What is Leicester City’s transfer strategy?
Leicester City’s transfer window has again been one filled with frustration and near-misses, with the club scrambling around for enough change for a striker as the last orders bell chimes. Is there a plan? And if there is, what does it look like?
When Jordan Ayew, Leicester City’s latest summer signing, came on for his debut at Craven Cottage, the away end burst into chants of “We want Rudkin Out”.
To say Ayew’s signing has been met with scepticism in some quarters would be an understatement. To say Leicester’s summer transfer business has been a frustration would be similarly so. To say the jury remains out on Jon Rudkin as Director of Football would be stretching the concept of the word ‘understatement’ to breaking point.
The Leicester fanbase doesn’t agree on much at the moment, but it does agree that the squad needs reinforcements. The away end on Saturday reflects an increasing frustration as August has drifted on, a feeling that the club has had so long to improve the squad and has found itself flailing around desperately in the final few hours of the window to try to strengthen the team.
Steve Cooper has been open about his desire for new signings. It has been widely reported that he wants at least two more players in attacking positions before the window slams shut on Friday evening. Even the players themselves seem to be eager for reinforcements, with recent reports suggesting Wout Faes is ‘surprised’ by the lack of transfer activity this summer and considering his position as a result.
Perhaps some of this is unfair. In many ways, if you exclude the managerial change, Leicester look like a classic promoted team from a previous era, where you keep the core of the side together and try to stay up on a limited budget. Of course, this approach now feels outdated, in an era when promoted sides go out and buy an entirely new squad to celebrate their achievement.
Even in 2024, though, Leicester aren’t that much of an outlier in the Premier League. It’s easy to focus completely on your own club but when you zoom out, this whole summer has been a strange one at the top level. There have simultaneously been so many signings and not enough, with a handful of clubs signing an enormous number of players without improving their first team while others scramble around for scraps, bound by the limitations of the financial rules.
In the PSR era, some teams have become fixated on trying to game those rules, stockpiling players, exchanging youth team products in peculiar swap deals and trying to insert buy obligation clauses into every loan deal to ensure that all-important accounting profit for next year’s books.
The end result is that you have some teams, of which Leicester are one, who don’t seem to have done enough business. Crystal Palace, for example, have only signed two players for money and lost half their first team. Wolves are similar. Liverpool have signed one player, and loaned him straight back out again.
Newcastle, who are either badly constrained by PSR or don’t understand it, have signed a left back they already had on loan from Chelsea, Sheffield United’s reserve striker, and somehow managed to spend £20m on Odysseas Vlachodimos, currently their fifth choice goalkeeper, from Notts Forest as part of the deal to send an actual good youth prospect, Elliott Anderson, to the City Ground. Oh, and they also sold one of their other youth prospects, Yankuba Minteh, directly into Brighton’s first team.
Then there are others who have surely done far too much, or tried to be too clever: Southampton, for example, have signed 15 players. Ipswich 11 and counting. Aston Villa, another prime PSR culprit, have signed eight - including Cameron Archer who they bought and then sold this summer - and might have a worse team than a year ago at the end of it all.
Leicester have made six permanent signings and one more loan so far, and it looks like another arrival is imminent. This is not necessarily bad, but some of the criticism has been about the types of players they’ve signed. Both from a positional standpoint and the age profile of the ones they’ve brought in.
One clear trend over the last year or so is that there is a clear premium on young players across the Premier League. Once you start to look through the business done elsewhere, the most jarring thing is how virtually no clubs are signing players over the age of 30.
There have only been 13 permanent signings of players aged 30 or above so far. Four of them are goalkeepers, and a couple more - Adam Lallana to Southampton, Ilkay Gundogan to Manchester City - are outlier deals that have unique emotional value. Only five of these transfers have included an actual fee.
There has been a lot of talk over the summer that Steve Cooper wants players with “Premier League experience” to improve the Leicester squad. In some quarters this has been interpreted as '“bring me old players”, or at least dull, experienced professionals who can do a job.
Ayew is, of course, one of that tiny percentage of signings where the buying club paid money for a player over the age of 30. Together with Bobby De Cordova Reid, it means that out of nine 30+ outfield players signed across the entire league this summer, Leicester are responsible for two of them.
If this is Leicester’s transfer strategy, then it would be quite at odds with what the rest of the league is doing. But is it a fair characterisation of the plan this summer? In lieu of any kind of direction from the club itself, can we work out what Leicester are trying to do, and what sort of squad they’re trying to build?
Perhaps predictably, for a club with about five competing centres of power among the backroom staff and board room, we can see a few different strategies at play.
One approach is what we might call the Cooper Plan. This one is about bringing in players with Premier League experience who can play straight away and targeting players with energy, technical ability, and a high work-rate. It’s about keeping your best players at all costs, giving the manager the best chance to succeed right now.
This is the plan that saw Leicester linked with Wilfred Zaha, Tammy Abraham, and Steven Bergwijn. It’s the one that ultimately signed Ayew and Reid, and handed out new contracts to Jamie Vardy, Jannik Vestergaard, and Wilfred Ndidi. The first four of those will be steep into their 30s by the time their contracts expire, Ndidi will have crossed the 30 threshold as well.
It’s not a great plan for a club where the focus has to be on long term sustainability, but used wisely and together with developing young players this can work.
The second plan, which we’ll call the Glover Plan, after the Head of Recruitment who you may or may not have forgotten existed, is about buying up young talent for the future. This is the basic Brighton plan that virtually every club in the Premier League is trying to follow now: sign young players, develop them, flip them for profit, repeat.
This is the plan that brought in Abdul Fatawu (20), Caleb Okoli (23), Michael Golding (18), and soon Bilal El Khannouss (20), and is pretty clearly evident in some of the other serious links we’ve heard this summer: Fotis Ioannidis (24), Adam Hlozek (22), Matias Soule (21), David Datro Fofana (21), Armando Broja (22).
It’s also evident in the business Leicester have done since Glover arrived, after his extended gardening leave, in September 2022. There has been a clear shift towards signing younger players on long term deals. Combined with new long term contracts for players like Kasey McAteer and Will Alves this summer, you can see a core of players locked up long term to protect their value. Here is a list of players contracted to the club until at least 2028:
Stephy Mavididi
Mads Hermansen
Victor Kristiansen
Kasey McAteer
Tom Cannon
Michael Golding
Will Alves
Bilal El Khannouss (assuming he doesn’t get lost on his way to Seagrave)
Oliver Skipp (2029)
Caleb Okoli (2029)
Abdul Fatawu (2029)
The Skipp signing is a clear example of these two plans working in tandem. He is both relatively experienced for his age - he played 70-odd games Spurs and another 45 for Norwich - and yet still a young player with his peak years ahead of him. The ideal signing for both manager and club.
There have been other links this summer to players who fit into that bucket, like Reiss Nelson and Fabio Carvalho. Facundo Buaonanotte would too, just about, if he weren’t a loan signing with no option to buy him if he turns out to be good.
The Glover approach ultimately looks like it’s the main plan. It fits into the idea that Leicester can reach sustainability through player trading, which was an important enough strategy to find its way into the annual accounts.
It’s also fundamentally a good plan for a club like this. If you squint, you can see a core of genuine quality players in a few years time, or at least players who Leicester can sell on to fund future investment and steer clear of the sort of financial woes that have befallen us over the last year.
Inevitably, there’s a catch. Or two, really.
First, we’ve talked a lot about players Leicester wanted to sign but ultimately failed to. Second, the club doesn’t have infinite money and so you have to make decisions about where to spend your resources.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with trying to sign Wilfred Zaha, a signing for right now, and pairing him with an exciting young forward in Adam Hlozek, who’s for now but also for the future. There’s nothing wrong with taking a few punts on young prospects. That’s a good, flexible transfer strategy that gives you the chance to marry immediate success with long term improvement.
You do actually have to sign those players, though.
For years now, it feels like it takes Leicester a very long time to do transfer business. It feels like a club where the transfer department is composed of one bloke on a dial-up modem, who can’t deal with more than one thing at a time. If Hlozek’s agent calls back while we’re in the middle of trying to fax Silko Thomas to Wigan, oops, he’s gone to Hoffenheim instead and we’re back to square one.
Perhaps it’s purely financial limitations that have caused a problem this summer, maybe it’s bad luck. But how many times have we seen mistakes, mishaps, or a complete absence of activity? From Adrien Silva to Stefano Sensi, to the Rodgers Reset, to Matias Soule’s agent coming out to slaughter the club for having “no sporting project” this summer after he flounced off to Roma, at a certain point it’s fair to question the competence of the people involved.
Beyond that, there is the way Leicester have used their scarce resources. In January 2023, they signed Harry Souttar and Victor Kristiansen on permanent deals, two players who fit the Glover Plan. Then by the summer, the club had hired a new manager who had no place for either and they were thrust out into the cold.
This is the same problem that Chelsea have with their stockpiling of young talent. Players have to play to develop and players are human beings, who aren’t just assets on a spreadsheet that appreciate or depreciate in value. Leicester got lucky to some extent with Kristiansen, who got a good loan deal, performed well, and seems to be happy enough to stay at Leicester. Souttar, on the other hand, had no chance to do anything for over a year and looks like a lost cause at this point.
Similarly, last summer, the club signed Tom Cannon, another Glover Plan alumni. They were so determined that he was the right player that they signed him despite the fact the medical picked up a stress fracture in his back. A year later, the club hired a new manager who has no place for him. There’s now talk that Leicester are willing to sell him for less than they paid a year ago, an almost unherd of arc for a 21 year old forward.
We’ve seen some of the same thing with contracts handed out. Hamza Choudhury got a new deal last year, as cover for the inverted full back positions in Enzo Maresca’s system. That seemed a strange deal at the time, it looks even more strange now, when there are no inverted full backs, Ndidi has a new contract and Oliver Skipp has come in ahead of Choudhury in midfield. Ndidi, indeed (say that three times backwards), doesn’t even seem to fit Cooper’s technical demands himself, and might ultimately get usurped by Skipp in the team.
This summer, meanwhile, we’ve seen reports that Leicester had used up the majority of their transfer budget simply on signing Fatawu and Okoli. Fatawu is hard to argue with, but Okoli coming into a side that already had Vestergaard, Faes, Souttar and Conor Coady, with James Justin an option in a back three and Ben Nelson coming through the ranks, feels like far too much money invested in one position given the restraints we’re operating under.
Vestergaard is the perfect example of the confusing nature of some of Leicester’s decisions over the past few years. He barely played for most of his first contract. Every other centre back, barring Nelson, currently at the club has been signed since Vestergaard arrived, to the tune of about £50 million combined. In that time at least three more senior centre backs were ahead of him at one point or another: Caglar Soyuncu, Jonny Evans, and Wesley Fofana, and our desperate attempts to flog Vestergaard came to nothing.
Last summer, Leicester signed Coady - allegedly on so much money that he couldn’t turn it down - who looked to be above Vestergaard in the new manager’s pecking order before he got injured. That’s a huge amount of time, money, and energy spent on having literally anyone other than Vestergaard play for the club, to then decide to give him a new contract at the end of it all.
Even under the Glover Plan, you want a sprinkling of Cooper Plan players, experienced heads to guide the younger ones. But you don’t want to invest so much money in those older players that they limit your freedom to operate the Glover Plan effectively. And sometimes you need to actively harm the Cooper Plan by letting experienced heads go because the money is better spent executing the Glover Plan.
At a certain point, Vestergaard, Vardy, Ndidi, Choudhury, Coady, Ayew, and Reid become progress stoppers for the players you want to develop, that list of players tied down until at least 2028 that we went through earlier. Those are the ones whose success is vital to your on-pitch and financial strength. For a team that needs to work its way out of a financial hole, it’s the future you need to think about more than the experienced heads.
We saw hints of this in action against Tranmere on Tuesday night, where Coady and Choudhury came on before Chris Popov and Alves, while Nelson didn’t even make an appearance, even with Leicester well clear in the game. Having to keep senior, fringe players happy with minutes becomes a problem when they’re stopping players with far greater potential value from getting onto the pitch.
The ultimate takeaway here is that Leicester’s transfer problem this summer, and over the last couple of years, has been one of execution as much as of vision. In particular, the inability to generate more money to play with.
When you dive into the signings, the rumours, the overall contract situation, you can see what Leicester are trying to do. And it ultimately looks like a pretty good strategy for a team in our position. But then there are occasions where something breaks down, where the execution of the approach they have starts to get squirrelly.
Possibly, a lot of that is down to the financial restrictions, that mean we can’t compete with other Premier League sides. Possibly the shifting between playing styles of different managers is forcing unwanted and unplanned overhaul on the squad every summer. Perhaps the Director of Football is not very good at player trading, and his staff is too short-handed or not qualified to manage that job at Premier League level.
But it is also obvious that an inability to manage the budget, self-scout and prioritise where limited money should be spent is causing the sort of problems we’ve seen over the last couple of years. Where certain areas of the team have been needlessly overstocked.
Leicester seem to focus on working through a list of targets, effectively following a Best Player Available strategy that you might see in the NFL Draft. You have players you like, and you go get those players, regardless of what your squad’s strengths and weaknesses might be.
This would explain some of Leicester’s activity this summer. Okoli rates well on whatever metrics we use to judge players, so does Skipp, so does Soule. When Soule falls through, we move to the next guy, et cetera, et cetera. This is fine, up to a point.
The problem with this approach comes when you have budgetary restraints. If all you do is pour money into centre back and defensive midfield, you need to be able to trade in some of your other assets in those positions to be able to create a balanced squad. Otherwise you have a bunch of centre backs and defensive midfielders, approximately one player who can actually score a goal, and no money left.
This part of the plan has clearly been a huge problem in recent years. The money recouped relative to the actual market value of players we have owned has fallen way short of what’s required to make player trading sustainable long term.
Centre back is one example of this. A plan to have Coady, Vestergaard, and Faes in the Championship is strange. On a purely footballing level that’s a lot of centre backs with not a lot of pace between them - at Chelsea, Maresca has immediately picked just about the fastest back four he can put on the pitch. On a financial level, that’s an extraordinary amount of money to be locked up in three players at that level, at least one of whom isn’t going to play.
Even now, Leicester surely don’t need them all. Perhaps Faes’ rumoured discontent would be a blessing in disguise, because he is the one centre back who might attract a substantial transfer fee that could allow Leicester to reinvest resources further forward. But beyond Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s sale, which was clearly done for PSR reasons against the club’s wishes, there’s not been any sign of planning to sell off assets to fund further sales.
If and when El Khannouss joins, Leicester’s spending will be around £70-80m this summer, with only the KDH sale in terms of incomings. That will rank pretty much bang in the middle of the league as far as net spend goes. It’s not like we’ve not spent anything, but too many resources have gone into the wrong areas, or are stored up in players who aren’t worth it or aren’t going to play.
We can only fully judge the transfer window once it closes on Friday. But to this point it’s simultaneously true that a lot of what Leicester have tried to do makes sense, while there is obviously room to improve and to execute the strategy better than they have done.
It still seems like Leicester overpay and overvalue players we currently have, which makes it very difficult to shift them later. They have also certainly not been ruthless enough in selling high value assets to fund improvements elsewhere, since the decision to keep Youri Tielemans around to run his contract down. Tens and tens of millions of potential budget have walked out of the door for free.
They have tried and failed to get too many targets, and made the sort of amateur mistakes you should not be making at this level.
Underneath all that, though, there are reasons to believe this plan can work over the next couple of years if they are brave enough to commit to it. The Premier League forces teams into short termism, often against their own best interests, and the sheer volume of money other teams spend convinces you that you need to do more, all the time.
The truth is that a lot of Leicester’s competitors have spent all summer making signings and not got any better, while plenty more are operating under similar restraints to us. We have a good core of young players locked down for the long term, and the profile of players we’ve been targeting all summer is surely the right route to fixing the financial issues that have plagued the last few years.
The question is whether they stay the course. Whether they continue to target players from the Glover Plan, or panic in the last hours of the window, and again in January, when the manager is pushing for win-now experienced players to save us from the drop.
Decisions like that are, ultimately, why you have a Director of Football. Someone whose job is to prioritise the long term and execute a vision to get you from here, to up there. The whole point of that model is to make sure you don’t eat the marshmallow now in order to get two later.
Some of the issues we’ve gone through here look a little like a Director of Football who’s not strong enough, or who vacillates between two visions rather than one who’s too pig-headedly committed to one way of doing things.
Perhaps, ironically, the Director of Football needs more power, not less.
Rudkin in?
