“It’s just like watching Leicester”: Balancing success and style for club and country
Watching England labour through the first half of a goalless draw with Slovenia on Tuesday evening, something struck me. It was a thought, not a plastic cup launched from the stands. This was just like watching Leicester.
Within minutes, I’d received WhatsApp messages from three different people saying the same thing.
For me, it wasn’t just last season’s Leicester but the Leicester of the past few years. Possession Leicester. Slow Leicester. The kind of Leicester that has - win or lose - made more and more people question whether the entertainment value matches the increasing prices.
Over the years I’d summarise the evolution of our playing style as possession with pace and purpose in the early Rodgers years to a slower, more laborious approach gradually shedding the pace and purpose as he started to give up.
Latter-era Rodgers is probably closest to what England have served up since half time in the first group game - passing and passing and passing and hoping someone brilliant does something brilliant. For James Maddison and Harvey Barnes for Leicester, read Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham for England. Very few patterns of play that look rehearsed or orchestrated in any way.
Then, after the brief Dean Smith interlude, we had Enzoball - possession with a clear purpose but largely devoid of pace. And even when we were treated to quicker approach play or (whisper it) counter attacks, Enzo Maresca was reluctant to give any praise in post-match interviews to the kind of football our fans were still in the stands applauding.
I tried to crystallise these thoughts into what I will still label a tweet:
“There will be Leicester and England fans out there who have spent the entire last 10 months bored and booing their own teams have both finished top of the table”
I was careful in my wording, attempting to convey an observation rather than a personal opinion. “There will be”… “out there”… “their” - this wasn’t me, but it was impossible to ignore.
It’s part of a wider narrative too - the idea that Pep Guardiola has single-handedly made football boring. The idea that “xG nerds” have taken over and that players like Hungary’s robust centre-forward Martin Adam are throwbacks to better days.
While the current Ronaldo is busy dodging falling human debris as he walks down the tunnel, the greatest Ronaldo ever to have played the game says he doesn’t even watch the game any more.
Is football as exciting as ever? Is there just too much of it? Are we getting old?
Guardiola cops most of the flak for a perceived dearth of excitement and maybe there’s been the same decline in entertainment value in Guardiola teams that has happened at Leicester over the past five years.
His treble-winning Barcelona side of 2008/09 are still the best team I’ve ever seen - measured in both success and style. His treble-winning Manchester City side of 2022/23 barely registered for either success or style. The final few weeks of the past two Premier League seasons have felt like a machine-like grind to an inevitable end result.
Of course, our own Premier League success had an element of that too, the 1-0 wins at the back end of the campaign a necessary evil to get over the line.
But the first eleven weeks of that season had been remarkable to watch. We averaged 2.09 goals per game in those 11 games before the switch to Danny Simpson and Christian Fuchs in the full-back positions. The average after that point was 1.67. We sacrificed some of the style to gain the ultimate success.
This weekend offers an opportunity for England to alter the growing narrative around Gareth Southgate and his team, just as this summer will bring change for Leicester City. The closest parallel of all is that boring football is only acceptable to the masses if it gets results.
As Southgate will be forgiven if he one-nils his way to “it” coming home, Steve Cooper will be a hero if Leicester stay up, whatever the football’s like. But as this group of slow death at the Euros and Leicester’s poor run in spring have proven, fans paying huge prices to be bored without winning will turn in a matter of games.
Leicester’s one-season holiday in the Championship/start of another yo-yo phase (delete where applicable) can certainly be compared to a nation like England competing at a major tournament.
Admittedly, the move to a 24-team tournament brings to mind a Championship season where the champions are fine and all the other big clubs are consigned to more years of hurt (maybe it’s the white shirts). But there’s still the same big-fish-in-a-small-pond mindset, where the default mentality for the majority is a comfortable 3-0 win.
Next season will be the first for a while when Leicester fans haven’t gone into it expecting to win home games against all but the elite. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in the stands. By then, “it’s just like watching England” will either remain an insult - or be magically transformed into the greatest compliment imaginable.
