The prospect of four months’ employment followed by a big pay off has proven too much for Enzo Maresca to resist, as he becomes the latest Leicester man to follow the trail of tears to Stamford Bridge. Where does this leave the Foxes now?
Leicester’s promotion was confirmed over a month ago, on Friday April 26th, handing them a huge head start in the race to prepare for the next Premier League season.
All those weeks later, and the champions look significantly worse off than the playoff winners. Leicester are in managerial purgatory, walking proof that in the modern era you aren’t allowed to enjoy anything for more than a second before someone else buys it off you.
On Filbert Way, the managerial change leaves a number of questions for the club to answer, which will go a long way to telling us how the next year is going to go. Let’s take a look at them.
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How appealing is the Leicester job?
We are about to find out whether the Premier League brand is strong enough to wipe away the threat of a points deduction.
In a vacuum, this is an exciting job: the team just won the Championship, the owners traditionally back the manager (to a fault, some might argue), and there is the training ground, which still just about stands on the right side of the ‘world-class facility vs. white elephant’ divide.
What’s more, relegation just isn’t what it used to be. Vincent Kompany has managed to translate plummeting straight back down with Burnley into the Bayern Munich job, while Rob Edwards has survived with his reputation enhanced. Brand Rodgers, of course, walked straight back into the Celtic gig after taking Leicester to the brink of the drop.
Is that enough for a manager to take a chance despite all the uncertainty? Despite the fact that they may be on a hiding to nothing before the season even starts? We have no idea how bad the points deduction is going to be, nor how limited the transfer budget is this summer. The club has, shall we say, been a bit loose with the truth with the last two permanent managers about the financial situation. Would a third be happy to take that risk?
For now, we lean towards a belief that any Premier League job holds enough allure to bring in a decent option. But with so many vacancies across Europe and the trickle down effect of the big boys taking first dibs still to take effect, who knows who’ll be left in the jar by the time we get to choose.
2. Did the club have a contingency plan?
Maresca first made noises about leaving Leicester in January, when he threatened to leave if the fans didn’t appreciate his style of play. Even before then, he’d publicly lamented the fact that he didn’t know anything about the financial situation until the club slammed the brakes on transfer activity in January.
In the latter part of the season, the prospect of him departing picked up even more steam. The transfer embargo and the threat of a points deduction, combined with a collapse in form and discontent on the terraces, made it feel inevitable that he would leave.
The way the season ended and the fact he eventually steered Leicester to the title put all that talk on ice, but the club must(?) have faced up to the reality that he might leave, whatever the outcome of the season turned out to be. Had Leicester not gone up, it was more or less impossible to imagine him taking charge of the club on negative points going into another Championship campaign.
If they have prepared, then there should be a list of candidates ready to go. There are some good managers out of work, like Graham Potter and Steve Cooper, and plenty more decent, if less proven alternatives who are currently employed elsewhere: Edwards, Carlos Corberan, Mark Robins, Michael Carrick. But the name perched at the top of the shortlist depends on the answer to the next question…
3. Are we still wedded to The Idea?
Since Claude Puel replaced Craig Shakespeare in 2017, the Leicester hierarchy has had a clear preference for managers who play possession football and develop young players. Puel, to Brendan Rodgers, to a brief Dean Smith interlude, and on to Enzo. Maresca was the ultimate end point: a manager for whom the style was the be all and end all, possession taken to extremes.
He obviously moulded the squad in his image, installing a style of play like an NFL playbook, but he didn’t really have the opportunity to completely overhaul the playing staff. Ultimately, Leicester don’t have to appoint another manager with the exact same style of play, they could take this opportunity to evolve it, to react to the complaints in the stands, to bring someone in who may want to do things a bit differently.
Given the fact there have, famously, been no changes whatsoever at boardroom level for years, we have to assume that they will not do that, and the focus would be on finding a manager to continue this trend. But who is it?
Potter, Cooper, Robins, and Corberan, for example, are very different managers, and certainly not the sort of managers who would do things the same way that Enzo did. The irony is that had Southampton not sent Leeds to the morgue on Sunday, Russell Martin would have been the obvious choice to bring in as a sort of poor man’s Maresca and continue what he had built, but he is presumably not a realistic option now.
So what does the club do now? Find another true believer, or adjust and adapt their expectations to the best manager available?
4. What does this mean for the playing staff?
Part One: New contracts
A looming decision that the club has to make is about what to do with the key players out of contract at the end of June.
Since the season finished, and the big send-off on the final day, there’s been a general vibe that Jannik Vestergaard and Jamie Vardy would get new deals, but in all likelihood the rest would not: with Wilfred Ndidi, Kelechi Iheanacho, Marc Albrighton, Luke Thomas, and Dennis Praet consigned to the dustbin of history.
Where does this news leave the state of those deals? Maresca’s arrival was a perfect storm for Vestergaard, the manager who plucked him out of the aforementioned bin and installed him at the heart of our defence.
Are we confident a new man would see him in the same light? We’ve already been burnt once by a manager who had no time for him whatsoever, and he’s clearly a divisive character. Would he still be as valuable to a different style of play? Or was his value tied to the previous regime?
Likewise Vardy, who Maresca clearly still rated and who ended the season on a high. What does a new manager with a different style of play mean for him? And Ndidi, whose real value is in a more defensive role that did not exist under Maresca’s system. If Leicester now plan to use someone in that position, should they act to try to keep him?
More importantly, the clock is ticking on a decision with all of these players and it’s not clear on what basis these decisions would be made. Many of the financial issues up to this point have come in large part thanks to handing out big money contracts to players who the manager doesn’t want.
The expectation might be that the club sticks to the plan and hands out all the new deals it was planning to with Maresca at the helm. But is that simply storing up trouble for the future?
Part Two: The exiles
A related problem are those players who Maresca had no time for but who are still lurking around the place. Harry Souttar is at the opposite end of the Vestergaard spectrum, a player signed under Rodgers and exiled under Enzo. With Maresca in charge, Souttar was a certainty to be sent packing out the door this summer.
What about now? Do Leicester still attempt to cash in, or wait for a new manager to decide? Can they afford to release Vestergaard and sell Souttar, given (presumably) some limitations on the amount of players we’re going to be able to sign?
Last summer, June 30th acted as a soft transfer deadline, the date by which clubs needed to shift players to count the sales towards the current season’s Profit & Sustainability Rules. That is a month away. Assuming no immediate managerial appointment, the club is going to have to make some calls here with limited input from the manager.
This also applies to players out on loan, particularly Victor Kristiansen, who simply had no position in a team that never played a genuine left back. We can assume he would rather be sunning it up in the Champions League with Bologna than grinding his way towards zero points with Leicester, but if the new manager requires some full backs, he’s quite literally the only left back contracted to the club after the end of June.
Part Three: The valuables
That June 30th date looms large when it comes to players Leicester may not want to sell, but whose value makes them potential financial casualties.
The most obvious is Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, but you could throw in anyone who other clubs may want or whose wages make them a significant drain on resources. With Maresca’s system, it made some sense to think about selling Dewsbury-Hall, as he doesn’t completely fit the mould of a ‘number eight’ in the Guardiola style.
Now, however, it’s a different matter. We have no idea what the new manager might want, and selling the club’s player of the season from under his feet would hardly help with encouraging someone to take the reins.
At the same time, do the financials dictate that we have to? Does the lack of a manager in-situ make it easier to sell him without risking the wrath of someone like Enzo, who – let’s face it – was liable to walk at any moment?
All of these questions are linked in some way, but the right answers depend on what you think is most important. Do you pick the style of play first and then the manager, or the manager first and then react to his style of play?
If you pick a style of play, it’s easier to make decisions about the players, but you are inevitably taking something of a gamble on the manager, particularly if your first choice plan falls through. If you wait for the manager to dictate the style of play, you might get the best candidate but saddle him with a squad that doesn’t give him the best chance to succeed.
Despite the odd dud, the current regime has generally been good at picking managers over the past decade. For all the criticism they’ve had over the last couple of years, they did clearly get the choice right last summer.
But this is a much more difficult and complex situation, where we’re now one of the smallest fish in a big pond, instead of a big fish who could take more or less whoever we wanted. Maresca, of course, was the first choice of a bunch of Championship clubs a year ago. This time, we’ve got a much harder job on our hands, and less trust in the leadership than ever.
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