Entering our Ruud era: The pros and cons as Leicester gets ready for van Nistelrooy
Shortened betting odds for Ruud van Nistelrooy early in the week made him the firm favourite for the vacant Leicester City job. Our ongoing flirtation with Graham Potter has yet again come to nothing. See you next time for more of the same, Graham.
With John Percy sounding the klaxon that Ruud is the man, Helen Thompson, James Knight and David Bevan have compiled a few pros and cons of our next manager.
The timing of Steve Cooper’s sacking certainly implied the club had a firm candidate lined up, rather than it being about us just losing to Chelsea and the recent run.
Perhaps we've learnt from the wasted time around the Brendan Rodgers sacking and how long it took to pull the trigger that time.
Hiring Ruud van Nistelrooy has its financial benefit; there’s no compensation fees due, which is possibly why Carlos Corberan wasn't more highly favoured. After his spell keeping the Manchester United dugout warm for Ruben Amorim, it looked like we faced a battle to secure the Dutchman with Hamburg also interested. The pull of the Premier League won out again.
It's not the first time van Nistelrooy’s name has been in the mix for the Leicester job. We were linked with him prior to Cooper's appointment in the darker days of summer when everything was up in the air. Although seemingly that was more rumour than anything concrete.
The Foxes are a more attractive proposition now of course, without the point deduction decision hanging over us. Any manager looking at the job now can still stroke their ego and feel they can make their positive impact. We aren't cut off in the bottom three on zero points and there's a transfer window coming up. Good timing.
The two big question marks for prospective candidates will be what resources they have to play with in the window, natural caution will exist after the position Enzo Maresca found himself in not even twelve months ago when the club admitted we needed to sell if we wanted to buy.
While we haven't yet found ourselves in the relegation zone, we have some tough fixtures across December and relegation is a risk. The bigger risk coming from it sending us back into scope of the EFL who definitely want to come at us again for a fine at best and points deduction at worst. But that's assuming the new manager fails at their one objective to keep us up.
Appointing the Dutchman feels more in keeping with the mythical Leicester blueprint and vision for the future. There's a Maresca feel to it rather than, as TFW co-founder James labelled it, the tinder matching we did in more desperate times with Dean Smith and Steve Cooper.
In for a Ruud awakening?
There's risks to appointing the Dutchman and the club will have looked at the cons and weighed them up against the pros.
Since we’ll never get to see their thinking, we’ve debated our own list of questions or red flags.
Premier League experience
Van Nistelrooy is - obviously - a huge name in Premier League history as a player. But he is still raw in managerial terms. He has barely managed a game in England.
The likes of Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard were great players too and it's not transferred into them being great managers.
He did spend some time alongside Erik Ten Hag at Manchester United and his brief reign as interim head coach brought much needed stability and organisation to a team that had been a mess under, showing an early understanding of how to deal with things when you’re handed the joystick of a plane that’s careering out of control.
However, two of those wins came at our expense. The latter probably saw the worst performance of our season. We're expecting van Nistelrooy to take that squad and revitalise it - without a pre-season and without any real experience in this situation.
General managerial experience
The majority of his managerial experience comes from PSV and the 2022/23 season that he was in charge there. He made the step up from managing Jong PSV, but that is the entirety of his managerial experience: a season with the youth team, a season (minus one game, which we will come to) with the senior squad, and a couple of games with Manchester United.
The Eredivisie is different to the Premier League, but that was a big job that comes with pressure and fan expectation. However, taking charge there presented different challenges to tackling a relegation battle.
In the 51 games he managed at PSV, his win percentage was just shy of 65%. Van Nistelrooy isn't as proven a manager as other managers we could have appointed, but neither was Maresca.
Many wondered if Maresca had what it took to get us out of a very tough Championship with no experience and that worked out.
His main experience comes in coaching, he’s been doing that for about 11 years, but everybody is always very quick to point out the differences between being a good coach and making a good manager.
The way he exited PSV
He quit PSV with one game left in his first season. He’d enjoyed some success there, winning the cup by beating Arne Slot’s Feyenoord in the final.
There were rumours of the dressing room revolting, which might be a concern. Players were said to have complained about his coaching style and tactics.
Van Nistelrooy himself hinted at wider issues, including a general lack of support from the club. A worrying statement perhaps given the position we often leave our managers in.
They’re left to face up to the media on… well, everything, and coupled with our recent issues backing our managers with the money or the players they want and it doesn’t necessarily scream a match made in heaven. Presumably he’s asked all of these questions himself and decided to take the job on.
There are, to be fair, whispers that the penny is dropping with Top that his multi-million pound operation is not being handled with care from day to day and perhaps things will change.
The squad he’s been handed
The problem with appointing a new manager on a three year contract, allowing him control of pre-season and the transfer window and then sacking him after a couple of months, is that his replacement has to deal with a random assortment of players that he might not necessarily want.
Does van Nistelrooy have any interest in a bunch of experienced heads whose only quality is that they’ve played in the league before? Do these players fit the style he wants to play? How long is it going to take for him to instil his vision on this group?
We can point to the January transfer window all we want, but if we’re looking back at the relegation season as a reason for making a managerial change sooner then equally we have to also look at it as a reason not to rely on January acquisitions to stay up.
Do strikers make the best managers?
Okay, perhaps this one is a bit harsh. But there’s something about being at the heart of the action or seeing it unfold in front of you that seems to translate well to management. The current crop of elite Premier League managers who played the game at the top level were all central midfielders - Guardiola, Arteta, Maresca…
While there are examples of strikers making great football managers, you're hard pressed to find many in recent generations.
Simone Inzaghi, also the same age as van Nistelrooy, is perhaps the best modern example. The Inter manager was ranked the 3rd best men’s coach by FIFA, enjoying a successful time in Serie A after his previous job at Lazio.
To find the last striker-to-great-manager conversion though, you’re going back to the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish and Johan Cruyff. As with the Lampard and Gerrard problems, top players having equally top managerial records is more rare than you’d imagine.
This is Leicester City
Less about Ruud and more a risk of any of our appointments falling into the same trap that Brendan Rodgers and Maresca ended up in.
We have no transparency as fans whether our financial books are more balanced these days and whether we have flexibility to spend at all in January (the fact the club seems to have once again consciously avoided paying out an employed manager’s contract would seem to suggest not).
We can't expect too many sales to generate cash given we're still trying to sell the exact same group of players that nobody has wanted in the last four or five transfer windows.
Van Nistelrooy would likely seek assurances here based on what he viewed while knocking us out of the Carabao Cup and beating us in the league with United.
The squad does need investment, not just because of injuries but our choice of centre backs for this level is lacking and given we haven't used Odsonne Edouard at all, another attacking option would help.
He isn't likely to suffer the club lying about finances or not backing him. Nor would he suffer the type of disrespect or player unrest that Cooper was potentially battling based on his exit at PSV.
It’d be Ruud not to
Onto the pros and things tipping in Ruud’s favour. There was something that felt somewhat energetic about making the call to sack Cooper this early.
You could say in part that it makes hiring him look like a mistake, but after how long we had to wait for a jolt back to life two years ago, this is positive.
A fresh start
Something that Cooper never got for various reasons. But van Nistelrooy isn’t bringing baggage from having managed a local rival, or having a poor record of winning at any Premier League ground aside from The City Ground.
Van Nistelrooy seems to be the neutral, or the exciting choice, depending on your viewpoint as a fan. It won’t win us any praise from the same voices in the media who hounded us last week for having the audacity to question some of the most uninspiring performances and who then duly slated us when we sacked Cooper, but there’s a chance to repair that connection with the fans.
The reaction across the board from fans so far seems to range from cautiously optimistic despite acknowledging it’s a gamble to full-on mass turtleneck purchasing. Given where we are, it’s not a bad range.
Firm vision and principles
Perhaps the pro that the fans need the most. Van Nistelrooy will hold the club to account about their promises, what the squad needs and how to deliver the vision the board have.
Maresca may not have ever really built up a warm relationship with the fans but it did look like he tried to keep the club in check. He didn’t shy away from the tough parts when they had held back information about our financials and it’s likely the Dutchman would do the same.
We’ve already seen similar grumbles from Brendan Rodgers too - will it be third strike and you’re out for those behind the scenes? We can’t keep facing the same problems with every good manager we have. Cooper was never going to rock the boat in the way it seems Leicester need. Van Nistelrooy will.
A familiar style
Perhaps not music to some fans ears, but van Nistelrooy’s teams do seem have a Maresca look about them but in a slightly more simple way. It’s a style and identity that more closely aligns to the Leicester of last year.
Hopefully the squad will happily put away the ‘Enzo I miss you’ signs now and embrace a return to a more familiar philosophy.
For those who did find Enzoball tedious, boring or too risky, at PSV the approach shared similarities. He typically favoured a 4-3-3 formation. Building up the play from the back but with a clear goal to dispatching it to wingers.
Yes, it’s possession-based, but it has more direct elements as well and it should make for more exciting football. A tendency to favour overlapping fullbacks and getting the wingers more involved sounds promising.
It’s a shame for van Nistelrooy that he’ll have to make do without Abdul Fatawu as you’d expect the usual suspects from last season to be right on board with this.
Strength and flexibility in defence
With Leicester fans desperate for pointers about what we can expect from our new man, the words of a former Foxes defender have resonated. In an interview with FourFourTwo a couple of months ago, Jonny Evans said van Nistelrooy is “obsessed with defensive structure”.
That’s reassuring, given that Ruud’s PSV side of 2022/23 conceded more goals than any other team in the top six that season. He had Jarrad Branthwaite on loan and although it’s hard to say exactly what influence he had on the Everton youngster’s progression, it can only be viewed as a positive.
Leicester certainly need defensive structure. Perhaps Cooper’s main failing was trying to implement a tactical evolution that the players and fans struggled to align with when we were conceding so many goals and creating so little, despite scoring regularly during our rare good spells.
The fact him and Jamie Vardy can compare what it feels like to break the consecutive Premier League goals record
With every new manager, it’s interesting to see how they approach and use Vardy. JV9 appears, by all accounts, to have been one of the few senior players on board with Steve Cooper and what he was trying to do.
But Vardy continues to age, and his effectiveness is more and more sporadic. Perhaps one of the reasons he was so into Cooper was that the Welshman picked him all the time.
Cooper also referred to Vardy as “the main man here” and while it was a good soundbite and intended to get Vardy and the fans onside, it should have been ringing alarm bells. As Maresca showed, Leicester need a strong manager who gives the players confidence in their abilities.
This is particularly true of Vardy. There’s a sense that, when you shed all the Red Bull and bravado, Vardy is an elite footballer who actually recognises and respects quality in others at the club. That was key to his relationship with Maresca despite not always being picked, and it perhaps shone through last Saturday when his reactions were being scrutinised by most supporters.
The relationship between Vardy and RVN feels like it could be brilliant or a real point of friction. Two greats working in harmony, laughing about scoring approximately three goals from outside the area between them in their entire careers, or two selfish #9s rubbing up against each other?
It’s cool to have Ruud van Nistelrooy as manager
Does what it says on the tin. While he’s not a big managerial name, this is the sort of appointment you see on Football Manager a few years into your game that really hits the spot.
Wayne Rooney at Plymouth Argyle, Frank Lampard at Coventry City, Steven Gerrard at Human Rights FC, now Ruud van Nistelrooy at Leicester City.
A little like Sven Goran Eriksson or Brendan Rodgers, he is going to benefit from the simple fact that everyone knows who he is. He is a Big Name In The Game, which gives you a big club tingle every time you hear it.
It’s nice to have a manager who everyone’s heard of, rather than some bloke who got sacked by Forest.
