“What’s the point?”: Boarding the latest emotional rollercoaster for Leicester City fans
Amid the outpouring of reaction from Leicester City supporters to recent news about the club’s finances, three words have stood out time and time again.
“What’s the point?”
These words have been used in different contexts.
“What’s the point in trying to compete with the big six when everything is rigged in their favour?”
“What’s the point in being ambitious if we’re going to be punished for it?”
“What’s the point in being promoted if we’re just going to come straight back down?”
These should be worrying words for people in authority, both at football clubs and at football leagues. When your product trades on emotion, malaise can be damaging - something we saw last season when it set in early and the club drifted to relegation.
The final table*
More fundamentally, we’re not actually sure what the point of these final nine games is yet. Most of us know, despite those questioning the point of being promoted, that the easiest way out of this mess is to get back to the riches of the Premier League and re-stabilise the finances.
But with reports that both the Premier League and the EFL are pushing, remarkably given the timescales involved, for a points deduction to apply this season, there’s still a small chance these final games won’t mean what we think they mean.
And that’s been the basis of the current sense of unease spreading throughout the fanbase. Even when, for example, star players might be leaving, promotion or relegation is in the balance or the future of a club’s ownership is up in the air, you can rely as a football fan on Saturday at 3pm (well, you can’t rely on that any more either, but you get the drift).
This season’s Premier League is already going to produce a completely artificial league table, with results on the pitch not corresponding to points accumulated throughout the division. Points deductions and reinstatements on appeal give the impression of a table decided off the pitch.
In fact, it looks like the authorities might be saved by a relatively poor set of newly-promoted teams because if Everton or Nottingham Forest stayed up or went down based on these deductions and reinstatements, it would really be a farce. It’s already a farce, a league table with more asterisks than a Nigel Pearson press conference. Just ask Andros Townsend.
The idea that you could survive a couple of late onslaughts from relentless crosses into the box at “difficult places to go” or throw a lead away in the final minutes and those two points are equal to someone somewhere writing the word “mitigation” is ludicrous, given the past decade or so might be thrown out of the window anyway because of a team of light blue Lance Armstrongs.
First past the post
As a Leicester City fan, you have to learn to expect the unexpected, to prepare for the unpreparable for. Of course in our attempts to tick off the most footballing firsts in the space of a decade - first top flight title win, first FA Cup win, first club to think Danny Ward was a suitable first-choice Premier League goalkeeper - we should have guessed we’d be heading for the first points deduction in the club’s history before we were marking ten years since the miracle of 2016.
This is what it means to be a Leicester fan, constantly juggling new emotions and situations. Last autumn, when we were cruising to unremarkable 2-0 victories against random teams with an entirely unemotional, machine-like ruthlessness… that feels like a long time ago now.
The strange thing is that, with some blaming the club, some the Premier League or EFL and others feeling completely disengaged from it all, there’s no big, cohesive emotional response in the offing.
There should be, because this is the emotional part of the season. This is what it’s all meant to be about. And it’s fair to say most of us have little idea what to feel.
It’s worth fighting through the barrage of adverts on the Leicester Mercury website to read Jordan Blackwell’s excellent article on the club’s failed attempt to create a siege mentality with its response to the approaching threat from the authorities.
Back to the library
This failure is the pay-off for years of disconnect between a club and its supporter base, but it also gives those in charge an easy ride. There are pockets of real anger but there won’t be any mass protests.
Again, this feels like something of a first - the unprecedented success followed by a rapid fall, the continued presence of people who have overseen this decline, the expectations and entitlement to return to fight for European football while actually sitting in front of Stoke at home - it all adds up to a club that won’t see the kind of protests that boost the atmosphere at Goodison Park or elsewhere.
The clues have been there all along that this is not a football club ripe to produce a rousing atmosphere to see our boys through these final few home games - mainly an average of five minutes into each home game when the away end rolls out its first reference to a library. Perhaps this assumption will be proven wrong and a 12.30 kickoff at home to Norwich on Easter Monday will provide a Galatasaray-like atmosphere, but it’s hard to envisage.
We can only retreat to how good the next goal, the next win, will feel. Victory on Friday would feel fantastic, better than anything else so far this season, given what we’ve been through since we last watched our team play.
But we have no idea yet how each goal, each win actually relates to this gruelling 46-game season, for next season whichever league we’re in, for the club’s long-term prospects at any level.
On the pitch, we’re fighting for points. Off it, we’re still wondering what those points will count for.
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