Rational pessimism
Leicester City season preview, 2024-25
Club football is approaching the end of its annual summer hibernation, the previews are beginning, and FPL is presenting us with yet more conundrums (to Haaland or not to Haaland?) And Leicester, back in the Premier League (yay, VAR controversy…) after a season trying out the Championship, are favourites for relegation1, and probably rightly so. So the enticing prospect of an unremittingly difficult season awaits.
I can’t help reflecting back ten years, when Leicester were about to return to the Premier League for the first time in a decade, and my son and I got season tickets for the first time2. I still remember the early games that season - our first two home matches were entertaining, encouraging draws against Everton and Arsenal, followed by a glorious comeback victory against Manchester United in mid-September: we were 3-1 down with half an hour to go, and ended up winning 5-3, with a promising striker called Vardy scoring or assisting all five; that is still the greatest game I’ve been to despite all that has happened since. But then we barely won another game until the following April, by which time we looked certain to be relegated, at which point we started a miraculous run that kept us up - and then somehow just continued, eventually taking us to the title the following season.
Everything now feels jaded compared to the naive optimism of 2014, when it seemed like we had little to lose and much to play for. Today’s Leicester squad has far more Premier League experience than its 2014 counterpart (but what we would give to have a Cambiasso, Nugent or Ulloa now, let alone a 2014-vintage Vardy!) In 2024 it feels like we’re a club that punched itself in the face a couple of seasons ago, knocking ourselves comically out of the ring, and we’re now sheepishly trying to climb back up hoping no-one is still laughing. But - to mix the metaphor - the rest of the Premier League has left us behind in the dust while we were tending our bruises, and clubs that we once thought of as equals, or even looked down upon, now have ambitions and transfers we can only dream of. We need to get used to that: Fulham, Brentford and Palace are now unarguably better-run clubs with better teams than we have, and Villa is in the Champions League, while we’re just about to take a loan signing from Brighton; and while the pendulum may swing back in a few years, we have to deal with the world as it is now, which has us already standing on the creaking relegation trapdoor.
So while in 2014 we were wide-eyed with delight at getting to share some of the Premier League’s riches and having the opportunity to play the big, famous teams once more (Ulloa, bought for £8m from Brighton that summer, ‘cost a fortune’, we sang), now we just need the PL money to stop our accumulated financial problems getting worse; and there’s an unavoidable sense of regret that we’ve let slip so much of what we had in our hands just a few seasons ago.
Look at our likely starting XI and it looks decent, though: Coady, Faes, Ricardo3, Justin, Winks, Ndidi, Cordova-Reid and Vardy have all played regularly at this level. Hermansen in goal should do OK, and we’ve got some interesting options on the wings. I’m disappointed that last season’s manager Enzo Maresca left after just one season - though it seems to me a big risk for both him and Chelsea - but I’m not convinced he had in him the pragmatism and grit to steer a team that will be in an almost inevitable relegation battle; the new manager, Welshman Steve Cooper, who we now have to forget was previously at Forest (where he was mostly popular by all accounts4), seems like a good choice: pragmatic and experienced at relegation battles (as the recently-appointed manager of then-Championship Forest he masterminded Leicester’s notorious 4-1 FA Cup defeat, when we were holders, in early 2022).
But I worry about our attack, where we are weaker than we were this time last year in the Championship. Those fans who have been following the pre-season matches (which I tend to ignore, because they are generally poor guides to the season ahead) are worried by the lack of creativity, as Cooper searches for his best options.
On the wings we still have Mavididi and Fatawu (who we unwisely came to love when he was on loan last season, but thankfully he has now joined us permanently), both of whom have the potential to do well in the Prem. But we’ve had to sell Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, probably our best player last season5. We’ve also lost three of the other attacking midfielders we had at the beginning of last season, Casadei, Praet and Yunus. New loan signing Buonanotte (not yet confirmed) and Cordova-Reid, who has just joined on a free from Fulham6, will presumably be options for the 10 role (assuming that new signing, 18-year old Michael Golding, is one for the future, as is academy product Will Alves) - unless one of the wingers shows they can play there. There are plenty of rumours (some of which might even be credible) that we’ll get another attacker signed before August is up, and I hope they’re right, but the clock is ticking for that first game.
Up front, Kelechi Iheanacho has ended his inconsistent - variously brilliant and terrible, sometimes within the same game - stay at the King Power and gone to Sevilla. I’ll be happy to see Vardy have another shot at scoring in the Premier League (he currently has 136 goals, 15th in the PL list) but he showed last season that age is catching up with him - he’ll be 38 in January - and we really shouldn’t be relying on him. Patson Daka never quite gives us confidence, and Cannon has had some good moments but doesn’t seem ready to lead the line. I’d really worry if we don’t get a new striker before the transfer window closes.
Nonetheless, despite the lack of depth in attack, if you take a step back and squint a little, and if Vardy stays fit, our best XI is decent for a newly-promoted team; and if Cooper can find a way to get them to gel we’ve got a chance of doing well.
So it would be possible to make a case for a somewhat stubborn optimism about the coming season, if it were not for the threat of a points deduction hanging over us, for breach of the league’s Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR). It seems quite likely that in the coming months we will have a hefty deduction (potentially ten points or more) because of past overspending (my reflections on this here).
Teams aiming to avoid relegation normally aim for 40 points over a 38-game season (West Ham were relegated in 2002-03 with 42 points, but that was before Manchester City and those competing with them gobbled up almost all the points they could find, making 90+ points the norm for those at the top, and leaving fewer for those at the bottom). There are no obviously woeful teams this season (but one team or another could yet surprise us), so there’s currently no reason to think mid-30s would be enough to stay up.
So if we receive a ten-point deduction for breaching PSR, we’ll need to aim for 50 points to be confident of avoiding relegation, a total that is normally comfortably mid-table (we scored over 50 points in the four seasons preceding relegation, but that was with an established and stable squad).
We could get to 50 points, for example, by winning twelve games and drawing 14, meaning we could only afford to lose twelve (if we can win 13, we could lose 14). We’ll play the richest six teams twelve times, and will probably lose most of those games, which means we could barely afford to lose any games against any other teams. Given the quality of some of those teams (Villa and Newcastle, for example) that’s a huge ask (and explains the title of this blog). There have been rumours of a deduction as high as 15 points, and then it would be very hard to make any plausible case for us avoiding the drop.
To exacerbate the problems, the squad is weaker than it would have been without the alleged PSR breach - as noted, we’ve had to sell our best player from last season, and to avoid any future PSR risk we can’t afford to spend as much money as we’d probably want to get the squad ‘Premier League ready’. The transfer challenges encapsulate the intractability of our PSR problem: a kind of Catch-22 where the players we can afford and who are willing to join us may not be good enough for what we need - avoiding relegation, even with a points deduction - because they will be good enough to play for clubs which are safe from relegation7. We are therefore less attractive to these players, so will presumably have to pay them a premium (which will further limit our spending power) to attract them, and get them to accept relegation clauses in their contracts. I feel like I’m going round in circles just thinking about it. It feels unfair, but then other clubs would say the same of our apparent overspending. Backs to the wall, lads…
To mitigate these financial challenges8 the club needs to try and maximise earnings from other sources, in a way Leicester fans are not used to. So we’ve joined the list of Premier League clubs with a main shirt sponsor that is a mysterious betting company you won’t find on any British high street. While understandable, this is hugely disappointing, and I certainly won’t be buying a men’s replica shirt this season (the women9 still have King Power as their sponsor, reinforcing that the club is not in financial difficulty as such, it’s just trying to maximise earnings for the men’s team that count for PSR). The club has also been charging fans £10 to watch pre-season matches on the website, one of those little irritations that symbolises for many the current disconnect between the club and its fans, along with the grumblings a few months ago about paying for season ticket cards.
So lots of fans are angry and/or disillusioned, with the Club in general and with the Director of Football in particular (even though none of us outside the Club really know his role or how responsible he is for the current problems, so I’m uneasy about the way some fans single him out). I can understand the grumpiness, but personally I don’t see the point in getting cross: there’s nothing I can do about all the off-field stuff, so I’m going to turn up at the KP each week and hope the team gives us something worth cheering about, with at least some moments of hope.
In the light of all this, it’s possible to construct different, entirely plausible stories about how this season might play out. If things go badly, we could be a few games into the season without a win, struggling to score, with the players barely seeming to know each other or what they’re supposed to be doing, and fans grumbling loudly (on social media and in the stadium) about the manager. Then a big points deduction is announced and the season stretches ahead without hope, and we get through only with gallows humour, while the increasingly toxic atmosphere in the stadium acts as a drag on players’ confidence and commitment. Cooper goes before Christmas and the cause is taken up by someone else willing to have a go at an impossible cause, hopeful they’ll do enough to keep the job when we inevitably return to the Championship. Vardy barely scores all season and announces his retirement in May, the sad end to a great career. The announcement of a fan vote for ‘player of the season’ leads to hollow laughs. And this time next year we’ll be getting annoyed by the Second Tier Pod again.
On the other hand, perhaps we’ll do something like we did ten years ago, an underdog scrapping for early points, maybe including a famous but barely-deserved victory in the opening game against Spurs; and a few games into the season we’ve already sprung a few shocks and the team is looking like it knows what it’s doing and can hold its own in this league. Cooper is a genius! One of our unsung players (maybe Tom Cannon or Kasey McAteer) might have an unexpectedly good season, and go on to become a Leicester legend in the years ahead. When the points deduction is eventually announced it’s less than we’d feared, and we can reset our expectations and look ahead to the possibility of avoiding relegation without seeming ludicrously optimistic. What an achievement it would be, in the face of everything, to be above the line at the end of the season.
Neither of these scenarios, nor any in between, would particularly surprise me. It’s all part of the joy, tedium and stress of being a football fan, which will be rekindled when the referee’s whistle blows at 8pm on Monday week. Despite everything that could go wrong, and quite probably will, I can’t wait.
You can get odds of 1/3 [sic] if you want.
He quickly got bored, and my daughter had taken his seat by the end of that first season.
If I was going to recommend a Leicester FPL option it would probably be £4.5m Ricardo, who is classified as a defender but may be asked to invert as an attacking winger, so could get plenty of attacking points; but give me a few weeks to see how things go before I put my Fantasy money where my mouth is.
A Forest-supporting friend on Cooper: ‘Love him. Nothing to do with success, but before and after him Forest were a club that was difficult to enjoy supporting. He gets it.’
Many of our recent financial problems can arguably be traced back to ending the annual tradition of selling one of our best players for a hefty profit, so in that sense alone maybe getting some money for KDH is a positive.
And must be the only Premier League footballer whose sibling is an MP, Marsha de Cordova.
That’s presumably why we’re struggling to get a new striker.
There is a good, if sobering, discussion of the issues with football finances on this podcast: https://www.theguardian.com/football/audio/2024/jul/31/a-football-finance-special-before-the-new-season-football-weekly.
Leicester Women start their fourth consecutive WSL season next month. Much to be positive about there - an exciting new manager, lots of new players, and no threat of a points deduction. I’ll write about that in a few weeks.