Shakespeare has carried the can while those responsible for botched Silva transfer survive
In an era when small margins are ever-more important, the 14 seconds that cast club’s major capture into limbo now look hugely significant
It was only 14 seconds the wrong side of 11pm on the last day of August, the kind of mistake that happens once in a lifetime, but then if you look at Leicester City in the 17 months that have followed their historic Premier League title success of 2016, it is not hard to see why it was they who made it.
Their failure to log documents in time that led to Fifa refusing to ratify the £22million transfer of Adrien Silva on that last day of the transfer window did not alone lose Craig Shakespeare his job on Tuesday, but if clubs make enough mistakes like this, bigger consequences follow. The margins are fine indeed in football, but it all adds up, just as surely as there was a time when Leicester seemed to get everything right.
Since they clinched their title in May 2016, and for some of the months before then, the club have embarked along a path of player recruitment and sales which has taken them to a point where they find themselves looking for their third manager in eight months.
It is always the manager who shoulders the greatest burden, and the manager who is the easiest to change. The club’s Thai owners, the Srivaddhanaprabha family, said they had simply failed to see the development in Shakespeare since he was given the role permanently in June. But if his place in this deserves examination, then what can be said of the others charged with taking the club forward?
Jon Rudkin, the director of football, is responsible for all football matters at the club and closest of all to the patriarch, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha. That puts him a level up from the head of senior player recruitment, Eduardo Macia, an appointment from the Claudio Ranieri era and still key to player signings.
If Ranieri’s input into the signings of last summer was significant, so too was that of former head of recruitment Steve Walsh, who left for Everton in 2016 because his path to director of football was blocked by Rudkin.
Last time it was Ranieri, now at Nantes, who paid the price, and now his successor has gone, while Rudkin and Macia have survived again. Shakespeare is no doubt wondering why it is him and no one else who should shoulder the blame for the overlapping recruitment strategies of the last 17 months that have left Leicester in the relegation zone with six points.
Michael Appleton, the caretaker manager, will presumably inherit a familiar problem at the Liberty Stadium on Saturday – the fundamental lack of strength in central midfield which epitomises the recent dysfunction in Leicester’s recruitment. In that position, Leicester have available just Vicente Iborra, who started his first league game on Monday; Wilfred Ndidi, who has struggled this season, and Andy King, the club stalwart who is carrying an injury.
Matty James, who started the season so well, has an Achilles injury and, while all this can be waved away as the misfortunes that beset any club, it brings us back to the fine margins of the Silva situation. With Danny Drinkwater leaving, and mistakes already made in recruitment in that position, the Silva deal was one signing the club could not afford to get wrong.
Ineligible for Leicester until he is registered on Jan 1, Silva, who is still training with the first team, will never get to play for the manager who signed him. You wonder what he makes of it, as a former captain of Sporting Lisbon and a European Championship winner with Portugal. Leicester’s signings have been the work of so many different individuals that it is hard to know who takes responsibility for whom. Between them, Walsh, Ranieri, Rudkin and Macia have brought in Islam Slimani, Ahmed Musa, Papy Mendy, Bartosz Kapustka, Daniel Amartey and Yohan Benalouane, although there are few who can see a future for them at the club.
As it stands, the biggest triumph since the arrival of N’golo Kante in the summer of 2015 has been Harry Maguire, who was a personal project of Shakespeare, who persuaded the England defender and his parents of the merits of the club.
Following Ranieri was always going to be a challenge for Shakespeare, whose popularity at Leicester went some way to compensating for his low profile.
Neither is his fate a reason to challenge the rise of competent, long-term, independent recruitment planning at the