Don’t panic: Leicester City on the eve of the Premier League
As the new Premier League season prepares for lift off, it’s time for a look at the state of play at your Leicester City Football Club. Could failing to score a goal in weeks turn out to be, in fact, a good thing?
It has been more than three months since Leicester City last played a competitive game. By the time the Foxes take to the field against Tottenham Hotspur on Monday night, it’ll have been an even longer break between games than when the season was suspended due to Covid in 2020.
In some ways, a lot has happened over these three months. All the stuff you know about: the manager, the best player, the ticket prices, the physical tickets, the crypto sponsor, making people pay to watch friendlies.
At the same time, it feels like nothing has happened. When you dive in and start to mentally prepare for the season, it’s remarkable how much is the same as it was when you checked out in May.
All those months ago, when Leicester hosted Blackburn at the King Power, the Kop gave Jamie Vardy a huge send-off, just in case. As the new season dawns, Jamie Vardy is still here. So too are Jannik Vestergaard and Wilfred Ndidi. So is Abdul Fatawu.
Remember Boubakary Soumare? He’s still here. Luke Thomas, Danny Ward, Daniel Iversen, still here. Until his injury in France on Saturday, Patson Daka was still the starting striker. Even Victor Kristiansen is back playing again.
All of which has made the build up to this campaign extremely odd. For promoted teams, this time of year is normally a time of hope, optimism, and excitement. It’s normally the prospect of something new, different, exciting.
How will our style of play suit the step up? Which players are going to make it? Look at all these thrilling new signings, bought by those big bags of money that arrived the other day!
For Leicester City, 2024 edition, none of that is true. We’ve seen most of these players play at this level before. The one man who would have been the headline act in every preview is gone. Even the endless arguments over Enzo Maresca’s tactics have been silenced.
Instead a kind of ambivalence settled over the club this summer. Not helped by the Premier League’s complete inability to decide how many points we should start with. The threat of Competitive Sanctions landing at any moment has certainly served to take the air out of the excitement balloon. Pre-season results have served to pummel it into a rubbery pulp.
Now we’re at the same point we arrived at two years ago, the club on the brink of a crisis before a ball has even been kicked in anger. Could Steve Cooper become only PL manager sacked in preseason? screamed one headline over the weekend.
Are things really that bad?
“Where Cooper had to choose between a continuation of Enzoball and an uncompromising Pragmaticoball, we seem to currently be wading through the sludge of a compromise between the two which doesn’t suit or impress anyone.”
Anyone glued to The Fosse Way over the weekend will have read these lines, summing up the slightly calamitous defeat to RC Lens in the final pre-season friendly of the summer.
There have been three notable things to come out of the pre-season campaign. One is, obviously, that the results have been terrible. That’s not really important beyond the damage it has done to the vibes. The second is that we’ve hardly scored any goals. We can possibly put that down to the (lack of) transfer situation.
Third, and more fundamental, is the tactical plan that Steve Cooper has gone with. The trips to Shrewsbury, Chesterfield, Bavaria, and northern France have made clear that he’s decided to change a lot less than we might have expected.
In his first interview as Leicester boss, Cooper made a point of saying he’d watched every game from last season. His actions in setting the team up back that up completely.
He has done what would be the correct thing to do in most normal situations and at most normal clubs. Particularly in a situation where the previous manager was successful. He’s gone in, watched a bunch of games, noticed that Leicester were basically good except that they didn’t commit enough people forward and they passed it backwards far too often.
As a result, he’s tweaked the tactics a little bit. Instead of the inverted full backs, we’ve got one committing forward and one staying back. We’ve seen Ricardo on the right with James Justin tucking in on the left, or Justin tucking in on the right and Kristiansen flying up the left. That means the winger on one side comes inside to overload the middle of the pitch, creating a lot of opportunities for quick passing patterns on the edge of the area (all of this is, of course, in theory).
Where we had two attacking number eights in the Championship, this fluidity means one can be pulled back in the Premier League so we have two defensive midfielders for greater protection. That and the distinct lack of the goalkeeper looming out of his goal into midfield are the two primary sacrifices to pragmatism that we’ve seen so far.
Otherwise, he’s more or less kept things the same. When Cooper took over a couple of months ago, he may have assumed that he was inheriting a pretty good situation, that he had a squad that’s perfect for possession-based, attacking football, and he didn’t need to change all that much.
You may have spotted the flaw in this cunning plan already. This is not a normal club in a normal situation. The more it fades into hindsight, the more last season looks like it was willed into existence by the sheer force of Maresca’s belief in his own idea, and the fact Leicester basically brought an atomic bomb to a knife fight.
As pre-season has progressed, and the opposition has toughened up, the more a tactical plan based on tweaking a successful system has looked completely at odds with reality.
Despite what last season might have suggested, Leicester don’t actually have very many players who are good in possession, the best defence in the Championship is one of the least convincing back lines in history, and all the names that looked outrageously good for the Championship have serious questions next to them at this level.
The fluid movement in attack, designed to flood the opposition with tricky wingers and midfielders, has generated zero goals in the last three games, trickling to its nadir at the weekend where it only managed to create one touch in the opposition box and two speculative long-range efforts.
The solid defence, packed with experience and boasting the one notable new signing, has conceded the full gamut of goals: from mistakes, from set pieces, and by being completely outplayed.
It is easy, in a binary world of instant reactions, to blame Cooper for this. He’s failed! His tactics are wrong! He’s a clown! Or to ink in Leicester for 20th spot and spend your time doing something else this year.
But it is worth reiterating that these games didn’t matter. That the entire point of friendlies, for a new manager more than most, is to test things. It is hard to imagine losing a lot as a good thing but, as any half decent LinkedIn influencer will tell you, failure can teach you a lot more than success. If the last few weeks mean that the tactical plan is completely different next week, they’ll have done their job.
The results and performances have been bad, but we have already seen a reaction to it. Cooper, you suspect, knows full well after Lens that this is not the way to go against Spurs.
In the early stages of pre-season, we saw some positive signs of how Leicester looked in transition and on the counter-attack. Mixing in more direct passing has caused the team to be wasteful at times, but it’s also proven a dangerous weapon to get the ball to the quicker, trickier players earlier than we’re used to. That sort of style seems far more likely to be the one we see on Monday.
Meanwhile, Rudkinbot has begun to crank into action, potential new signings are belatedly beginning to materialise. Just in the nick of time.
“With the greatest respect, we have not had the help in the market this team needed. To watch clubs in the top five leagues add players and we haven’t been able to do has been difficult. We needed help and I haven’t been able to get that.”
For all the tactical side of pre-season has been interesting, it’s hard to imagine any manager succeeding with the tools available to Steve Cooper right now. The evidence of the blanks his team has fired against Palermo, Augsburg, and Lens has only served to emphasise how dismally understocked Leicester are going forward.
There are perfectly legitimate questions about how things were allowed to get to this point. Going into the Championship season a year ago, Leicester had four legitimate striking options, in Jamie Vardy, Kelechi Iheanacho, Tom Cannon, and Daka. Stephy Mavididi, Fatawu, Yunus Akgun, Marc Albrighton, Kasey McAteer and, at a stretch, Wanya Marcal, competing for spots out wide. Yunus battling it out with Dewsbury-Hall, Dennis Praet, and Cesare Casadei for the attacking number eight roles.
Now, having gone up a level, and having known we were more or less promoted for about eight months, six of those players have disappeared, with only Bobby De Cordova Reid, Facundo Buonanotte, and Michael Golding coming in.
A depth chart on the Athletic this week literally listed one player for the left wing spot, and two for the central attacking midfield position: Golding, a man of zero senior appearances, and Buonanotte, who is still a teenager. Of the three striking options, two are currently injured and one is Cannon, who Cooper has shown absolutely no inclination to play at any stage this summer. The ‘CM’ spot is, rather amusingly, left blank.
There is no doubt that this squad is currently worse than the team that got promoted. Had Maresca turned down Chelsea’s advances, there has to be a decent chance he would have quit in protest by now. Cooper is being asked to fly a plane with half an engine and one of the wings strapped over the windscreen.
“We know where we are with the level of the team in certain areas, we’re desperate to strengthen. Even the players are crying out for some fresh blood”
Despite all that, it is also worth saying that the transfer window is a strange beast nowadays. After a flurry of activity as teams tried to juice the Profit and Sustainability Rules at the end of June, there have been a lot of rumours and not much hard action until the last few days. Liverpool, for example, haven’t signed or sold a single player yet this summer.
There are still three weeks until the deadline, and we’ve seen in recent years how the season doesn’t really start in earnest until after the September international break, when squads are finalised and settled.
From a Leicester perspective, the rumours have started flying since the final whistle blew in Lens. Some of the more genuine targets seem to include Wilfred Zaha, who would make you feel a lot better about the left hand side with him and Mavididi competing, and a physical centre forward of some description.
The Big Lad From Greece, Fotis Ioannidis, seems like a gamble on a player from a poor league, but Adam Hlozek would be a sensible signing: a young striker on loan with an obligation to buy is the right sort of deal for this moment in time. Both address the physicality Cooper’s system is clearly desperate for, and would allow him some freedom in how he sets the team up.
Add another midfielder into the mix and suddenly things look a lot rosier. The squad would look far more likely to compete at this level than it currently does. Everything anyone has ever said about Cooper is that he’s a good coach, but you have to hand him the tools to do the job properly to have any chance of success.
Again, if pre-season has forced Leicester’s hand in this respect, then this is a significant improvement on two years ago. There is a lot more room to manoeuvre this time, with fewer big name players on expiring contracts. There seems to be more of an understanding that they have to strengthen, even if it’s taken an outrageously long time to address the problems.
The question then becomes whether Cooper is a good enough manager to overcome the obstacles put in front of him, whether that ends up being a points deduction or merely the negativity that has engulfed the club over recent weeks and months.
Even that, though, may not be as bad as it currently appears. It’s difficult to gauge whether the atmosphere online over the summer, and the frustrations the fans feel at various aspects of the club’s nonsense, will actually be recreated in the stands.
For all that Cooper’s appointment was met with scepticism in some quarters (including, it must be said, here), he has spoken really well since his appointment. His interviews have all been positive, and he spoke well at the manager’s Q&A last week. His frustrations at the lack of signings have been delivered in a far more positive way than Brendan Rodgers revealed his a couple of summers ago.
If he can get the team playing like it cares, if his team can produce a few moments of magic, it’s easy to imagine the crowd getting behind this side. “No one believes in us” is motivational tactic 101 for a reason. After the way the last few weeks have gone, Leicester genuinely are going into this season with no expectations. Even the most optimistic fans are bracing themselves.
Hosting the first game of the season under the lights is a perfect opportunity to rally the troops and start to generate the siege mentality we need to survive. The King Power can occasionally be a powerful force, and remembering Craig Shakespeare may help unite a club in desperate need of unity in grief on Monday.
If the club can get a couple of signings over the line between now and then, facing Leicester at home on Monday night suddenly looks like a more difficult proposition, the sort of game that could spring an uncomfortable surprise.
For as annoying as shelling out £40 to watch your team fail to have a shot on target for three weeks is, imagine how different things might look then.
