Over the past 10 years, Tottenham and Leicester have often found their paths converging, either competing for a Premier League title or European football.
On Sunday, they meet down in the division’s basement rather than the top-floor balcony overlooking the garden. It’s a Doomsday derby between teams currently sat 18th and 19th in the form table over the past 10 matches with nine points between them.
Much has been said and written about Tottenham’s issues, less so of Leicester, who have struggled as most promoted clubs tend to with the gulf between the top two tiers wider than ever.
However, the mutinous atmosphere that spiked ominously during last weekend’s 2-0 defeat to Fulham has shone a spotlight on the club.
Leicester have endured a torrid time since returning to the top flight last summer.
They are 19th in the table, have failed to score in over six-and-a-half hours at home, and have lost seven successive league matches, their worst run in 24 years.
Everything that defined the glory years appears to have been lost: the popular manager, the savvy recruitment, the unbreakable bonds between the suits in the boardroom and those in replica shirts in the stands.
Leicester were once a prototype for promoted clubs to aspire to; now they serve as a cautionary tale. What has gone so badly wrong?
From an outside perspective, Leicester’s current predicament can be partly summarised by three R’s: [John] Rudkin, recruitment and (financial) regulations. The jury is out on a fourth – Ruud – and mixed together they could lead to a fifth: relegation.
Leicester are a club well-versed in miracles. The way things are going, they might need another one to survive the drop.
“We want Rudkin out, say we want Rudkin out,” is now a familiar refrain at the King Power and the club’s director of football has been a lightning rod for recent criticism.
Now 59, Rudkin has spent his entire professional life at Leicester, holding various positions including youth coach, academy director, caretaker manager of the first-team and as of December 2014 director of football.
He was a key sounding board for Leicester’s late owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who tragically died in a helicopter crash in 2018, and has continued to be hugely influential since Vichai’s son Aiyawatt, widely referred to by his nickname “Top”, inherited the King Power group.
Along with his Leicester role, Rudkin is on the board at feeder club OH Leuven and involved in King Power’s horse racing arm.
Although Rudkin’s spell has coincided with the greatest period of Leicester’s history, his more recent decision-making, mainly in terms of recruitment, player sales, and managerial appointments, has come in for much criticism.
“Top handed Rudkin so much power but I just think he’s so far out of his depth,” Jordan Halford of the Big, Strong Leicester Boys podcast tells The i Paper.
“When we were doing well we sold one big player every year and then reinvested and that was working, but for some reason, they decided to change approach.
“They should have sold [Youri] Tielemans [in 2022] but he went for free [to Aston Villa a year later] and it cost us £40m.”
“We were sort of the model for the likes of Brighton, Bournemouth and Fulham to follow but we deviated from it for some reason and it’s been disastrous,” he adds.
Leicester’s failure to sell players before they have run their contracts down has been a recurring issue and is symptomatic of the club’s declining success in the transfer market.
From 2016 until 2022, Leicester offloaded one of their best players in all but one summer window, banking a reported £337m from the sales of N’Golo Kante, Danny Drinkwater, Riyad Mahrez, Harry Maguire, Ben Chilwell and Wesley Fofana. They made an approximate £275m profit from those players.
The magic has worn off broadly because of two reasons: 1) they stopped selling players at their peak value, if at all and 2) the quality of recruits has plummeted.
Over the past two summer windows, nine first-team players left at the end of their contracts: Kelechi Iheanacho, Dennis Praet, Ayoze Perez, Caglar Soyuncu, Tielemans, Jonny Evans, Nampalys Mendy, Daniel Amartey and Ryan Bertrand. They cost over £153m combined.
James Maddison was sold in 2023 to Spurs for £40m, a fee that would have been significantly higher had he not entered the final 12 months of his contract.
“You’ve got players like James Justin and Wout Faes who have been there for too long and are on stupid money. Basically, all the players just run their contracts down, and we can’t sell anyone,” Halford says.
When Leicester were relegated in 2023 they had the seventh-highest wage bill in the Premier League and as documented in their 22-23 financial accounts, a wage-to-turnover ratio of 116 per cent.
The club’s overpaying of underperforming players, allied to dropping out of Europe and into the Championship in one season, left the club in a Profit and Sustainability Regulations (PSR) mess.
Although Leicester have so far avoided PSR sanctions, the threat of points deductions has impacted their transfer business.
Last season’s Player of the Year and academy graduate Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was sold to Chelsea for £35m to bank “pure profit” in the accounts and most of the new recruits have struggled to make an impact.
Oliver Skipp cost £20m from Spurs but has made as many appearances off the bench as he has made starts. Odsonne Edouard, who joined on loan from Crystal Palace, hasn’t been picked since November and is now blocking a crucial squad space that could be used for another loanee.
Fans felt that deals for thirty-somethings Jordan Ayew and Bobby Decordova-Reid were uninspiring and a full 360 from Leicester’s previous strategy of targeting promising young talents.
Rudkin’s managerial appointments have also appeared inconsistent.
Since April 2023, Leicester have lurched from Brendan Rodgers to Dean Smith to Enzo Maresca (who left of his own accord to join Chelsea) to Steve Cooper to Ruud van Nistelrooy.
The Athletic reported this week that individual managers have had the final say on all signings.
Unsurprisingly given the turnover in the dugout, that has left a hodge-podge squad of players bought for a variety of managers with different tactical outlooks. The squad has gone stale.
Leicester have squandered millions on strikers, but still have 38-year-old Jamie Vardy starting every week. Signed in 2012, Vardy has now worked with nine permanent managers.
The decision to dispense with Cooper after just 12 games seemed odd with Leicester 16th in the table and while there was an initial bounce under Van Nistelrooy that has quickly ground to a halt.
The Dutchman has taken just four points from his opening nine games in charge.
“People are probably baffled that we got rid of Cooper but there were just no tactics or anything. It was chaos. We won two games but we were very fortunate,” Halford says.
“Then they got Ruud in and that’s been a disaster. We couldn’t keep clean sheets anyway but now we’ve stopped scoring because he’s tried to tighten us up at the back.”
According to underlying data, the Foxes have slightly improved their xG (which measures the quality of a team’s shooting chances) and xGa (expected goals against; the same metric but in reverse) since Van Nistelrooy took charge.
However, the stats that matter are less encouraging. They are taking fewer points per game, have conceded the second-most goals and scored the second-fewest under Van Nistelrooy, and slipped three places in the table.
Van Nistelrooy hasn’t been helped by the lack of recruits so far this month. It has been reported that the Dutchman was assured new players would be brought in when he agreed to join, but Woyo Coulibaly, a right-back who cost £3m from Parma, is the only addition so far.
“I am focused on getting this team out of the situation that we’re in and that is my only concern,” Van Nistelrooy said on Friday.
“Fighting through this period is the main thing. We are doing that and that’s why I am confident we can get out of this situation.”
Dutch football journalist Arthur Renaud points out that this is not the first time that Van Nistelrooy has encountered adversity as a coach.
“He did reasonably well at PSV, finishing second and winning a cup after losing [Noni] Madueke [to Chelsea] and [Cody] Gakpo [to Liverpool] in the winter,” he tells The i Paper.
“I think he can turn things around because he is a really positive character and really driven. Of course, that is no guarantee of success but sometimes you see managers and feel that they have no energy anymore, I don’t see that with him.”
The mood is unmistakably low, so much so that blame is even being directed at Top.
“Because of the family and everything that King Power have done, I think people were really reluctant to have a go at him,” Halford says.
“But let’s say King Power decided to sell up to an American company or whatever and they’d come in and run the club like this there’d be uproar.
“Personally, I don’t want them to sell the club but I can also see why people would want them to because it sort of feels like the end of the road for the whole journey.”
It’s a reasonable shout to suggest that from 2014 until the middle of 2022, Leicester supporters enjoyed themselves more than any other fanbase in the country.
In chronological order during that period, they enjoyed: a Championship title-winning season, a Premier League great escape, a 5,000-1 title win, Champions League nights in Porto, Copenhagen, Brugge, Seville and Madrid, five consecutive top-half finishes, an FA Cup win, another deep run in Europe.
Then there are the intangibles: Mahrez’s magic, a front-row view of Vardy’s Hollywood script ascent from non-league nobody to bonafide club legend, the pinch-me moment of Andrea Bocelli belting out Nessun Dorma on the King Power pitch.
Most fans could only dream of such highs supporting their clubs, which has led to accusations of entitlement now that success has dried up.
A new Leicester protest group called Project Reset are planning a peaceful demonstration against the club’s “football leadership” before the home game against Arsenal on 15 February.
They are more likely to earn ridicule than support from rival fans, but is that justified? Just because Leicester scaled Everest it doesn’t mean that supporters should be grateful for tumbling back down it head first.
A second relegation in three years would be calamitous with the EFL reportedly pursuing sanctions against Leicester from last season if they are relegated from the Premier League.
“A lot of us think we’re headed into oblivion, because the EFL want to pounce,” Halford says. “At the very least we’ll probably get a transfer ban, probably a points deduction and anyone of any value we’re going to have to sell.
“But personally speaking, I don’t care if we go down, I want us to rip up the whole thing and start again.”
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