Steve Cooper is a sign of where Leicester City are right now
On Thursday morning, Leicester appointed Steve Cooper as the new manager to replace Enzo Maresca. After a whirlwind 48 hours and with a sense of what might have been, how should we feel about his arrival?
For about 12 hours, from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, Leicester City had done it. The Much Maligned Jon Rudkin had pulled it off. The banter club was rising from the ashes. We might have no staff, no money, and less than no points, but we’ve got big Graham Potter coming through the door.
File those few hours away with the ones on deadline day a couple of years ago when we nearly signed Marcelo based on some guy talking about it on Twitch and duping Fabrizio Romano. For the second time in 24 months, Leicester City have put Romano’s reputation in a body bag.
Instead, it quickly became apparent that the Potter deal had collapsed. Into the void, so quickly that it makes you wonder how close they can ever have been to a deal with Potter, strode Steven Daniel Cooper, formerly of Notts Forest.
“We are delighted to welcome Steve to Leicester City”, crooned Khun Top’s AI ghostwriter, a sentiment that is emphatically not shared by the good folks of X, where Cooper’s appointment has been met by an avalanche of gifs and laughing emojis.
We’ll get to the nuts and bolts of this appointment in a minute, but there are a couple of things that immediately jump out. One is that the club has been played a PR hospital pass by the way the Potter news story developed. The timing of it has made the club look ridiculous, when they may well have had genuine reasons to change tack. Maybe the Potter deal was never that close, maybe he really was stalling them in hope of a better offer, and at a certain point you have to walk away.
For the most Online among us, it felt like we went from having Graham Potter, universally beloved, to Steve Cooper, universally hated, in no time at all, which has made the reaction to the announcement even worse. The reality probably wasn’t like that.
The second thing is the club made their bed here. They have been unlucky with the way Enzo Maresca left so soon after the season and the way this announcement developed, but those two events sandwich things like whacking a great big ticket price increase out there and justifying it on the grounds that it’s in-line with the 9th or 10th best teams in the country.
The 9th and 10th best teams in the country last season were West Ham and Crystal Palace. West Ham just appointed Julen Lopetegui to replace David Moyes, Crystal Palace appointed Oliver Glasner to replace Roy Hodgson in March and promptly won 6 of their last 7 games and got their entire squad on the plane to the Euros.
Appointing Steve Cooper to replace Enzo Maresca feels like the opposite of those two appointments. There are genuine reasons to defend this decision, but it’s difficult to argue that the ceiling here is very high.
The bull case
There is merit to appointing Steve Cooper if your sole goal is to avoid relegation this year. Some of the discourse about Cooper is a bit over the top: he did a good job at Forest in his first Premier League season, when he was dealt a terrible hand by the owner (sound familiar?). A huge squad, with significant changes from the side that got promoted, is difficult to manage.
He has also displayed the sort of tactical flexibility and pragmatism that many people were crying out for last season. For a long time people have raved about him as a good coach for young players. Leicester have, as we never tire of hearing, one of the best training grounds in the world, and have prospects like Ben Nelson, Will Alves, and Sammy Braybrooke lurking on the fringes of the first team.
Cooper does fit the profile of a manager to bring through these players, seems to be a good bloke who his players like, and he has been able to create successful(ish) teams in the midst of a lot of chaos around him.
There is a line of argument that Leicester have a better chance of staying up under Cooper than we did with Maresca, purely because Cooper is much more likely to be pragmatic in order to get results. We know Maresca would never have done that, he would have sacrificed himself to protect his ideals.
The flip-side is that there was a non-zero chance that Maresca’s Leicester took the league by storm. If he is genuinely as good a coach as the football cognoscenti believe, maybe he would have been able to pull off the sort of campaign you occasionally get from promoted teams that lands them in the top half (points deduction notwithstanding).
Perhaps you could build on that, perhaps you can evolve and develop with him and get back to the glory days of about three years ago where we were challenging for Europe with an exciting, young squad.
Aspirational appointments
The issue with Leicester appointing Cooper as Maresca’s replacement is the lack of that potential. It seems to be at odds with the club’s alleged vision. Ever since we sacked Craig Shakespeare there has been a pretty clear direction of travel in the managerial appointments.
Claude Puel, unpopular as he may have been, had a reputation for working with young players and was handed the job of completely overhauling the aging title winning squad. He had the cojones to be unpopular in a way that was necessary to replace club legends.
Brendan Rodgers was brought in to improve the style of play and take that team to the next level, with his tactics, vibes, and general lack of sour Frenchness. Enzo Maresca turned this up to 11, bringing an even more Manchester City-esque style of play, and represented an effort to install a winning mentality that was clearly missing under Rodgers.
Rodgers and Maresca in particular were both examples of Leicester reaching above themselves, aspirational appointments with a view to challenging the elite in the short/medium term. Rodgers didn’t leave when he may have had the chance to go to Arsenal, Maresca obviously did when Chelsea came calling. The club took a gamble that they were both the best managers available at the time, and would stick with the project for a while.
The fact that Maresca burnt them doesn’t make that a bad plan. But Cooper doesn’t fit this trajectory at all. Graham Potter would have done, Carlos Corberan would have done, even someone like Ruud van Nistelrooy, who was tenuously linked to the job and looks likely to turn up at Burnley, would fit the mould of an appointment who could be destined for greater things.
What we would have expected to see as the next phase to follow Maresca would have been a manager you could imagine taking Leicester back towards the top half, or towards the European places.
Cooper, on the other hand, looks like the sort of manager you’ve had to resort to because you either didn’t have the money or the ability to attract anyone better. The Athletic’s list of the other clubs who have approached Cooper since he left Forest are or were all Championship teams: Birmingham, Burnley, Hull, Norwich, Stoke, Sunderland.
This isn’t proof that he’s a bad manager, but it is proof of the club’s own confused state of mind. Or at least of the yawning chasm between what they say in public and the reality of our situation. Because it’s entirely possible that the financial situation and the impending points deduction meant they had no alternative. Perhaps no one really wanted the job.
The implementation of a long-term vision
When Maresca left, the only communication we had from the club was to talk about the “long-term vision”. They didn’t specify what this long-term vision actually was, but we can assume that it remains all the things they routinely waffle on about in financial reports and in arguing against PSR charges: being the best of the rest and routinely challenging the elite clubs.
“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.”
Indeed, given the way that the entire financial plan of the club seemed to rely on qualifying for Europe, it would seem something of a necessity to be upwardly mobile. On top of those financial pressures and business dreams, it’s fairly common knowledge that Top wants his teams to ‘play like Manchester City’.
Steve Cooper doesn’t fit this strategy very well. He feels like the one manager we didn’t mention in that managerial history lesson: Dean Smith. He’s fine! He’s probably a decent manager! He seems like a nice bloke! But…that’s it. The aforementioned Athletic article on his appointment focused heavily on the good bloke angle, about how popular he was at Forest, about he gets lots of text messages from people who used to work with him.
That’s all good stuff, but is that building on the foundations that Maresca left? Is it evolving the style of play? Is his greatest skill, the ability to create togetherness in a squad, negated to some extent by the fact that all the players absolutely loved and raved about Maresca? Creating a united squad that believed in The Idea was Maresca’s superpower too.
This might turn out to be fine. The fact remains that Leicester have been very good at choosing managers in recent years, even when that decision looks terrible on the face of it. Cooper’s Forest links are only really an issue in the discourse right now, and if he turns out to be a bad manager for Leicester. No one needs reminding that Martin O’Neill was a Forest legend first, nor that Wes Morgan came from the City Ground.
But this decision feels different because it is so opposed to how Top’s Leicester have operated. It’s so different to last summer, when they went all in on Maresca to overhaul the feeling at the club. This isn’t an exciting appointment, and many aspects of it are confusing. If you were looking for reasons to hope this season might be better than you feared, you’ll have to keep searching.
