Why Leicester should sell Wesley Fofana
ITK Leicester City guru John Percy reported this week that the club would only consider a ‘record’ fee for Wesley Fofana. But what if we shouldn’t only consider it, but accept it as well?
There is a received wisdom in the NFL that if you aren’t competing for a title, you’re rebuilding.
The parallel doesn’t transition perfectly to the Premier League. In the NFL, even if you lose every game, the worst that can happen is your entire coaching and managerial staff is fired in disgrace in January. In the Best League In The World, the existential threat of being forced to go to Barnsley looms large over everything.
So we can probably add ‘surviving’ as a third option for life in the big league. But there are certainly some NFL parallels worth thinking about – most notably, the understanding that sometimes, it’s better to trade your most valuable asset for capital you can use later to build a better team.
Fofana is Leicester's most valuable asset by some distance. Right now, his value is close to £100m, given the length of his contract and the new Chelsea owner’s desperate need to impress people.
Yesterday, we polled the folks here at TFW towers on whether we should sell Fofana. The consensus was, effectively, ‘no’. There are plenty of good reasons for that: he’s really good at football, good players are better to have than bad players, he just signed a new contract, and Chelsea are a disgrace. But there are reasons to take the money as well… and not just because he changed his Twitter bio.
Project refresh
Brendan Rodgers’ infamous hope for a refresh involved getting ‘five or six’ new players in. Right now, pending the much-heralded arrival of Alex Smithies, we are at a net minus two.
On top of that, a week into the season, our starting right-back is out for six months, the only winger at the club has the sort of two-week injury that normally keeps Leicester players out for most of the season, and we’ve settled on a caretaker goalkeeper to see us through the year.
None of this really screams ‘challenging for the top six’. And that’s before we get to the relatively minor issue that as soon as we face the first trickle of pressure in a game, it floods the moat and drowns half our team. There is clearly a serious issue with both the injury record and mental strength of most of our team that is going to prevent us from breaking the Sky Six monopoly again.
This is the end-game of the first Rodgers cycle. Next summer, there are eight members of the senior squad out of contract. We can probably assume Bouba Soumare and Jannik Vestergaard will be gone by then as well. Even if we have to bury the latter under a car park to get rid of him.
Along with those 10, we have Fofana. Leicester have actually dealt with him well, and by signing him to a long-term deal in March we have all the leverage. But he is not going to be here beyond next summer, which means we’re looking at having to replace half of the first team squad.
Sell Elvis to buy The Beatles
£100m might be less than it was, but it can still get you quite a lot. With that you can build a new training ground, redevelop the stadium, or pay your gas bill for a fortnight.
Most importantly, that money can buy Leicester three or four top-level targets. It can sort out a new long-term deal for James Maddison, which should be Priority One at this point. It can give the new head of recruitment, fresh from a well-earned sabbatical, the financial power to fix the issues we all know are holding the team back right now.
The riposte might be that the £100m will still be on offer next summer, but we really have no way of knowing if that’s the case. Football moves fast and our bargaining position might not be as strong in a year’s time. We might get less money, or we might spend weeks embroiled in a transfer saga in lieu of doing anything to address our problems.
In an ideal world, this would have been a discussion for earlier in the summer. In an ideal world, our transfer guru wouldn’t be sipping cocktails in the Canaries in the middle of the transfer window. In an ideal world, we would have some defenders to step in who we had some confidence in. But this isn’t an ideal world.
The Amartey party
There are many obvious issues with selling our best defender without a replacement a fortnight before the end of the window. The most pressing is that most of our other defenders aren’t very good. But stay with me here, because once we accept the following statement, we might be able to be free from worry and doubt.
We can’t defend as it is.
Even with Fofana, we concede two goals a game. How much worse can things get? Rodgers tends to ask a huge amount of the most talented individuals to bail out failings in the system, it might actually be better to force him to accept the team’s limitations.
Given the absence of Harvey Barnes and Ricardo Pereira, we seem locked into a back three for the foreseeable future. There is an argument to be made (in next week’s edition of captain contrarian) that a back three might suit the defenders that we have – particularly the likes of Daniel Amartey and, dare we say it, Vestergaard himself.
This is not a brilliant scenario to contemplate. It may be tempting fate to an outrageous degree to proclaim that we aren’t going to get relegated just because we lose a centre-back. But the best thing to do for the long term might be to take as many wheelbarrows of money as we can handle and make for the hills.