- Leicester charged yet again over Profit and Sustainability Rules
- Tackles, fouls and yellow cards: Arsenal and Leicester compared
- Why do Leicester get such strange stats for fouls, cards and penalties?
- Arsenal v Leicester and the very curious case of Leicester’s yellow cards
By Tony Attwood
Leicester City is the club whose statistics always looked odd. There was a time when they were getting twice as many penalties in their favour as anyone else, and deemed to be committing only a fraction of the fouls that anyone else got. When we first started looking at the where the board is blaming anyone and anything other than themselves. Interestingly they’ve sacked Ruud van Nisstoroy, as if somehow the collapse of the club who are at war with the League in which they have been playing, is his fault.
Leicester as we have oft pointed out is a club that has been reliant on legal trickery for two long, getting themselves off the hook when charged under FFP regulations for example, seemingly unaware that you can pull a clever trick once and get away with it but not twice.
The media have become aware that Leicester’s owners have run out of money to pump into the club – but they’ve never caught up on their trickery such as getting far, far more penalties than anyone else for a while, and also simply not getting penalised for fouls as as clubs were. (You might recall our revelation that Leicester had to commit 9.48 fouls to get a yellow, while Arsenal got a yellow card every 4.32 fouls – so we were asked to believe that Arsenal were twice as dirty as Leicester. That never remotely looked reasonable.)
Their finances always looked dubious to, but whereas we could analyse their fouling figures those financials were harder to unravel, and we’ve had to wait until now for the League finally to decide something is amiss. (They are not the only team whose data we’ve questioned, but they have been one of the most consistently strange clubs.
What finally caught up with Leicester was its owners’ debts, and this demise like that of Man U and Tottenham reminds us that one of the great problems with all commercial operations be they football clubs or anything else, is that the people at the very top (usually the board of directors) are often immune to criticism. They run the show, they have the money, they do what they like and when caught, well, they blame someone else.
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.
