The winds of change are howling
Jannik Vestergaard’s dog is the hero we need right now.
Over the weekend, John Percy dropped an all-time classic piece of reporting. In it he revealed, among other things, that Jannik Vestergaard sleeps over at the training ground and, on one occasion, brought his dog to stay along with him.
The sight of an enormous man walking a small dog around Leicester City’s multi-million pound training ground the following morning, presumably stopping every now and again to take a slash on the pristine turf, appears to have been a bit of a shock to those who rolled up the Seagrave driveway.
If nothing else, Vestergaard’s dog is going to go down in Leicester City folklore. When he passes from this world, he should be stuffed and displayed alongside James Maddison’s tweet and the ‘Enzo I miss u’ banner forever more. Memorials to the era when the club scaled new heights of comedy every six months.
But while Sir Woofsalot stole the headlines, to focus on that part of the story is to bark up the wrong tree (that’s the only one, I promise). The rest of the reporting laid bare a bewildering array of faults behind the scenes, and is another dagger in the heart of the current Leicester City regime.
This piece is the latest in a line of stories from national media outlets highlighting the shambolic state of the club. A club that has, despite everything, run a pretty tight ship over the past few years, has sprung a leak, and the water is pouring into the boardroom.
We have to resign ourselves to the fact that we aren’t going to see any significant changes this season. But the tide has turned now, the (lack of) leadership is being exposed in a way that has never happened before. There’s no turning back.
A furry friend
It is not surprising that it’s Vestergaard at the centre of this story, a man who is essentially a running walking example of the nonsensical way in which Leicester operate.
He is clearly a bit of a character, in the sense that he seems to a) do his own thing and b) be a human being with human feelings, rather than a footballing automaton.
When he turned down a move away a couple of years ago, he subsequently explained it was because his wife was pregnant and he didn’t want to move the family.
“I can’t leave my pregnant wife alone in England with our other child – and soon a baby – and obviously I don’t want to be away in the first months of my baby’s life. What man could do that? I don’t want to be at a place where they don’t use me, but before being a football player, I am a husband and father.”
It is entirely on brand that he is the player who would ask if he could bring his dog to the training ground and get the liaison officer to sort a dog-walker while he was training.
It’s also quite reasonable for the club to accommodate these sort of requests, that might eliminate pressures and stresses from their players’ lives, even if they are a bit weird. Yes, a multi-millionaire could probably afford to hire a dog-sitter, but human beings can get very attached to their pets.
Unless the dog is running around, crapping all over the 18 yard box and causing chaos with the offside line, it’s not much of a problem. Vestergaard’s Leicester career shows that he typically performs when he is wanted and valued, and gets disillusioned and difficult when he isn’t. In that he is probably just an extreme version of the vast majority of footballers.
What this story is, though, is a fantastic metaphor for everything that is rotten at the heart of the club. Now, Leicester are the team who let the players bring their dogs to training.
And, worst of all for the leadership, is the fact this story got into the wild at all.
Revenge
There are several explanations for why this story exists.
It could be that someone hate dogs. It could be that someone hates big Jan. It could be that there is some kind of horrible, Rees-Mogg/Musk-like spectre looming at the club, determined to rid us of any kind of humanity in the workplace.
The more plausible reason is that we now have two ex-employees with an axe to grind.
Despite the fact that the last few years have been awash with failures, Leicester have made essentially no tough decisions. Everyone involved in these failures either still currently works at the club or has been paid off to an enormous degree.
Even most of the players involved in them got to choose to walk away rather than being dispatched, or are folks like Boubakary Soumare, who have stuck around so long that the team has regressed down to their level.
You play nice with King Power and they let you do what you want. You can leave when you want, you get a new long-term contract whenever you ask for one. If you’re the boss, you get a bumper pay off in exchange for being the guy who’s put out there to defend the regime.
In short, there is no one with any desire to break ranks and stick the knife in.
Ruud van Nistelrooy’s decision to sack “Dawson” and “the other guy” a couple of weeks ago has changed things. It is the latest, and largest domino in a game that is going to engulf everyone this summer, all the way up to the previously invincible Jon Rudkin.
The media narrative around Leicester had already changed over the last few weeks. Project Reset has, for its various faults, succeeded in putting the current leadership under the spotlight. Did a single person outside of LE2 know who Rudkin was before the Arsenal game?
Thanks to that protest, virtually all of the ‘real’ media outlets have written about him, and he was picked out in particular by the BT cameras during that game. Percy himself has penned multiple pieces about the state of the recruitment and direction of the club.
Now we have sourced stories popping up that reveal the scale of dysfunction behind the scenes. The internal unity that has protected them for so long is breaking down.
Culture vultures
The Leicester leadership - by which we mean Top - only acts when the situation gets so dire or embarrassing that it’s harder not to make a move. His knowledge and understanding of football, and indeed business in general, is open to question at this point, so it’s only once things are so bad that they cut through into his world that change happens.
It was only once stories of player unrest started to circulate about Claude Puel that he was thrown to the hounds, despite vast sections of the fan base having lost faith in him almost a year beforehand.
Brendan Rodgers was only sacked once Leicester actually dropped into the relegation zone in 2023, despite it being obvious that we were doomed months in advance. Steve Cooper only got the bullet once the players were in open mutiny, despite Leicester being the worst team in the league by almost every metric except league position for the entire first half of the season.
We have reached that point again, where the club’s incompetence has broken into the wider footballing consciousness. Only now it is too difficult to pin the blame entirely on the manager. While Percy’s article outlines some failings of Van Nistelrooy, it is clearly much more focused on the culture of the club.
The dog incident is used more to reflect the fact that “certain players feel they can do what they want”, we have “certain midfielders” taking issue with their roles against Brentford, and Brian Barry-Murphy forced to apologise to players for asking them to do things in training.
Indeed, the subtext reads like Van Nistelrooy might be the only sane man in the asylum, someone trying to change the culture against a wall of institutionalised inertia. He has removed or sidelined coaches who were at the club before he arrived - even “Dawson’s” attempt to leak how much work he was doing by saying he was taking all the training sessions rather explains why he got the sack, given the club has lost almost literally every game during that period.
The article also has Van Nistelrooy attempting to stop the practice of players commuting from hundreds of miles away - something that has been an issue for a long time and which, if nothing else, clearly makes it difficult to create any kind of bond if senior players have half an eye on the traffic on the M1 at all times.
It may be that he ends up as collateral damage anyway. It is difficult to defend a manager who oversees a team that never scores and never wins. But in a way we should be grateful for the way he has allowed the fundamental weakness to be so baldly exposed.
The key point now is that all this is starting to get out into the wild. By enabling Van Nistelrooy - a man who they must have known wouldn’t do things quietly - to come in and break things even as the results collapse, they have exposed themselves. How many more stories like this are we going to get as Leicester slip dismally back into the Championship?
Never embarrass a billionaire
The clock is ticking now on this regime. Rich people don’t like to be embarrassed. We see again and again that it is being laughed at that forces a reaction.
Owning a professional sports team is about status. You want people to fawn over the way you brilliantly masterminded the greatest underdog victory in football history, or you want to self-effacingly cluck over the FA Cup as you do a business deal with Venture Capitalist B, or you want people to come up to you gushing about the taste of the free doughnuts you benevolently hand out at games.
What you do not want is to be milling about the first class lounge and have people start asking about dogs at the training ground. Or journalists calling to ask if one pooped in the honeymoon suite of your £100m dream.
We do not have active leadership. Top only attends a few games, he probably doesn’t even watch the others (and to be fair, who could blame him?), he is not involved in the day to day operations. He is not a Ratcliffe or a Boehly, busily sacking the dinner ladies and selling hotels to himself to allow for vast spending on random left backs from Namibia.
What he does care about is reputation and respect. Of the club and, by extension, his family. One of the few times Top has got actively involved in recent years was when he lectured the squad after Cooper was fired earlier this season.
It is the Thai sex orgies and banners at the Christmas parties that are the agents of change at Leicester. It is those shocks that act as red lines, which break through into their orbit and jolt King Power into action.
The drip, drip, drip of articles exposing how poorly Leicester have been run were already doing their work. The sheer ineptitude of the results, the anger of the crowd, the Project Reset protests, these were all gearing up to suggest there would be significant change in the summer.
Now we have the humiliating cold shower we needed to make sure.
