Leicester City begin their Premier League campaign at home to Brentford at the King Power Stadium on Sunday – and that is roughly where the certainty ends for the Foxes.
In many respects, Leicester have been a picture of consistency over the past few seasons. They have finished in the top half of the Premier League for five successive years. Brendan Rodgers is the fifth longest-serving top-flight manager, having been in the job for three years and 158 days – a total bettered only by Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Thomas Frank and Ralph Hasenhuttl. They won the FA Cup in 2021 and reached the semi-finals of the Europa Conference League this year.
Yet that façade of solidity and calm is gradually being eroded, with the summer proving to be “very difficult” in the words of Rodgers. The biggest, most obvious and unusual element that has come to define the Foxes’ rocky off-season is recruitment.
Remarkably, Leicester are the only club in Europe’s top five leagues who are yet to sign a single player this summer. They held that honour jointly with Girona until the Spanish side brought in David Lopez on a free transfer on July 25. That goes some way to demonstrating the issues being felt in the east Midlands.
To make matters worse, Leicester are also trying to fight off bids for their star players. Club captain and longest serving player Kasper Schmeichel has already left for Nice and now James Maddison, Wesley Fofana and Youri Tielemans could all be following them. It’s a perilous situation which leaves Rodgers at a crossroads as the 2022/23 season looms.
Exodus brewing
Schmeichel left with the best wishes of the club, having given them 11 years of service across 479 appearances. He is 35 years old and all good things have to come to an end. The other trio of potential departures are from a different bracket.
Maddison recently enjoyed his best ever season at Leicester in which he contributed 12 goals and eight assists in 35 Premier League appearances and won the club’s player of the season award. The 25-year-old is at the peak of his powers and has been the subject of two bids from Newcastle, who are willing to pay £50million for his services.
Fofana is 21 years old and regarded as one of the most talented young centre-backs in Europe. Chelsea have already seen a £60m bid rejected by Leicester, according to L’Equipe, but are not likely to walk away, given their need for defenders and Fofana’s desire to leave.
Tielemans has entered the last year of his contract and is unwilling to sign the new one which has been offered to him. Arsenal are long-standing admirers and the Foxes are reportedly braced for a bid. The 25-year-old is a Belgium international and one of Leicester’s most consistent performers.
Rodgers wants to keep hold of his best players but has his hands tied by the club’s financial realities. “Every manager in this league wants a better squad,” he said recently. “But I’m not one who’s going to sit here and kill my board. I’m not going to do that. Would I want a better squad? 100 per cent, absolutely. But will I work with what I have? Of course I will.”
Leicester have lost £120m over the past three Covid-19 affected seasons and – after regular high-profile sales, like those of N’Golo Kante, Harry Maguire, Danny Drinkwater and Riyad Mahrez – the well ran dry last summer. Subsequently they racked up a net spend of £50m – the highest in the club’s history – and are now feeling the repercussions, with an overall debt of £276m.
HAVE YOUR SAY! Where will Leicester City finish in the Premier League this season? Comment below.
Burden of expectations
Leicester and Rodgers are feeling the burden of expectations. The club’s steady and impressive progress has made it more and more difficult to replicate every year – especially when you don’t have the funds to revitalise your squad.
Rodgers particularly wants to sign a right-winger, but is fully aware he might not get one, with plans to build a new training ground and redevelop the King Power other money-sapping commitments. “Santa Claus isn’t going to come for me. I knew exactly what we needed six months ago, what we wanted, what the team is crying out for,” he said.
“But I really can’t lose sleep and pine for my fast right winger. Because if I can’t get it, I have to make do the best I can. I’d love to be in that position where the team is adding because if I could add to this group, as it’s growing and developing, then it’d be really, really exciting. If I can’t, I’m still excited to work with what I have.”
Leicester held an interest in Charles De Ketelaere before he moved to AC Milan from Club Brugge and PSV Eindhoven’s Noni Madueke, who has since suffered a serious injury. Now it seems like they will have to sell in order to buy.
"It may change over the course of the rest of the window, but once I found that [the club's financial situation] out, I had to go back in and focus on what we have, rather than what we don't have,” he told BBC Radio Leicester this week. "If we can challenge for the European places then that is where we want to bring the football club."
For Rodgers personally this might feel familiar. His time at Liverpool came to an inevitable end after he narrowly missed out on the Premier League title and he left Celtic for a new challenge once the cycle had run its course. While the recruitment struggles are obviously not his fault and he should have plenty of credit in the bank, there’s a feeling that a bad start to the season could spark a change.
The Foxes travel to Arsenal and Chelsea before August is over before matches against Manchester United and Tottenham in September. At present, Rodgers’ squad is good enough to repeat another top-half finish, but the events of the next few weeks – both on and off the pitch – will be crucial to determining the direction of Leicester’s season.
