Players are the real culprits for Leicester’s meltdown
Ranieri should not be blamed for champions’ lack of effort and intensity on the pitch
First rule of modern football: the players always win. Faced with a choice between sacking a manager or striding into the dressing-room to confront the millionaires who caused the problem, owners will take the easy route and drop the pilot.
There are ‘sound’ business reasons for this. Expelling half a dozen players is messy, expensive and takes time. Players are commodities, managers are hired guns. The queue of new applicants starts the very next morning, while the job of replacing the five players you identified as troublemakers can take months or even years.
This is the logic, but it takes no account of where football ends up when a Premier League winning manager (at odds of 5,000-1) loses his job nine months later. It leaves no room for the disgust supporters feel when dressing-room accountability is non-existent but the manager is scapegoated and sent on his way.
Claudio Ranieri will always have Paris; the Paris being, of course, one of the greatest managerial achievements in English football history. The revisionists will find all sorts of reasons to downgrade Ranieri’s feat in turning relegation strugglers into champions but the miracle cannot be disparaged. It is his forever; and ours, in a sense, because it snatched the title away from the big city conglomerates and returned it to the whole of football.
But what happened next? The Leicester players, high on the hog, returned with fatter contracts and dropped their work-rate, their intensity, sufficiently for results to plunge and anxiety to set in. Authoritative reports from Leicester say Ranieri antagonised the players and members of his backroom staff. But which came first – the poor performances or Ranieri’s attempts to correct them? The poor performances, of course, so the players, not the manager, must carry the bulk of the blame for the subsequent collapse.
Simply: no team goes from winning the league to losing 14 of 25 games in their very next campaign if the players are doing their jobs; if the players are trying.
No team goes from hounding the life out of opponents and counterattacking like demons to standing and watching the opposition if the players are doing their jobs; if the players are trying. Leicester’s players were like Lottery winners with no idea how to handle the overnight fame and money.
In the current game, where hyperactivity is the religion, no outright rebellion is needed to remove a manager. A mere 10 per cent activity drop will allow that opposition full-back to deliver his cross unimpeded, that opposition midfielder to score from the edge of the box while yours jog back with no urgency. The supporter is wise to look for these signs now of players on partial strike, because they tell you the battle has started. Either the manager regains control or the end is nigh.
It was no shock then to see Jose Mourinho at the front of the line to express empathy for Ranieri, because two consecutive Premier League winning managers have now failed to survive the season that followed.
Mourinho’s downfall at Chelsea was partly self-inflicted – the result of “palpable discord” with his players.
He left Chelsea in December after winning the title in May. Ranieri lasted until February. And when Leicester backed their players ahead of their leader, Manchester United’s manager posted a picture of himself with Ranieri on Instagram and wrote: “Champion of England and Fifa manager of the year. Sacked. That’s the new football. Keep smiling amico. Nobody can delete the history you wrote.”
This stirred the memory of a few of us waiting for Ranieri in the cold in Zurich to talk to him about his Fifa coach of the year award. Yes, world coach. No 1 in the whole of management, ahead of Zinedine Zidane and Portugal’s Euro 2016 winning coach (Fernando Santos). This was 47 days ago.
Ranieri ought to have been ecstatic, but was subdued and uncommunicative.
He seemed almost embarrassed. He hurried away. Recalling that scene now, you feel he already knew it was over. His players had become big shots. Bad recruitment and the loss of N’Golo Kanté were also conspiring against him.
Who would pay the price for all this? Just one person: the man who had the “unwavering support” of the club 16 days ago. If Leicester’s players ever offer you their unwavering support, just say: no thanks.
The players were like Lottery winners with no idea of how to handle fame or money