Ten moments from the Leicester City timeline that should have been a warning
Much like sliding doors, small moments and decisions change everything. With fallout from the £90 losses still fresh, it got me thinking about ten moments across the LCFC timeline that led us here.
It’s impossible not to be blown away by the £90 million losses. Much is being made of when this started, how it was allowed to happen and who’s to blame. As the brilliant analysis on the When You’re Smiling podcast with Kieran Maguire showed, it’s a collective failing. Many decisions were made that passed through all of the board and were approved by many different faces before they came to pass.
There's a lot of debate about how far you should go back to find the start of the slow rot that saw us posting the extortionate figures in yesterday's accounts. Joe Brewin did a brilliant job of dissecting the news and pondering how it’s somehow worse than we all feared. I spent some time offline, reflecting and working out where I fell on the scale between anger and abject sadness over how it's come to this.
Ultimately, although the spending didn’t come directly in our Premier League title season, that feels like the start of it. Because we changed as a club, and the rules also changed, partly in response to it.
You can chart the little decisions over the years that all contributed alongside the bigger, glaring ones that have left us facing up to some very uncertain times as fans. Top and the board have assured us that the long term stability is safe, King Power remains committed to Leicester. And while we probably aren't worrying about our existence, I do wonder at what cost that comes. The suggestion of a Leeds-style fire sale is a grim prospect.
I found myself casting a frustrated pair of eyes across our timeline and the decisions of all shapes and sizes that are still hurting us now. My sleep-addled brain wishes we had had our own non-sinister LCFC equivalent of the Time Variance Authority to keep tabs on us and take preventative action.
For those not versed in the Marvel universe, the TVA claims responsibility for monitoring the multiverse and can prune timelines if they are deemed too dangerous to exist (yes, I’ve been watching Loki recently). Should such an organisation exist, the club would have been keeping them incredibly busy the last few years. What seemed maybe harmless at the time, or a worthy risk, has proven to be anything but.
We don't have the technology to go back and wipe away these decisions, but here's some of the key sliding doors moments that I find myself ranting about when friends or colleagues have asked how our ‘incredibly well-run club’ has ended up here.
This timeline is just a few of the things that you wish we had handled differently. Or just not done at all. It was so hard to not just pick ten from last year, but we covered that last ridiculous season pretty well here.
1) Summer 2016 - Splashing that new money
We were always going to do some spending after 2016, given the sudden increase in revenue, but this summer was the first that set a precedent for the kind of transfer fees I’d not seen from Leicester City in my lifetime. This wasn’t the worst of them either, more recent ones would be more suspect, but they certainly weren’t a true success given Islam Slimani and Ron Robert-Zieler didn’t last that long.
It marked a departure though from our previous capabilities and aspirations. The start of it all really. Our own version of Icarus.
2) 6th December 2019 - Brendan’s brucey-early Christmas bonus
Given the club named listed Brendan Rodgers and his staff as one of three big contributing factors to why the loss is so big, this had to be on the list. Rodgers was given a new deal to keep him in place until 2025. Possibly to reward him for our early season form, partly to keep him as bigger clubs were circling. Perhaps that’s another sliding doors moment given Arsenal were interested in him.
At the time, we were flying high in the league, these were the early golden days of Brendan. But even factoring that in, considering we were still Leicester City and he was still Brendan Rodgers, giving him a deal that made him the third highest paid manager in the Premier League (only behind Guardiola and Mourinho - take that in) seemed pretty outrageous then.
In hindsight it’s even more nauseating. Somebody was definitely blinded by the elite manager packaging he presented.
3) 2020 - The c-word and Seagrave
This one is an anomaly on the list. The one nobody at the club could really have predicted or planned for and the one I think we’re all likely to cut some slack around. The pandemic. It wasn’t just the impact to the club, and the fact that King Power, as a duty free company, suffered hugely in a global series of lockdowns. Leicester endured more than most with lockdowns, general negative experiences for all.
Stadiums were empty, money was going to be tight and games were delayed. It’s not an excuse because every person, every club had to cope with it but add it into the list with the rest of these things and it adds to the cracks that were forming.
At the end of 2020 though, the club moved into the Seagrave training facility. It cost essentially the money we made from the sale of Harry Maguire. It’s a fantastic achievement but was this a missed opportunity elsewhere. The owners had plans on a stadium expansion but presumably it was one or the other.
This is a contentious one and you can make the argument for either choice. But given the conversations around fan atmosphere and matchday revenue, you do wonder if the stadium could have come first.
4) 15th April 2021 - A four year extension for the second-choice goalkeeper
We're almost at the anniversary of this personal favourite of mine: on this day Danny Ward signed a new four year deal that means, unless we can trick somebody into buying him this summer (third time’s the charm, right?), he will still be here until June 2025.
At the time he wasn’t even the number one goalkeeper, we saved that disaster for the later months. Sorry Danny, you’re in here more than once. It’s possibly a little unfair to single out his extension, and wages, because this was a pretty consistent problem across the board but it’s the best recent example given our struggle to move on players in Ward’s position.
5) 2nd May 2021 - Outfoxing the Supercomputer…unfortunately
Missing out on the Champions League one year may be forgiven, given we’re not one of the traditional big six. Blowing it two years running? Unforgivable really. Losing out on the last day of the season having needed not only our own result, but other teams to go our way is a long stretch and a loss to Tottenham (of course it had to be them) meant we didn’t make the Champions League again.
The Supercomputer had put our chances pretty high in both years. The aforementioned Brendan extension wasn’t really delivering the on field results his salary (earning more than those finishing above us) demanded. Quite how the club kept budgeting on the assumption we’d make it after this is akin to the Einstein quote about insanity.
We’re still regularly told we are ungrateful for those two seasons of finishing fifth because we ‘overperformed’ when in reality, most of us were and are still mad at the way we blew the chance at fourth place and limped home each season.
6) Summer of 2021 - Gambling by retaining our best players
While we’d grown a little more used to seeing bigger transfer fees and ‘bigger’ signings, albeit with a mixed track record, this summer we stuck to our guns and didn’t sell anybody. Previously we’d always sold one or two, for tidy profits and used those funds to strengthen the squad.
This time it was a gamble to see what we could do with a full, unchanged, squad. A few more contract extensions followed but nothing seemed too outlandish.
We had European football to plan for, after all. It seemed like a gamble that was worth it at the time.
7) 5th May 2022 - No storia d’amore in Roma
Not even two years ago, yet it feels a whole lifetime ago now. The second leg of the Europa Conference League semi final still feels like a huge wasted opportunity. The beginning of the end for Rodgers, if it hadn’t already felt apparent.
We went to the Stadio Olimpico level at 1-1. This was a huge opportunity for us, we knew exactly how Mourinho would set up his Roma team and…we had no answer. It was a flat performance and we were beaten by our biggest weakness; set pieces.
Lorenzo Pellegrini delivered a perfect ball for Tammy Abraham to head home eleven minutes in. And we never really took it to the home side or made them work hard. They went on to win the final, and then got to the Europa League final the year after. Incredibly different fortunes.
8) 3rd August 2022 - Bon voyage, Kasper
Admittedly, we don’t know how much of a decision this was by the club and what weight Kasper Schmeichel himself had in it. But losing your first choice goalkeeper and club captain just days before the Premier League season is poor. We either had no time or no intention of even trying to replace him, instead we either decided Danny Ward was good enough or Brendan Rodgers’ hands were tied. Given the infamous quote of ‘he deserves this’ you have to think it’s the former.
This was the first alarm bell of last season. Your club captain doesn’t usually leave out of the blue, days before the campaign kicks off. Perhaps he was doing us a favour, getting his wages off the books would have helped as one of the top earners. But could his leadership and goalkeeping have helped keep us up? I hate myself for playing this game of ifs, buts and maybe, but there we go.
Either way, the decision to stick with Ward for the foreseeable wasn’t pretty or smart. There’s a huge argument for what might have happened if we’d dropped him after the Arsenal away game in September.
9) January Transfer Window 2023 - Just throw money at something
It was a tough choice between this and any of the key games from last season, but this one felt the weirdest. Rodgers’ job never felt secure all season, in keeping with how fragile the whole club looked. Yet we let him have the Christmas period to keep churning out the same tired looking side to deliver the same half-hearted performances.
Then we let him spend some money? Whether he hand picked the individuals or not, we spent quite a lot, a roll of the dice, while not rolling the main one and giving ourselves time to recover from the Brendan era. Instead, we ended up with Harry Souttar, who must regret his move given his pretty much instant exile, and Victor Kristiansen, who is merrily in the hunt for a Champions League spot in Serie A with Bologna, playing every week (what about Tete? - Ed).
Neither look like wise investments, which ties nicely to how few actually good investments we have made in recent years in the transfer market.
10) March 6th 2023 - The infamous Tweet that still haunts us all
There’s no new commentary here (everything that can be said has been) but it would be criminal to not have it as one of the worst things. How has it only been twelve months?! It hasn’t aged any better either, although it’s been amusing seeing it tweaked to match the financial position. If you can’t laugh, you’ll just be even more miserable about it all.
At the time of posting we’d lost four in a row and were sat 15th. Do I respect James Maddison more for still not deleting it and allowing it to be churned out repeatedly? Not really. It just brings back the bizarre, nonchalance in which the whole club except the fans went sleepwalking into 2024 and into relegation.
It seems insane that this tweet only preceded the actual relegation by two months. You may as well have put the red R next to us straight away. Instead, we muddled on a little bit more before finally sacking Brendan Rodgers on April 2nd and then frittering away some games on interim managers before appointing Dean Smith as a final, pretty limp looking, effort to save ourselves.
Based on everything that preceded it, the damage was already done. Damage we’ll be bearing the cost of for some time based on this week’s news.
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