31 July 2024
Foxes Venture into World of Predators
Leicester City returned to the Premier League at the first time of asking, bouncing back from relegation the season before. They appointed Man City assistant manager Enzo Maresca as the man to get The Foxes to where they wanted to be.
He achieved that feat, winning the Championship title in the process. After securing their promotion, Maresca accepted an offer from Chelsea, bidding The Foxes farewell. Leicester considered their options before appointing Steve Cooper as their new manager, someone with Premier League experience.
After losing Maresca, he immediately came back to the club with a bid for Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, looking to take advantage of the club’s financial woes. One of the most influential players in their title-winning season, the player had his head turned by the approach and opted to head to Stamford Bridge to begin a new chapter in his career.
The gulf between the Premier League and Championship has never been bigger, underlined by the table at the end of the last campaign. All three newly promoted teams were immediately relegated at the end of their first season in the top-flight. That is the size of the task that faces Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Southampton.
Last season Luton Town came closest to clawing their way out of the relegation places that the trio spent most of the campaign in. Burnley and Sheff Utd struggled badly. Between the three sides, they conceded a total of 267 goals. They almost shipped more than Amazon, Temu and SHEIN combined. Their goalkeepers faced more shots than German soldiers over two world wars.
It was only eight years ago that Leicester City shocked the footballing world by winning the Premier League. That seems a long time ago given their current plight. While being promoted to the top-flight is the aim of any side in the Championship, nobody wants to spend the season being fodder for the rest of the league to boost their goal difference against. Competitiveness is key.
With the new season only weeks away, just how ready are The Foxes for life in the Premier League? They have brought in Abdul Fatawu on a permanent transfer, after a successful loan spell in the Midlands last season. They have also added Bobby Decordova-Reid to the ranks on a free transfer from Fulham. Other than that, their only two other signings have been youngsters Caleb Okoli and Michael Golding.
As an outsider looking in, this Leicester side is weaker than the one that won the title last season. Of their two top scorers that campaign, one is 37-years-old and questions will be asked about his ability to lead the line in an effective manner, while the other joined Chelsea. If you do not learn from history, it tends to repeat itself. Nothing could be more the case when it comes to the Premier League.
Every season, irrelevant to who goes down, there is one thing you can guarantee about those clubs. None of them will have a striker capable of scoring 15+ goals in the league. Serious questions can be asked as to whether Leicester City have that player. Vardy, for all his exploits in the top-flight is much older now and will struggle to stay injury-free, such are the demands of the Premier League schedule.
The Foxes have been charged with breaking Profit and Sustainability Rules in the three-year cycle to 2022/23. While they appealed this, their grounds for doing so was that they were an EFL club at the time of the charge. This has been rejected by an independent commission and they are awaiting a decision on what punishment they will face. History would suggest that they will be docked points before a ball is even kicked in the Premier League.
Balancing the books was mooted as the reason for selling Dewsbury-Hall to Chelsea, so that they do not face further charges from the EFL. It puts a big question mark over what, if any, money there is to prepare themselves for life in the top-flight. To start the season on a negative points tally would be crippling to any club, the future looks bleak currently at the King Power Stadium.
If you were a betting man, The Foxes seem the worst equipped for life in Europe’s top league. Oh to be a fly on the wall of the boardroom meetings. You wonder if the plan is to spend as little as possible, absorb the riches that a season in the Premier League brings, then look to use the parachute payments from relegation to come back up again.
From a business perspective that may well put Leicester City in a far stronger position to try and stay up than the one they currently find themselves in. However, fans do not want to see this. Ask the Burnley and Sheff Utd faithful. At times, Saturday afternoons felt like torture to them. They were so far out of their depth many hoped to see a life preserver thrown in from the dugout onto the pitch most weeks.
The NHS can ill-afford a spike in prescriptions for anxiety medication, anti-depressants and beta blockers in the Leicester region. Steve Cooper has experience of doing the job on limited funds, apart from Nottingham Forest, where they brought in so many players the National Crime Agency considered investigating if there was a case for human trafficking. Even so, it seems a massive ask of any manager to turn this current squad into a Premier League outfit capable of survival.
It could be a long season for Foxes’ fans. If Steve Cooper keeps them up, he is sure to be a contender for the ‘manager of the season’ award. Their best hope is that there are three teams who are worse than them. Leicester City have done the unthinkable before when they won the title, however that squad was considerably better than this one. Achieving Premier League safety could be such an incredible miracle it would not look out of place in biblical texts. However, the modern game suggests that failure will see Cooper nailed to the cross.
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