Can Leicester City afford a long-term vision?
“The Board will now commence the process of appointing a new manager that will lead our return to the Premier League and continue the implementation of our long-term vision for the success of Leicester City Football Club.”
Reading the club’s response to the departure of Enzo Maresca, three words leapt out. Long-term vision, eh? Not many football clubs have one of them.
The vision? Never officially and clearly articulated (what has been?) But we’re led to assume it’s to challenge England’s football elite, playing in the style of the elite. Like Manchester City.
Easy to say. And very grown-up sounding. A bit like having rules for Profit and Sustainability. Who wouldn’t want their football club to be making money? Who wouldn’t want it to be making long term spending decisions which guarantee its long-term future?
With PSR, the footballing authorities are saying: “Forget the mad spending sprees, the despicable player pay inflation, the astronomic transfer fees. Spend only what you can afford.” Very Rachel Reeves.
How long is long-term?
Yet if anything, PSR has accelerated the short-termism of football clubs as they bid to get the shopfront nice and tidy for inspection by the authorities’ accountants.
The final vestiges of the pretence that Academy products are being prepared for first team action at the clubs they have grown up with has virtually gone. One-off transfer fees are artificially inflated with a nod and a wink.
Hotels are bought and sold in ways which would make the most flagrant Monopoly cheat, blush. And contracts get longer and longer so the real cost of new signings look smaller in any single accounting year.
The short-term benefits are clear. The long-term downsides will only be felt when clubs are still paying for players well past their sell-by date.
But fear not. LCFC has a long-term vision.
Brighton blues
In 2023 Brighton qualified for Europe for the first time in their history. They finished top of a Europa League group which included Marseille and Ajax. When I met a mate and lifelong Brighton fan, last April, the club sat 8th in the Premier League. Manager Roberto de Zerbi was a respected boss, doing a good job.
So why was Jim so fed-up? One word: “Chelsea.” He felt that Brighton’s patiently, painstakingly built, new-found, footballing status, had been systematically dismantled, in the space of one season and primarily, by one club. As a result, Brighton’s “Golden Years” need barely be pluralised.
In three seasons Graham Potter rebuilt Brighton from the bottom up, breaking records for a club whose imprint on English football hitherto, has been unremarkable.
By the time Moises Caceido signed for Chelsea in August 2023, Brighton had received £225-million from the Stamford Bridge piggy bank, but lost three key players (Cucurella, Sanchez and Caceido), one foundational manager, and five of his backroom staff.
Which might have been vaguely tolerable had the west Londoners showed similar patience with Potter and allowed him time to implement his vision. But he lasted seven months. Mauricio Pochettino arrived to restore order, before suffering a similar fate. We all know what happened next.
“If you refuse Chelsea, you’re crazy man”
The words of one Wesley Fofana to Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall as KDH contemplated a move to Stamford Bridge. Fofana’s intervention as “secret agent” in the transfer was certainly annoying. But it contains an unpalatable truth. Money doesn’t so much talk in football as shout through a megaphone, plugged into a Foo Fighters amp stack.
Chelsea have so much financial muscle, any time they fancy a player or manager from us, or from Brighton, or from pretty much any other club, it’s just a matter of time before they get them. Which gives any club trying to challenge the likes of Chelsea a very small window in which to flourish before their success is picked off.
This week, the BBC reports that since mid-June, Chelsea have spent £243million and now have more than 50 senior players, including EIGHT goalkeepers.
If this is what sustainability looks like, imagine unfettered chaos. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Chelsea are trying to control as much footballing talent as possible. Many of those 50 will have to be loaned out – with clauses to suit Chelsea.
Remarkably the club was one of eight put on the PSR naughty step in May, along with Leicester, Newcastle, Villa, Forest, Manchester City, Everton and Arsenal. Chelsea’s £722million net spend to that point makes them the only club at “severe” risk of PSR breach. You have to assume they just don’t care.
The PSR folly
All this as Leicester await a PSR points deduction which may obliterate a whole season, while shopping for players in the bargain basement to avoid further punishment. Desperate attempts to leverage the revenue stream of the club may marginally increase the club’s PSR wriggle room but have done incalculable harm to relations with its supporters.
The fact is PSR is a solution looking for a problem. It purports to guarantee financial sustainability and does nothing of the kind. It is designed to stop clubs going out of business, chasing success. The last Premier League club to go bust? Portsmouth, in 2010.
If you wanted to enhance football’s financial stability, you’d tackle the allocation of football’s income. Increasing the pittance offered to lower league clubs would allay their very high risk of financial oblivion.
Reducing the financial gulf between the Championship and the Premier League would make promotion and relegation more financially manageable.
But the elephant in the room is players’ wages. A salary cap is being mooted for 2025-6 but you can bet your life Premier League club lawyers will be studying the details as soon as they emerge, to find ways to get round them. Oh and the PFA isn’t keen.
With these tangles of ineffective regulation, how long before the final league tables are decided in the High Court? Or in some hotel room, housing some FA independent tribunal. Trophy presentations in the car park.
The vision thing
Leicester’s summer could not provide clearer evidence of the vulnerability of adopting a long-term philosophy in the short-sighted world of English football.
Decisions taken 100-odd miles away at another club have wiped out Year One of Enzo’s long-term plan and now we’re back at the beginning again, minus our most effective player. There is no stability at clubs like Leicester and Brighton without a similar commitment to stability at clubs like Chelsea. And of all the things I might bet on for the new season. That’s not one of them.
Those who steer the LCFC ship bear huge blame for our current plight. Bad decision has followed bad decision. But we shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which the rug has been pulled from under clubs like ours.
PSR effectively prevents a rich owner investing heavily in a club which cannot match that outlay with worldwide shirt sale revenues and multinational sponsorship deals.
Second rank European clubs like Sevilla, Bologna and Torino can’t afford to buy our excess “talent”, even if they’d like to. Sidelined players sit out lucrative contracts, depriving the club of transfer revenues which could have been taken for granted five years ago.
As we embark on our season we face an impossible choice. To go for broke to stay up and risk more PSR headaches further down the track. Or to finance the club more realistically, on the assumption that relegation is likely, survival a bonus.
Neither approach amounts to a vision. Both are likely to be pretty painful. Manchester City are not quaking in their boots.
Welcome to the 2024-25 season.
