Not so long ago, the story we told ourselves as Leicester fans was that our club was one of the good ones. We were a well-run club, we thought, and it’s smugly satisfying to know you support a well-run club. We had got relegated, we said sadly, because we were not willing to (over)spend the money needed to stay up when things had gone wrong, unlike some of the others still in the Premier League. This narrative was reinforced when we saw how well we’d (apparently) prepared for success in the Championship, as we got off to our flying start last autumn.
We don’t think any of that any more.
Leicester’s accounts were published this week and they’re grim reading. Leicester made a £90m loss in 2022-23 - the fifth consecutive annual loss, following four consecutive years of profit - in the process spending 116% (sic) of its total (sic) revenue on wages.
I confess I have a little bit of sympathy for the club here. We punched above our weight for several seasons, winning trophies, getting into Europe and breaking records with abandon, and it was fantastic to be part of. But buying and keeping players of the quality to allow that success to be maintained, season after season - as we fans demanded, of course - is costly. It required the club to keep spending and hoping that that spending would buy the future success needed to keep generating the money to fund the outlay; unlike bigger clubs, we don’t have the breadth and depth of commercial and matchday revenue to sustain that spending even when things go wrong, or to buy our way out of trouble if we need to.
So last season, it seems we couldn’t afford to sack Brendan Rodgers when it was clear things were going badly wrong, but we couldn’t afford to keep him either. We were like a one-club Ponzi scheme, constantly needing another success or another big sale to keep the money flowing and prevent the whole pack of cards collapsing; or perhaps we were one of those cartoon characters that runs off a cliff and keeps going until they notice the ground has disappeared beneath them, and then they look down, feet still flailing frantically, and then fall off the screen comically (except we weren’t laughing). Even before the Rodgers era plunged to the ground, Covid seems to have caused us serious problems, cutting off revenue streams and messing up the transfer market that had previously been central to our success; before that, we had sold one good player for a juicy profit each year (and though we - sometimes - didn’t like losing the players, we were good at it and we enjoyed the money they brought in); but we failed to do that in 2021, and the cards wobbled alarmingly.
What was the alternative? Ideally the club would have done what they did but without the bad decisions, of course - all that money wasted on players who never lived up to the promise of their YouTube highlights, and who were never going to be the next Mahrez. Maybe that would have worked. But Leicester had to take risks - even with our pyramid scheme we couldn’t afford proven top players; and risks, by definition, don’t always come off. No club can get every transfer and every contract renegotiation right, and we could not afford costly mistakes like bigger clubs can. We had to try and find the next Mahrez (and Morgan and Vardy), but we couldn’t rely on punts on £400k players in the way that we had in previous years, not when we were competing in Europe.
So perhaps we should have scaled back our ambition, sold our best players rather than pay them the wages needed to keep them at the club, and enjoy tweaking the noses of the big clubs every now and again? That would have been more pragmatic and sustainable: forget those blue BMWs, we should have offloaded our unaffordable assets after the title win and trusted the scouting department to find our next stars, and try and build another great team. We should have been content to be a plucky underdog, relying on our wits to compete with the best and perhaps pull off an occasional shock.
Of course, we fans would have hated that. We’d have railed against the money men, and urged the club to follow our dreams (and Vichai’s), and leave the trophyless pragmatism to the likes of Brighton1. We would have mourned the European nights under the lights we’d never have known, and could only have imagined the sheer absurdity of what we actually achieved in that period.
Instead, as we cheered, the money men (and women) were left to sit in a dark corner at Seagrave, watching a club whose minds were scrambled by the title win, shaking their heads as we cheered the FA Cup win and mourned not quite making the Champions League; and they nervously wondered how long the dream would last and what would happen when we woke up.
They’re about to find out.
It seems quite likely (to put it mildly) that Leicester will be found guilty of breaches of one league or another’s Profit and Sustainability Rules. So if we get promoted to the Premier League next season, we could be starting with a points deduction, and facing a transfer ban, and perhaps having to sell some of our best players too (there were rumours we might have to sell KDH in January, and we can now see why: I would be amazed if he’s still wearing a Leicester shirt next season). That’s going to be grim. Simply staying in the Premier League in those circumstances, with a worse squad than we have this season, would be a major achievement. Even if we did, we would have a lot of ground to claw back to where we were last time we were there.
That’s the best case scenario, though. If we fail to get promoted next month, we’ll have to cope with similar constraints, but without the income we get from being in the Premier League. It’s hard to see many of this season’s squad sticking around: we simply won’t be able to afford them. What a sad end that would be to the Vardy party.
The idea that we wouldn’t get promoted would have seemed ridiculous even a few weeks ago, following our delicious, record-breaking start to the season. But a slump in form over the last few weeks - it’s impossible to say whether and how the financial problems have been a factor in us losing a group of games we’d have mostly won easily earlier in the season - combined with the ridiculous good form of both Leeds and Ipswich, means we are currently not even in the automatic promotion places (though it’s so close, we would be top again if we won our single game in hand over those other two).
A comfortable win against Norwich on Monday eased our nerves a bit, but we’ll need to win most - and maybe all - of the remaining seven games of the season to be confident of going up. We can, incidentally, no longer beat Reading’s record Championship points total of 106, which until recently seemed like an easy target: win every remaining game and we will just match it. So competitive is the league this season that we (or hopefully one of our rivals) could plausibly get over 100 points and not be automatically promoted.
Many fans are bitterly angry about all this, understandably, and demanding that club heads should roll. Personally, though, I’m quite phlegmatic, as I was when we got relegated last season. I don’t see any point in screaming into a void. I don’t want to spend time thinking about the club as a plc. As long as there’s (hopefully entertaining) football at the KP I’ll watch it and cheer; and as I look back wistfully at past glories, I’ll also know I never thought they’d last.
I’ve also got the women’s team to turn to, and they’re still doing OK in their top flight. Though they too suffered a shock last month, as manager Willie Kirk, suspended in early March reportedly for having a relationship with one of his players, was dismissed last Thursday; having been out of sight for several weeks, his departure felt inevitable by the time he went. There is nothing much to be said about this: Kirk had done an impressive job during his eighteen months or so in charge, with the team playing some wonderful attacking football, if only intermittently. Rightly, none of the details of what happened have become public, but if a manager (or indeed any employee) is found ‘to have breached the team’s code of conduct to a degree that makes his position untenable’, as the Club’s statement says, then obviously they have to go.
Under the interim manager, Jennifer Foster, suddenly thrust into a spotlight she presumably neither expected nor wanted, the team has lost two league games (including a ‘thrilling for the neutral’ match against Brighton ten days ago, which cruelly exposed some defensive weaknesses) and drawn one; but we did beat Liverpool to get to an FA Cup semi-final for the first time, against Spurs: I shall be going to that match, the weekend after next, which will be my first visit to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium.
The Women are effectively, if not mathematically, safe from the threat of relegation from the WSL, so I hope - whether under Foster or a new manager, if an appointment can be made quickly - that we will throw everything at that semi-final and give ourselves a chance of Wembley glory, either against Chelsea (beaten by the men on that memorable day three years ago as we emerged from Covid) or Manchester United. Nothing to stress about there; Spurs will be favourites, so losing to them in the semi would be a mild disappointment but no more, and we could hold our heads high.
No danger of a mild disappointment watching the men, though. This season is all or nothing. While the women play seemingly oblivious to their off-field issues, the men have to endure playing with theirs hanging ominously and conspicuously over them, growling at every turn, and we in turn have to endure the stress of watching them. And then, grimacingly, we’ll have to suffer whatever happens after that.
Ask not for whom the whistle blows; it blows for the fans.
Maybe Brighton, or a similarly ‘well-run’ club, will find a way to square the financial circle as we didn’t, and good luck to them; but I fear in any case that we’ll be playing them in the Championship in a few years.