Said the same to the wife yesterday - only Luton's story could surpass our achievement
They're talking about us
- Thread starter Brown Nose
- Start date
Brown Nose
Well-Known Member
Leicester City didn’t see their relegation coming until it was too late
Rob TannerMay 28, 2023
How on earth did this happen? How did Leicester City, who won the Premier League title just seven years ago, lifted the FA Cup at Wembley two years ago, and were in a European semi-final only 12 months ago, end up back in the Championship?
Perhaps it is the stunning speed of that decline that meant there was a numbness when the final whistle went at the King Power Stadium on Sunday, a 2-1 win over West Ham United proving too little, too late to stave off a relegation that the club did not see coming until there was not enough time left to avert it.
There was a smattering of boos and some applause for the players, many of whom will certainly not be at the club next season when they kick off in the Championship.
Even by Leicester’s standards, this has been an astonishing development and it is a cautionary tale for similar-sized clubs who chase the dream while ignoring reality until it is too late.
Usually, when a club is relegated, its fans can point to a lack of ambition or interest from their owners and management. The opposite is true at Leicester.
They have aspired to challenge the “Big Six”, disrupt the established elite of English football, and eventually close the gap and claim a seat alongside them at the top table. By and large, they have done that. They have claimed two top-five finishes and became one of only seven clubs to actually lift the Premier League trophy.
Now they are the second former champions to be relegated after Blackburn Rovers in 1998-99 and one of the most expensively assembled squads ever to drop through the trap door. Leicester aimed to be the best of the rest and they soared over the past seven years, but ultimately flew too close to the sun and have come crashing down.
The club have been so obsessed with regular European qualification — where the big money is truly made, so they can continue their astonishing investment in the squad — that complacency has gripped Leicester. A sense that relegation wasn’t a real prospect.
There was a general feeling the club was now too big to go down, with an array of international players too good to be dragged into a relegation scrap, led by an elite manager who was the highest paid in the club’s history, and facilities the envy of even some of the biggest clubs in Europe.
Even in the dying throes of their struggle, there didn’t seem to be that genuine realisation that this was truly happening, that relegation was looming. They thought they would be safe. They were wrong.
Leicester have always been an ambitious club under the ownership of King Power and the Srivaddhanaprabha family. They have invested heavily in the club, and continue to do so, but in recent years, that has accelerated.
The overreach is shown by the increased expenditure on contracts for new and existing players, taking the wage bill up to the seventh-highest in the league. That expenditure includes Brendan Rodgers, who they made the highest-paid manager in the club’s history.
There has been huge expenditure on the new training ground at Seagrave and the King Power Stadium project, with loans secured against future Premier League television money to pay for them. That money will no longer arrive in the same volume but the bills still have to be paid.
Leicester wanted the best facilities they could and have stretched themselves to do so, but it is a catch-22 situation. To obtain regular European football and the extra revenue that offers, you have to increase expenditure, but without guaranteed extra revenue, how can you afford the extra expenditure? There is no wriggle room for failure.
In short, it is a gamble. Had Rodgers and his team been able to hold on to the Champions League qualification spots in both 2019-20 and 2020-21, and had COVID-19 not hit so hard, the gamble would have paid off.
However, Leicester became overstretched and had to pump the breaks on their expenditure, mainly with one eye on UEFA’s new financial sustainability regulations, which their 85 per cent expenditure-to-revenue ratio wouldn’t meet. They were already on UEFA’s Watch List. Even then, that decision was taken with lofty aspirations in mind, with no real consideration for a Premier League survival battle. There has been no contingency plan for relegation. The club have repeatedly stated their European aims in their annual accounts.
https://archive.ph/o/bKOqF/https://...2023/03/16/leicester-city-accounts-explained/
The training ground is a huge facility to run and finance, and will continue to be so in the Championship.
As well as the rising costs of running it and spiralling budgets, the move to Seagrave may have contributed to the apathy and culture change. Standing in impressive surrounds, it would be easy to get the feeling this is a club too big to go down with such a facility. There aren’t any £100million ($123.5m) complexes in the Championship.
“A legacy of the club’s incredible recent successes and a beacon of ambition for the future, the state-of-the-art new complex marks the next stage in Leicester City’s development,” the club said when the facility was opened at Christmas in 2020.
In time, it will hopefully prove to be the asset it is designed to be, but in the Championship it could be a millstone around the club’s neck.
One option could be to move the women’s team, who retained their Women’s Super League status on the final day of the season, to Seagrave and sell off the old Belvoir Drive training ground. The club could even explore an arrangement similar to the one Burton Albion have at St George’s Park so that another team could also use Seagrave. It is big enough to accommodate more people and to justify the costs.
When the men’s first team moved there, they lost more than just cash: they lost part of the family atmosphere that has been so special about Leicester for so long. In the old building, there was one canteen where everyone — the senior players, development squad and staff — would eat together at various times. Even the club’s long-serving head chef, Gary Payne, would sit down with whoever was around after service.
That environment fostered camaraderie and it will take time to replicate it at Seagrave, where the first team eat alone, separate from development-squad players and the academy, and they are certainly separate from many of the other staff, who have found themselves remote at times across the 185-acre site
It is also a departure from the old environment where club ambassador Alan Birchenall would share an office near the reception area and greet the players as they arrived with his infectious banter. He would also conduct “Birchy’s Tours” for visitors. It was light-hearted, informal and less pressurised compared to Seagrave, where all the top-of-the-range facilities leave players without any excuses for poor performance.
Clubs like Leicester can’t afford to make many mistakes as they seek to remain on the heels of the “Big Six”, who continue to be a moving target, and there have been other contributing and more tangible factors than their new training ground.
Recruitment has always been at the heart of Leicester’s recent story but that has gone awry in recent years, culminating in their problems this season.
The inability to move on surplus players, like Jannik Vestergaard, who has rejected two moves away, or cash in on players entering the last year of their contracts and refusing to sign new deals — like Youri Tielemans, Ayoze Perez and Caglar Soyuncu — affected the club’s ability to recruit and strengthen a squad that was clearly in need of refreshing last season has been a huge factor.
The delay to bring in a new head of recruitment, Martyn Glover, may have been unavoidable, as was the fact that so many players were entering the last year of their contracts, with some rejecting offers, leading to an inability to move them on. You can’t sell if there are no buyers, unless you are practically giving away assets.
However, some factors were self-inflicted.
https://archive.ph/o/bKOqF/https://...ester-rodgers-recruitment-finances-contracts/
The die was cast from the summer when Rodgers said he had been talking to new potential signings only to return for pre-season to be told there would be no incomings without outgoings.
What had changed? Not a lot. Leicester must have known before then how profit and sustainability rules would affect them.
From that moment onwards, Rodgers adopted a negative tone, talking about a challenging season ahead before a ball was kicked and about the target being 40 points. People around the club were genuinely shocked when he placed the bar so low. That message didn’t match Leicester’s ambition or the surrounds of the media suite at Seagrave where he said it.
Ultimately, Rodgers has been proven right, but that negativity had already seeped into the psyche at the club, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rodgers was pessimistic because he must have known he had gone as far as he could with this group of players, many of whom knew he no longer rated them or wanted to move them on.
Papy Mendy, Dennis Praet and Boubakary Soumare had expected to leave, but were drawn back into the fold. Soyuncu was frozen out — a decision that seems even more strange considering his performances under Dean Smith — while Rodgers grew frustrated at Harvey Barnes’s development, which was slower than he wanted. Rodgers, and subsequently Smith, have wanted Barnes to make more intelligent runs to turn him into an even greater threat.
Rodgers had signed and personally pushed for many of the players he now no longer wanted, such as Perez, Vestergaard and Ryan Bertrand. For an elite manager who prided himself on being able to develop players, he was failing to do so, or at least felt it was impossible to improve the troops he had at his disposal.
There was a brief spell before the World Cup where these unfancied squad members looked something like their old selves but impressive wins over Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa in February demonstrate just how far they have subsequently underperformed.
The decision to move on goalkeeper and captain Kasper Schmeichel has proven to be a disaster.
Schmeichel wanted to stay but desired a longer contract than Leicester were prepared to offer. His high wages were a factor in that decision.
Then, there was the decision to stick with Danny Ward as his replacement for so long when the Wales international was unconvincing.
With Schmeichel gone, vice-captain Jonny Evans injured and Jamie Vardy increasingly marginalised by Rodgers — he felt the striker’s powers were waning — Leicester were left with little leadership on the pitch. That was compounded when Marc Albrighton, the club’s vice-captain, was allowed to join West Bromwich Albion on loan.
There has been little consistency in selection and constant destabilising changes as Rodgers and Smith have searched for solutions, without any real joy.
There was clearly a huge rebuilding job ahead, to be done with fewer resources than before. When Rodgers said in September, after defeat to Manchester United, “This isn’t the club that it was a couple of years ago,” it gave many at Leicester the impression that he was looking for a way out; that he didn’t have the stomach for what lay ahead. His stock was still high after previous achievements and he could leave with a nice pay-off too if Leicester sacked him, although he wasn’t prepared to walk away.
After a shocking start to the season, with just one point coming in the first seven games to leave Leicester at the foot of the table, the axe could have fallen in the first international break. But it didn’t.
The reason was that while Rodgers had seemingly stopped believing in the club, Leicester’s hierarchy still very much believed in him, especially director of football Jon Rudkin.
Rudkin had worked hard to recruit Rodgers from Celtic — where he had led the Scottish giants to an undefeated domestic season and back-to-back trebles — in February 2019. They had paid good compensation for Rodgers and his staff, then rewarded him with another lucrative contract nine months later.
Rudkin and Rodgers were close. Their offices at Seagrave were next door to each other. They would communicate daily and Rodgers knew that chairman Aiyawatt “Khun Top” Srivaddhanaprabha relied on Rudkin for guidance on football matters. Rudkin was also the conduit to Khun Top, Leicester’s ultimate decision-maker.
Their relationship was the reason Rodgers was afforded more influence around the club than any manager previously, particularly on other appointments. Rudkin had an unwavering commitment to Rodgers’ training methods, message and playing philosophy, which were no longer effective with the same group of players. The alternative, to bring in fresh players, was not feasible.
It was the reason Rodgers was given so much time. Even when the fans began to turn on the former Liverpool boss in growing numbers, and when Leicester’s form dipped dramatically after the World Cup, Rudkin and others still believed he could turn it around — although when they did call tim`e on Rodgers following a last-minute defeat at Crystal Palace in April, the situation was becoming critical.
Even then there was the feeling internally that the club would never be able to get as good a manager as Rodgers again. Their faith in him was shaken by results but not in his abilities generally, yet it was felt a change was the only way to stop the rot at that moment. There was a realisation that things were going in one direction and Leicester’s slide has proven to be irreversible. The damage was done.
https://archive.ph/o/bKOqF/https://...2023/04/02/leicester-brendan-rodgers-sacking/
As was the case when Claudio Ranieri, the last trophy-winning manager to be sacked, departed in 2017, Leicester hoped that the bounce would come from a caretaker boss — or two of them in Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell — but it was clear from the performance against Bournemouth on April 8 that more experience was required.
After a protracted and confused search, in came Smith, assistant Craig Shakespeare, who had stepped in for Ranieri previously, and John Terry — but they have been unable to reverse Leicester’s fortunes.
Terry, in particular, has worked closely with Leicester’s defenders, concentrating on their shape on the training ground and assessing their performances in the video-analysis suite next to the first-team dressing room, but Leicester still conceded goals at an alarming rate, negating their attacking strengths. There have been constant changes to the back four and they didn’t keep a clean sheet between November and this month’s goalless draw at Newcastle.
With just eight games remaining, Smith and co haven’t had the time to imprint their playing structure or a new mentality on a group of players lacking confidence and leadership — a group no longer unified as they once were, with many knowing their time at the club is up.
Mistakes have been made and there will have to be a period of humbling self-reflection on what has gone so terribly wrong.
There has already been one change at boardroom level as financial director Simon Capper has left after 12 years. Matt Phillips, the club’s general counsel, has inherited the company secretary duties.
There are unlikely to be many more changes as largely the same leadership that has brought seven years of success to the club previously remain in charge, but Leicester have to make the right choices now so that they can regroup and return from the Championship at the first time of asking — starting with who the manager tasked with an almost total rebuild of the squad will be.
It remains to be seen if the club believe Dean Smith is the right man and they will be assessing all their options, with the next appointment one of the most crucial in the club’s modern history. They will be unlikely to tempt their preferred choice, Graham Potter, into the Championship.
It is a huge job — one that requires experience and vision, and the first task will be to bring the club together once again.
The Rudkin-led recruitment strategy to replace seven out-of-contract players and those who will inevitably be sold off to help finance the project, almost certainly including James Maddison, has to be spot on after two poor summers in the market.
It has been a terrible, sobering season for Leicester on so many levels. The under-23s have been relegated from Premier League 2 Division 1 as well. Their women’s side narrowly avoided making it a hat-trick of misery. The annual end-of-season awards dinner has already been cancelled, as was the traditional end-of-season lap of appreciation. There hasn’t been a lot for the fans to appreciate this season.
But the club’s ambition won’t change. The owners are committed to preserving the late-chairman Khun Vichai’s vision for Leicester, despite this huge setback.
They plan to push on with the development of the East Stand and the surrounding area to boost the club’s matchday revenue. King Power will also continue to provide financial support, covering the club’s operations through a loan facility the club can draw upon if required. It will be the footballing side of the operation that will see the biggest changes.
The budget for Leicester’s playing squad will have to be dramatically cut down as profit and sustainability rules in the Championship allow only £39m losses over three years rather than the £105m in the Premier League, although top-flight losses will be factored into the calculations if Leicester remain in the Championship over the next three years.
Relegation clauses in players’ contracts will help reduce the expenditure as some will have to take pay cuts, while others could leave if release clauses are triggered by other clubs, ensuring Leicester don’t carry too many big wage earners in the Championship.
However, Leicester are still likely to have the biggest budget in the division next season. Their expenditure will be dictated by the amount raised through sales but there will be money made available to spend to get back into the Premier League.
They will push to make an instant return to English football’s top table and ensure relegation is just a temporary setback, but the pressure will build if the recovery mission isn’t immediately successful.
Leicester have reached for the stars and fallen hard. They cannot be allowed to fall any further.
Brown Nose
Well-Known Member
Complacency, contract mismanagement and a lack of ruthlessness: How the Leicester dreamed turned sour
Just seven years after that fairytale win, Leicester find themselves going from Premier League champions to playing in the ChampionshipByJohn Percy28 May 2023 • 8:23pm
Too good to go down? Leicester were too bad to stay up, as so many supporters had feared for some time. The inquest into this sorry season will be lengthy and painful, as a club once regarded as flag-bearers contemplate the end of their nine-year Premier League existence, having lurched from a golden era to a collection of errors.
Leicester’s relegation feels completely self-inflicted and there has never been a stronger disconnect between supporters and players, ahead of a mass exodus this summer.
With eight players out of contract, it is mismanagement on a grand scale and the scrutiny has to extend beyond a squad who have gone down with barely a whimper. From Leicester’s indecision on the future of Brendan Rodgers, the lack of investment last summer, poor recruitment and the contracts mess, fingers have to be pointed at chairman Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha and director of football Jon Rudkin.
Rodgers will be viewed as the main villain of the piece and many fans hold him responsible for the club’s drop into the Championship. He guided Leicester to their first FA Cup final win, also finishing fifth twice, but over the past 18 months it unravelled dramatically. Rodgers should have gone long before April 2, and probably would have accepted it.
Dean Smith, his replacement, was given a near impossible task after coming in with eight games to go, but will have still expected to do better. Many fans saw this decline coming, but the people in power either did not or refused to believe it.
While Rodgers has become the primary focus of anger, much of what he said was prophetic. He warned last year that a “healthy shake-up” was required with so many players out of contract.
After the FA Cup defeat at Nottingham Forest in the February of that season, he said many of the squad “had achieved everything they can”. Last summer’s transfer window set the narrative for the season.
Rodgers was convinced there would be money available and lined up signings, but suggested that on his return to pre-season he was informed the financial brakes would be applied. Some of his comments on funds frustrated Leicester who, privately, insist Rodgers was always fully aware of the threat of potential financial fair play breaches.
When the squad were not strengthened over the summer, it only seemed a matter of time until he would depart. The departure of title-winning goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel to Nice was a grave mistake: he was one of the club’s highest earners and Leicester were not prepared to offer him new terms, while Rodgers’s relationship with the Dane had become strained.
But Schmeichel’s leadership and experience have been sorely missed and Danny Ward as a replacement has backfired badly.
After the 6-2 drubbing at Tottenham on Sept 17, Leicester were bottom and had lost six of their seven matches. That was surely the time to part ways.
The absence of ruthlessness allowed the club to drift. It seemed to suggest a mindset of “everything will be OK”, despite all the warning signs.
That mindset appeared to seep into the dressing room: in March, James Maddison responded to what he perceived as a negative article by tweeting that “we’ll be absolutely fine”.
When Rodgers finally left, it was too late. One of Smith’s first jobs was to get Caglar Soyuncu, Wilfred Ndidi and Boubakary Soumare back “onside”, such was their disillusionment under the previous manager. But Rodgers does not deserve all of the flak for the club’s decline: he is one of Leicester’s most successful managers and the first 2½ seasons were exhilarating.
Scrutiny should also extend to Rudkin, a key figure under first Khun Vichai and then “Top”. Their decision to give caretakers Mike Stowell and Adam Sadler the matches against Aston Villa and Bournemouth, after Rodgers’s exit, has proved disastrous.
Leicester lost both matches and two points from them would have been enough to keep the club up. Previously the club’s academy director, Rudkin is perhaps best known outside Leicester as the man who informed Claudio Ranieri of his sacking at the Radisson Blu hotel near East Midlands Airport.
He has not spoken publicly since Ranieri’s introductory press conference in July 2015 and operates in a very private, tight circle, where leaks of information outside the club can often spark internal inquests.
The farcical situation over contracts would appear to be his responsibility. Eight players will leave as free agents this summer – including Youri Tielemans, Soyuncu and Jonny Evans – and that is inexplicable.
Though footballers should have professional pride, how can those players be expected to fully fight when they are out of contract and have an eye on their next move? Incredibly, Leicester have seven other players whose deals expire next summer. Maddison is one of them and will definitely leave, for about £30-40 million, now, with his former club Norwich City to receive 15 per cent of the fee.
For many years, Leicester were a well-run club but, equally, recruitment in recent times has been a colossal disappointment. The £50 million spent on Patson Daka, Soumare and Jannik Vestergaard in the summer of 2021 was a huge waste. Ryan Bertrand also signed as a free agent on big wages and has not started a match since December 21.
After winning the title in 2016, most of the signings who followed were underwhelming. There was also the Adrien Silva farce a year later, when paperwork was submitted 14 seconds late on deadline day for him to sign from Sporting. Other senior officials will also be in the firing line.
Susan Whelan is the club’s chief executive and cannot escape criticism, though she is not involved in football decisions. A respected voice at Premier League board meetings, Whelan has been a strong leader at Leicester through tough moments, such as Khun Vichai’s passing and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Irishwoman has also been crucial in some player sales, including the £80 million transfer of Harry Maguire to Manchester United. Last August she moved to break the impasse in talks between Leicester and Chelsea over Wesley Fofana’s transfer.
Relegation will be especially hard on Whelan, who spearheaded the development of the state-of-the-art Seagrave training ground that will be home to a Championship squad next season. Her relationship with Rudkin is said to have become fractious in recent months.
Departures will not just be on the field, but off it. Simon Capper, the club’s financial director, has accepted a position at Newcastle United. Capper has been crucial over the past 12 months in handling Leicester’s finances following record pre-tax losses of £92.5 million.
John Ledwidge, the head of sports turf and grounds who played a major role in the development of Leicester’s £100 million training ground, is also understood to be departing for Manchester City’s City Football Group. Plans are in place to abandon the old Belvoir Drive training ground, the home of Leicester City Women, and replace it with housing. The womens’ team will then be moved to Seagrave.
While there is now fury over relegation, Leicester will be back. Before returning to the Premier League in 2014, they had spent nine seasons in the Championship and even one season in League One, so this is not a new experience. They can reflect on some glorious moments: the great escape from relegation in 2015 under Nigel Pearson which kick-started their momentum towards the title win the following season.
A surprise visit from Leicester legend Engelbert Humperdinck to watch the players train in Los Angeles on a pre-season tour. Those amazing Champions League nights in the cities of Bruges, Copenhagen, Porto, Seville and Madrid.
The FA Cup win in 2021 was a great second act after the title five years earlier. Players such as Riyad Mahrez, Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante, all signed for a total of £7 million, at the peak of their powers.
This has been a remarkable period in their history and will never be repeated, yet Leicester will return some day. It is the cycle of football, but this could have all been avoided.
Graz
Well-Known Member
A lot will be written about us. Most of it I will avoid reading.
But none will be more insightful than that.
And the thing that jumps out to me is that Rudkin needs to finally piss off. Please!
TornadoShaunUK
Well-Known Member
This all reads pretty bad on Rudkin in particular I have to say.....
give_us_a_wave
Well-Known Member
Rudkin really is the epitome of the useful idiot isn't he? I bet he still thinks BR is his actual friend too. ****ing lemon. If he manages to one day fail sideways into a similar role though at a decent sized club, you can bet Brendan will be calling then "hello my old mate, it's been ages" He'll probably fall for it too.
A small point to make, a quibble really, as an aside... I think the phrasing of this is a little unfair
Now I know to acknowledge the achievement of the women's team doesn't fit the overall tone of the article but I wouldn't class their success as "narrowly avoided" in the same way as perhaps your classic 'skin of the teeth' last day survival stories. I think our women have given the club a reason to be proud. Their performances in the 2nd half of the season were much improved, and they played with spirit and belief. I was under no doubt they'd stay up come the last day.
Now I know to acknowledge the achievement of the women's team doesn't fit the overall tone of the article but I wouldn't class their success as "narrowly avoided" in the same way as perhaps your classic 'skin of the teeth' last day survival stories. I think our women have given the club a reason to be proud. Their performances in the 2nd half of the season were much improved, and they played with spirit and belief. I was under no doubt they'd stay up come the last day.
Brown Nose
Well-Known Member
homer
Well-Known Member
Prem club's ex-stadium now abandoned field dubbed a 'travesty' next to car park
WHAT was once a rocking, vibrant Premier League football stadium is now a rocky, overgrown abandoned field. And the last person to score a goal there believes the miserable state of this iconic for…
www.thesun.co.uk
give_us_a_wave
Well-Known Member
Can't say I'm too bothered. Whatever eventually gets built there will most likely be some shite nobody wants or needs.Prem club's ex-stadium now abandoned field dubbed a 'travesty' next to car park
WHAT was once a rocking, vibrant Premier League football stadium is now a rocky, overgrown abandoned field. And the last person to score a goal there believes the miserable state of this iconic for…
More ****ing student flats
Office space that will be left empty & be crumbling & derelict in 10 years as everyone keeps working from home
Another ****ing pointless "retail hub" full of overpriced coffee shops, mobile phone outlets & tat fashion sellers.
Another multiplex cinema with 28 screens all showing the same shite film ( probably The Fast & the Furious 24 : More ****s in Cars )
The Sir Peter Soulsby Memorial Velodrome (one lane only)
Couldn't give a ****.
Brown Nose
Well-Known Member
This is pretty good in parts.
I especially enjoyed his description of City (which very closely aligned to what our ex-manager did):
I also thought I was the only one that noticed this and found it bewildering in the circumstances:
I especially enjoyed his description of City (which very closely aligned to what our ex-manager did):
I also thought I was the only one that noticed this and found it bewildering in the circumstances:
camberwell fox
Well-Known Member
Jesus man, cheer up.
give_us_a_wave
Well-Known Member
Nah. Where's the fun in that ?
give_us_a_wave
Well-Known Member
A good read.
Although Brighton & Brentford, if they do fall, won't do so in the same way.
Neither of them would ever employ a Rodgers type. Both owners are 100% hands-on but also know how to delegate roles to the best people they can get. Both of their businesses were built on that principle & the rise of both clubs has been too. No manager would ever be given control over those areas & if he pushed for it he'd be out the door in minutes.
Basically, neither club has a manager. They have head coaches. They're probably the perfect example to use to explain the difference to people who don't know.
Graz
Well-Known Member
You know who's NOT talking about us?
Any of our own players...
Ricardo posted earlier today to say that they let the supporters down and this is the most painful moment of his career.
That's it. He's the only one. Evans spoke after the game, Nacho spoke to the club's social team - from everyone else it's been radio silence.
Not a good sign is it?
Any of our own players...
Ricardo posted earlier today to say that they let the supporters down and this is the most painful moment of his career.
That's it. He's the only one. Evans spoke after the game, Nacho spoke to the club's social team - from everyone else it's been radio silence.
Not a good sign is it?
Fox Fan
Well-Known Member
Good point. Nothing from Madders, usually the first out there with social posts. Don't think I've even seen anything from Vards.
Weird. Almost like we sleepwalked into it and it hasn't yet hit the club it's happened. That or their too busy phoning agents and clubs for their next move.
| P | Pld | Pts | |
| 1 | Liverpool | 11 | 28 |
| 2 | Manchester C | 11 | 23 |
| 3 | Chelsea | 11 | 19 |
| 4 | Arsenal | 11 | 19 |
| 5 | Nottm F | 11 | 19 |
| 6 | Brighton | 11 | 19 |
| 7 | Fulham | 11 | 18 |
| 8 | Newcastle | 11 | 18 |
| 9 | Aston Villa | 11 | 18 |
| 10 | Tottenham | 11 | 16 |
| 11 | Brentford | 11 | 16 |
| 12 | Bournemouth | 11 | 15 |
| 13 | Manchester U | 11 | 15 |
| 14 | West Ham | 11 | 12 |
| 15 | Leicester | 11 | 10 |
| 16 | Everton | 11 | 10 |
| 17 | Ipswich | 11 | 8 |
| 18 | Palace | 11 | 7 |
| 19 | Wolves | 11 | 6 |
| 20 | Southampton | 11 | 4 |
