I hope the Leicester players are ashamed
FIRST some facts. Since the Premier League began in 1992, Leicester City have been part of the competition for 11 of its 25 seasons. They have been relegated three times, twice after just one campaign (1994-95 and 2003-04); their longest unbroken spell in the top flight is six seasons (1996 to 2002). To give the last figure context, Wigan (eight seasons) had a longer consecutive stint as a member of the elite in this era.
Now let’s go back even further and look at the final 25 years of the old First Division. Leicester’s performance was slightly better; they spent 14 seasons in the top flight but there were still four relegations.
This is Leicester City. They are a yo-yo club and always have been. Winning the title was not suddenly going to transform their status within the game. Last season was a freak.
Why sack Claudio Ranieri now? True, almost every other team in the relegation zone has sacked their manager. Hull, Swansea and Crystal Palace took that action. I could understand those decisions but I am furious about this one.
So why am I angry? Put the title aside for a moment. I’m angry because Leicester’s owners made a statement 16 days earlier to back Ranieri. I’m angry because the same owners stood by a manager in a far worse position than this.
More than anything, I’m raging with the role of the players, especially after it emerged there was a summit in Seville with the owners. A summit! Who organised it? Who attended it? Where was it? When did it take place? I find it extraordinary to do that to a man who’d helped them achieve the unthinkable.
Ranieri conjured a spell 12 months ago and the miracle became possible as his input coincided with these players having the best season of their lives, allowing them to pounce when every other top club underachieved. Now, though, normal service has been resumed and they are fighting the drop.
People make relegation out to be a fate worse than death but that’s nonsense. If the infrastructure is right, clubs can bounce back. With the money Leicester have made over the past 18 months and parachute payments, it would be difficult to see them going the way of Leeds or Blackburn.
Put it another way: if I was given the choice of Liverpool winning the league next season — after a 27-year drought with the fear another 27 barren years could follow — then being relegated in 2019 or having two years of finishing in the top four, I’d pick the first option every single time.
So what if you finish fourth! Who remembers that? I stood on the pitch of the King Power Stadium last May when they got presented with the trophy and I looked at the joy on the faces of the players; I thought about their journeys and had so much admiration for where they had come from.
But, at the same time, a big part of me was consumed with envy. I spent 18 years fighting every single day to try to get one of those medals and as I looked at them celebrating I thought to myself: ‘How has this happened?’
Those players should think about Ranieri for the rest of their lives and be eternally thankful for what he helped them achieve. The feeling should be mutual, too, after the roles of the players, especially Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez. But make no mistake, it was the manager — not the players — who was used to being at such a level after having second- place finishes with Chelsea, Roma and Juventus.
And now reality has kicked in. They are where they should be. I saw a tweet that read: ‘ Wes Morgan and Robert Huth have gone back to being Wes Morgan and Robert Huth’, and it summed the situation up perfectly. These are players of a certain level who did extraordinary things.
Yet Ranieri ‘lost them’. In the same way Jose Mourinho ‘lost’ the Chelsea dressing room after winning the title in 2015, there was no way back for Ranieri. It was the same for Manuel Pellegrini, who won the title in 2014, Roberto Mancini (2012) and Carlo Ancelotti (2010).
This is where the game is at: it used to be about players worrying whether the manager thought they were good enough rather than the manager worrying whether the players rated him. I’ll say it again: why would you ever want to be a manager?
I wrote a column last April about Ranieri in which I said he hadn’t received enough credit for the job he was doing; his last post had ended with the Faroe Islands beating his Greece team, so perhaps that meant he was never taken seriously.
Why hasn’t he been given proper respect? OK, I understand some criticism. They spent £60million last summer (£ 32.5m was recouped with the sale of N’Golo Kante) and many of those signings haven’t worked, but isn’t that offset by the fact the recog- nised XI who won the title cost just £23m? And what about all the extra TV revenue?
Think of the fortunes that have been invested elsewhere to try to do what they did. Liverpool have spent hundreds of millions in an attempt to become champions since 1990, Manchester United have spent more than £350m alone since they last won the title in 2013.
Sacking Ranieri? They should be building a statue for him. But by sacking him, Leicester have actually shown they value staying in the Premier League more than winning the Premier League.
When Leicester were promoted under Nigel Pearson in 2014, I’m certain what fans would have wanted was to stay up for as long as possible and claim a few scalps on the way. That has to be the mindset when 25 of the last 50 years have been spent out of the top flight.
It is also crucial to point out that there were no meetings between the players and the owners in that first campaign with Pearson when they spent 111 consecutive days in 20th position, bottom of the pile. Do you know why? That is where they probably expected to be.
What changed? It’s clear to see. Many of them will regard themselves as top players, they will be enjoying their bumper new contracts and have been caught up in the glamour of appearing in glossy magazines.
Success, sadly, can change people. I would bet my bottom dollar the only person who hasn’t been changed by Leicester’s success is Claudio Ranieri.
A summit! Who organised it? And who attended it?