For some Leicester City fans, being charged £10 to watch a pre-season friendly against Shrewsbury Town was the final straw.
For others, it was the front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with a crypto-gambling company who can’t legally operate in the UK and have, for some unknown reason, one of the most viewed tweets ever. A fair chunk were not best pleased at a demand to pay £25 for a printed season ticket.
This all followed an £880,000 fine from the UK’s competition watchdog for cutting an illegal shirt sale deal with JD Sports, losing over £100m worth of playing talent for free and, of course, the years of steady managed and mismanaged decline leading to a very sudden relegation. First as a drip and then in droves, Leicester fans lost their optimism, ambition and joy.
Now days from starting their ninth Premier League campaign in 10 years, a decade after the promotion which forged a path to nirvana, the squad is somewhere between incomplete and incoherent.
A sword dangles precariously from the King Power Stadium’s roof marked “impending points deduction” which could fall any time in the next six months for breaching Profitability and Sustainability Regulations (PSR). Ignoring it is impossible when it also restricts transfer activity and long-term planning.
There’s also the small matter of losing the Championship-winning manager and reigning Player of the Year, a local lad and academy product, while still relying on the 37-year-old club legend for goals.
Even last season’s promotion campaign, which flirted with its fair share of disaster, was only ever the realisation of base-level expectations.
It’s not difficult to understand how this heady cocktail of chaos and greed has ended in overwhelming apathy. A survey by The Athletic found 69 per cent of fans are pessimistic about the upcoming season.
The impending points deduction is the most severe concern. Despite Leicester being formally charged by the Premier League in March, the process has been dragged out by frivolous legal action suggesting relegation exempted the club from top-flight regulation.
Unsurprisingly they lost and can now expect a six-to-12-point penalty, potentially kicked down the road until after Manchester City’s 115 charges have been heard.
There is also the threat of a second deduction this season, as Everton experienced in 2023-24. The EFL were monitoring Leicester’s real-time losses last season and they have shared this information with the Premier League, which could lead to PSR punishments for both the 2020-2023 and 2021-2024 financial periods.
“All of us assumed we would have some clarity on what the points deduction is going to be by now,” James Knight from The Fosse Way tells i. “Everyone expects there is going to be one.
“That’s definitely contributing to the whole feeling around the club at the moment.
“We’re going into the season not really knowing what you need to do. We probably need four or five more wins than you would normally need to stay up. There’s quite a lot of ambivalence about the new season.”
A common trend of Leicester’s summer is downgrading their transfer targets, from first-choice to fourth or fifth, with players seemingly turned off by the uncertainty and looming deduction.
Juventus’s Matias Soule and Arsenal’s Reiss Nelson were among the primary options, yet the highest-profile deal has been signing Abdul Fatawu from Sporting Lisbon. Considering he spent last season at the King Power, this is hardly a fresh addition.
“The lack of transfer activity is absolutely down to the concern around PSR compliance,” football finance expert Dr Rob Wilson tells i.
“That is also why they let the manager go to Chelsea so easily, because of the compensation package that was agreed. That was money into the bank.
“They’re looking for mitigation if they breach again this season – they can say they’ve not spent the money, they’ve got a degree of profitability, they’ve released players and not signed anyone fresh. They should get £120m for promotion this season.”
There was much excitement when the club were linked to Wilfried Zaha, but are now much more likely to sign his 32-year-old former teammate Jordan Ayew. The Ghanaian has 21 goals in 174 Premier League matches for Crystal Palace, hardly the obvious answer to a goalscoring crisis.
Much of this is also caused by the club’s difficulties selling players.
Wesley Fofana, James Maddison and Harvey Barnes left for decent fees, but Kelechi Iheanacho, Dennis Praet, Caglar Soyuncu, Youri Tielemans, Ayoze Perez, Nampalys Mendy and Daniel Amartey ran down their contracts.
Wages were extortionately high for a Championship side and remain precarious even for a newly-promoted Premier League team.
This has contributed to five consecutive years of losses – including £92.5m in 2021-22 and around £90m in 2022-23. A sixth is inevitably coming. Don’t bet against a seventh.
“We just have been so bad at selling players,” Knight explains.
“It’s definitely much deeper than the relegation.
“Most people would blame Jon Rudkin, the director of football, for allowing it to get to this point, although it’s not actually that clear who’s ultimately responsible.”
“But the way the Leicester football operation works is a bit confusing, everyone assumes he’s the one making decisions, but it’s not actually that clear who’s ultimately responsible, whether it’s him, the chairman – who doesn’t seem to be involved day to day – or somebody else.”
This reflects a wider fan frustration about a lack of transparency from club executives, not helped by a series of attempts to financially exploit supporters.
“They [club executives] just don’t really answer any questions about the way the club is run or anything like that,” Knight says.
“If you wanted to change seats, you had to pay a charge for that as well. They’ve been treating fans more like customers.
“It’s definitely felt like they’ve tried to gouge the fans a bit this summer.
“When you put it together, you start to question who’s making the decisions and what the motivation is.”
There has also been a great deal of scepticism about hiring Steve Cooper to replace Enzo Maresca.
Not only has Cooper recently managed Midlands rivals Nottingham Forest, his Leicester side lost their final three pre-season games without scoring a goal, including an abysmal 3-0 defeat to Lens.
There has been a more-than-cursory discussion among some fans as to whether the Welshman could have lost his job before Monday’s game against Tottenham Hotspur.
Leicester will go into that game without their first-choice forwards due to Iheanacho’s departure and injuries to Jamie Vardy – still considered the starting striker – and Patson Daka.
“Cooper felt like he was free and available, rather than there being a coherent thought process behind getting him in,” Knight says.
“But he’s done a couple of sit-down interviews with official club channels and turned up to one of the fan engagement meetings and he speaks very well.
“He does seem to get the fans and relate to the fans a bit.”
Another blow to the fanbase was the departure of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to Chelsea, the club’s “universally popular” Player of the Year, as Knight puts it.
This felt like another blow to the club’s soul and a damning indictment of the financial difficulties it has created for itself.
The consensus around the club is that a 17th-place finish is the best Leicester can hope for with the impending deduction(s), despite having a strong, experienced starting XI when every player is available.
There have been minor protests against the ownership and board in recent years which could develop and grow if fortunes on the pitch do not improve.
This is a story of a club let down by its hierarchy and executives. They have both become victims of the Premier League’s punitive bureaucracy and yet done nothing to ease that situation with wildly optimistic legal action.
Burning the once-immeasurable goodwill of football’s most heartwarming story within the space of a decade exposes unavoidable flaws in Leicester’s management, but says as much about the impossibility of permanently disrupting the established elite as anything else.
The title winners have been forcibly returned to their erstwhile place in the footballing order. Perhaps their greatest source of hope now is what happened the last time they narrowly avoided Premier League relegation. Anyone know what Claudio Ranieri is up to?
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