And today we might wonder what Southampton have been getting up to. They were in the Premier League from 2012/13 to 2121/2 before they had their yoyo run of relegation, promotion, and then more relegation. Back in 2019/20 they knocked up 52 points and came 11th – which compares favourably with Tottenham’s 38 and Man U’s 42 in 2024/5. In 2019/20 Leicester scored 51 goals, compared with 26 in the campaign recently finished. Which suggests that maybe, just maybe, our articles showing just how odd Leicester’s on-pitch behaviour was eventually noticed by PGMO (who are, as we all know, always a bit slow on the uptake).
We’ve also often talked about how clubs believe that changing managers will improve their fortunes and how more often than not this fails to happen. It can work, but mostly it doesn’t and so Van Nistelrooy leaves Leicester after 210 days, when as in so many cases, the people who should be leaving should be the board of directors who have allowed Leicester to get into this mess.
Those who think Van N was not the right manager for Leicester in the first place (he was appointed after four games as ManU manager which included two wins over Leicester), and a good period with PSV Eindhoven. But no one seems to have asked if he bought into Leicester’s unique style. Now in retrospect, it looks like he didn’t.
Of course is that the people who own the club are responsible for the appointments, and you can’t easily sack owners – you have to wait for them to commit hari kari, which they might do, but not until long after they have wrecked the club. And worse – having wrecked the club and appointed a manager on the basis they could control him they then leave him hanging about for weeks and weeks before saying, “Oh yes, we’ve decided to sack you”.
But there is another factor lurking inside the Leicester City mess, and this really is why I brought this subject up again. Reports are now emerging that when Van N changed some of the approaches to training to build up player strength, some of the players refused to accept the new approach.
Now that is something we have come across in the past – although as in this case, it is normally left until midway through a review of the club’s failures before anyone notices it. But the fact is that when clubs change managers regularly, as many now do (usually around half of the clubs in the PL each season change at least once) quite often there is a group of players left over from the reign of the previous manager (or the one before that) who take the view that they are the heart and soul of the club, they link with the fans, and this new manager will probably be gone in a few weeks. So they resist the new regime.
Which then means that the manager either cedes control to his players, or else he is forced to work without some of his top players as happened with RvN. Leicester meanwhile still have its owners and some of its rebel players. It doesn’t bode well.