, suggest they had learned anything from what happened, or explain how and why Leicester had ended up both with a) a squad that cost more than any other non-big six team in the Premier League and b) in the Championship.
In fact, at no point did anyone at the club communicate at all, beyond a ghost-written statement from the chairman promising to “reflect on the processes and decisions that have brought us to this point”. This vague promise, famously, translated into zero changes at senior leadership level.
In recent days the extent of the rot at the core of the club has been laid bare for all to see. Leicester are staring at a significant points deduction, whatever league we happen to be in next season, a desperate firesale of talent in the summer, and have suspended the manager of their women’s team pending an investigation into a relationship with one of his players.
Throughout all this the club has issued two statements. One to claim victory over the Football League over an irrelevant technicality, and another to the Guardian pretending that Willie Kirk is “assisting the club in an internal matter”, as if he’s a research assistant loyally helping his boss use Google, rather than the literal manager of the first team under investigation for gross misconduct.
This attempt to stick their, and everyone else’s, heads in the sand is an embarrassment, that speaks to a lack of accountability and a culture of incompetence that runs through the heart of the club.
Trust issues
It has always been difficult to judge who is actually in charge at Leicester. While Top is the nominal leader, he is obviously absent from day-to-day operations. Underneath him, there is a management team whose job titles sound like a scene from the Life of Brian. After the CEO, we have a “Director of Football”, a “Football Operations Director”, and an “Operations Director”.
None of us have any idea who is making decisions. Who is responsible for the culture of the club, who is making financial decisions, who is communicating to the manager and to the owner. What we do know is that the club has got itself into a terrible state over the past couple of years, and their mistakes over a long period of time are now being exposed in the cold light of day.
It’s time for every single one of those people to go. It is clear now that they have presided over an abject failure that has seen Leicester go from a position of supreme strength as a team on the brink of the Champions League, to a Championship club in the midst of financial disaster.
Top’s statement at the end of last season was essentially asking the fans to trust him. To trust that he understood that there had been mistakes and that he would work to solve them. To trust that a successful ownership group can occasionally falter, but he would act quickly to right the ship.
It is clear now that this was all talk. Nothing changed in the summer, and in fact things have got worse.
There have been hints at rank incompetence, perhaps worse, at the heart of the club for a while. It was only a few months ago that we were fined by the Competition & Markets Authority for colluding with JD Sports to fix the price of our kit. We also signed up a shady betting sponsor who used paid actors to pretend to be directors of the company.
We have had a player fined for a serious drink driving offence who was then handed the captain’s armband a few days later. The club has, implausibly, now got two of its last three managers of the Women’s team accused of having a relationship with one of the players.
These are not the actions of a club with a healthy culture, or of one with competent people at the top. These are signs of a serious problem, where a lack of oversight and accountability means the club is being run by people who are, at best, out of their depth.
Not learning lessons
That’s before we even get to the footballing side. The club is currently staring down the barrel of a points deduction because of a complete failure to manage its finances. A situation it has seemingly kept from successive managers, who are then forced out in front of the press to answer questions about issues they have no control over because everyone above them is too cowardly to do it themselves.
Brendan Rodgers, for all his self-serving talk, was obviously blindsided by sudden financial restrictions imposed on him when he was ready to refresh the squad. The club then did the exact same thing to Enzo Maresca this season.
Those financial restrictions were the direct result of poor decision-making over a period of years, spending beyond our means, offering massive contracts to players who didn’t deserve them, or signing people who the manager refused to play.
Yet again Leicester’s actions betray the fact that we’ve learned nothing from these mistakes. We have favoured empty words over actions, and the chickens are coming home to roost. When Top initially put the brakes on spending last summer, he said he was making “difficult short-term decisions that protect the club's long-term interests”.
A few months later, Rodgers was permitted to spend £30m on players, before being sacked at presumably huge cost soon afterwards. Only one of those new signings is at the club even now, a year later, and he doesn’t get anywhere near the team. The club then committed to big financial outlays in the summer, on Harry Winks, Conor Coady, and obligations to buy Yunus Akgun and Abdul Fatawu, before slamming the brakes back on in January.
There is no coherence to our decision-making, other than the fact that they are repeatedly bad ones. The same people who made all these mistakes are still in charge, and still failing to take any public responsibility for the state we find ourselves in.
Time for answers
There’s only so long you can blame a King’s courtiers for a country’s problems. Leadership comes from the top, pun intended, and we have less and less cause to trust that our main man has any handle on things.
There is no reason to have any faith that the current management has a plan to solve the mess we find ourselves in. They have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of rising to the challenge. In recent days, they have busied themselves with issuing statements in legalese to try to mask the problems they have allowed to fester, rather than address them head on.
They have made no effort to start an honest dialogue with the fans, explaining what our problems actually are and how they hope to fix them. They have hung the manager, perhaps the only person at the club who makes you believe in anything, out to dry, and surely jeopardised our chances of keeping him beyond this season.
It is time the club showed some accountability. Not only does there need to be a complete clear out of senior management, we need answers about the true scale of the financial problems and what the future holds. We need to understand how the club allowed a culture to fester where multiple managers were (allegedly) able to exploit their position of power to start a relationship with the players in their team.
More than anything, we need a complete cultural reset. We need new leadership and a new vision for what the future holds for Leicester City, one that unites us and gives us something to believe in. Right now all we have is unanswered questions and a lingering sense of doom.
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