Surely Leicester City's players are better than this?
Leicester City are in a Premier League relegation battle despite having some cracking players. What gives?
Yesterday was a big day for non-league football. The FA announced its league allocations, navigating a tangle of promotions, relegations, reprieves and ground grading issues and attempting to place every team into a regionally viable competition for the year.
Every year there is a clutch of clubs who draw short straws and enter into an appeal process that generates no winners. For every club moved in an apparently absurd direction is an over-subscribed division they’ve left behind and a division that needs them. For every successful appeal is a compromise elsewhere.
It’s a thankless task for the FA and there’s not a whole hell of a lot they can do differently. Geography is geography. But the number of clubs complaining of a lack of consultancy is worth noting.
Engaging with every club doesn’t solve anything practically but there’s no denying that the element of surprise is unwelcome.
Anyway, I don’t get paid to find a way to make that work any more than I do for this newsletter so let’s get into something else.
Surely Leicester City's players are better than this?
There’s not a lot Dean Smith could do in his career to weaken my affection. Smith’s time as the manager of Aston Villa was special. He united his club, my club. It felt connected and focused and it achieved its aim on the pitch: get back to the Premier League and stay there.
Smith is now battling to stay there again in the unfamiliar role of relegation firefighter. It was a curious appointment presumably designed in part to take right-hand man Craig Shakespeare back to Leicester City with him.
It was as strange a decision for Smith as Leicester but he and they could yet pull it off. I sincerely hope they do. Should they fall short, theirs will be one of the Premier League’s more remarkable relegations not because they are relatively recent champions but because Leicester have more than a few players with formidable reputations.
Leicester sit in 19th place in the table and are two points short of safety with two matches remaining. They face Newcastle United away and then West Ham United at home and they are, to put it bluntly, in deep shit.
This predicament is all the more surprising because former manager Brendan Rodgers has enough strengths as a coach to offset an apparent difficulty with defending set pieces and habitual patchiness of form. Relegation should – should – have been no more than a distant possibility.
But what of those players? The ones who’ve been there and done it. The ones who’ll walk out onto the field with Premier League teams in August. The ones who won the FA Cup under Rodgers’ guidance. What’s happened to them?
I’m not a Leicester supporter or expert. I don’t have the inherent understanding of their spiral from one end of the table to the other. All I have is curiosity about the situation, access to information and a fondness for watching what I consider even now to be an entertaining football team.
It might surprise supporters of a team in danger of the drop that some of the current Foxes crop still have a fear factor. In my case, that's James Maddison and Harvey Barnes.
Maddison is one of my favourite players in the country. He puts me on the edge of my seat because he does brilliant, mad things. His technical ability on the ball is excellent but it’s his imagination that really makes him a player. He’s great to watch, and while he’s endured some dips in form at Leicester there’s no doubt he’s been a terrific signing.
In terms of goals and assists per 90 minutes Maddison is more productive this season than at any point in his career bar 35 prolific minutes for Norwich City in 2016/17. That’s borne out in his expected goals and assists, albeit with a couple of penalties leading to a higher number of expected goals but a lower number of actual goals than in 2021/22.
If Maddison’s missed penalty is the difference between his contribution to one team that finished eighth and another heading for relegation, perhaps his culpability is as minimal as the eye test suggests. Certainly his passing data are similar across the board – indeed many metrics have been improved upon – and his shot creation is up significantly. The conversion of those shots is a different matter.
Barnes, too, has found some extra quality in the final third, recapturing some of his 2020/21 form in front of goal after a more wasteful season last time around. But he’s managed just a single assist this term, a tenth of last season’s count, from an expected assists number that’s only halved.
So, who’s not putting away those chances? At 36, Jamie Vardy is understandably and inevitably in decline. He’s had an outstanding career and has 136 Premier League goals and a title to his name. He has been, still can be, absolutely lethal. His scoring record last season looks even more incredible when compared against a much lower rate in 2022/23.
The players Leicester need to ease the team’s reliance on Vardy in his footballing dotage are Kelechi Iheanacho and Patson Daka. Both have their virtues and both are arguably blunted somewhat by a relative paucity of playing minutes.
Iheanacho has had better seasons and worse in front of goal but has an ability to progress the ball and generate attacking opportunities. Daka left Austria with deserved praise ringing in his ears after scoring 51 Bundesliga goals in two seasons for Red Bull Salzburg. I watched him a lot in those two seasons and he’s yet to hit the same high notes in the East Midlands even beyond the drop in goals.
Nevertheless, after 36 matches Leicester have scored 49 goals in the Premier League in 2022/23. That’s the most in the bottom half. It’s 13 more than Chelsea in 11th. It’s one more than Aston Villa in the top half. It’s only two fewer than Manchester United. While it’s reductive to just point the finger at Leicester’s defending, it really is the obvious place to look.
The absentees are as notable as those playing at the back. Leicester captain Jonny Evans returned against Liverpool after a long injury lay-off. Ricardo Pereira has missed a chunk of the season. James Justin’s Achilles tendon injury dates back to the autumn. Ryan Bertrand hasn’t been able to play a Premier League game since October 2021.
Then there’s Jannik Vestergaard – an iffy signing that was recognised as such at the time – and Caglar Söyüncü, the 26-year-old central defender who played almost as many UEFA Europa League games in 2021/22 as he has Premier League games in 2022/23.
Before dropping out of the side at the start of last May, anticipating a move away that never came and facing criticism from his manager for his application in training, Söyüncü was a Rodgers regular. Five of his seven appearances this season came in the five matches before the Liverpool defeat.
Smith has some decent defensive players in his squad. Timothy Castagne is one of them. Wout Faes is not. Left back options Victor Kristiansen and Luke Thomas are in their very early twenties and experiencing a Premier League relegation battle for the first time. It just isn’t enough.
Leicester have lost key players at the back over the years. Kasper Schmeichel left last summer and the number one shirt passed from Danny Ward to Daniel Iversen with quarter of this season remaining. The sale of Wesley Fofana made them a fortune but he hasn’t been any more effectively replaced than Schmeichel.
Ultimately, we could say the same of Wes Morgan and Harry Maguire before them. N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez might be better players. They weren’t, it seems, bigger losses.
Irrespective of whether they’re relegated, Leicester are preparing to lose or jettison yet more significant members of their first team squad.
According to Transfermarkt and with the implicit caveats that come with that, the end of the season brings to a conclusion the contracts of Evans, Söyüncü, Bertrand, Youri Tielemans, Daniel Amartey and Nampalys Mendy. The 2024 batch includes Maddison, Iheanacho, Vardy and Wilfred Ndidi; at least three of them are unlikely to make it that far.
Not being burdened by long unwanted contracts can be a financial blessing for relegated teams but the Foxes aren’t down yet. Nevertheless, the imminent end of an era must make the Championship look a scary place to be should their miracle not materialise.
That they have players who’ll be in demand at the top end of the Premier League is a frustration Leicester supporters will find too hard to bear. Their club has got it wrong over the last couple of years. Did they hang on to Rodgers for too long? Might he have kept them up anyway? Was Smith the right replacement at the right time?
We’ll never know the answers to these questions. What the supporters who booed Leicester even in the first half and at half time against Liverpool do know is that their perilous position was avoidable.
Alan Smith, the colour commentator on Sky Sports for Leicester’s comprehensive defeat by Liverpool at the King Power, made an observation early in the second half that summed it up.
“It’s in there somewhere for Leicester, isn’t it?” he mused.
It is, and it has been all along. But that just makes it worse.
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“Southampton could well come back quickly and may even come back stronger; relegation does at least allow for a full spring clean. But leaving the Premier League, given the broadcasting revenues on offer, is never a good thing.
“The first full season of a new ownership regime ends with Southampton rock bottom of the league. They may be preaching that this is the time to stick together, but trust takes a lot longer to win back than it does to be lost.”
Daniel Storey on Southampton’s tame and disappointing relegation from the top flight. Their wounds will take time to heal and it feels like rather a lot of that has passed since we all wanted our teams to copy them.
Salty beef extracts
‘We lost everything’: The Ukrainian football club destroyed by war but reborn in Brazil (i)
Coventry’s Ben Wilson: ‘A rollercoaster? I’ve never been at the top to come back down’ (The Guardian)
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Have a week.