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What lessons should the big clubs learn from Leicester City?
Though Leicester City’s capture of the Premier League title caused a palpable explosion of joy throughout football, there is also something faintly disturbing about it. It makes you question everything you have ever thought to be true about the sport. Like those who first heard that the earth was round instead of flat, it will take time to assimilate this paradigm shift in our understanding of the game. Try as we might to absorb and contextualise Leicester’s triumph, it is of such enormous proportions as to be almost inscrutable. Nevertheless, we can’t help but try to explain, seek patterns and suggest lessons that other clubs can learn from the Leicester experience.
It is important, though, to learn the right lessons. One line of argument has been that Leicester have represented a triumph of ‘old-school’ values. They play a high tempo, fast, ‘English’ game and typically line up in a variant of 4-4-2. They show little interest in monopolising possession; they average 46% possession which puts them 18th in the ‘possession’ league table, and have a pass completion rate of 72% which puts them ahead of only West Bromwich Albion. Their defensive strategy is based around two centre-backs, Robert Huth and Wes Morgan, who relish defending and head and clear every ball that comes their way. Neither is interested in playing out from the back and neither is comfortable when condensing the pitch and holding a high line.
All of which is absolutely true, but it has given a certain type of pundit (you know who they are) a warrant to announce that we have had the wool pulled over our eyes for the last decade by ‘foreign ideas’ of namby-pamby, tippy-tappy, tika-taka, fey, effeminate possession football.
I wrote an article about Arsenal on this site last month, arguing that they were still trying to play an outmoded style of play. That’s not to say however, that the style might not swing back into fashion at some time in the future. That is how football tactics and style progress. Once the media have identified a trend, you can bet your life that those within the game have already come up with a way to combat it. New styles of play have a devastating impact initially when they carry an element of surprise, but eventually a coach or a team nobbles it. For example, Brendan Rodgers breathed life into an average Liverpool in the middle of last season by adopting a 3-4-3 that opponents struggled to pin down. Until that is, they went to Swansea City and Gary Monk largely stifled them.
So any team wishing to ‘play like Leicester’ next season will not be afforded the same period of amnesty that the Foxes were afforded this term. The concept of Leicester being ‘old-fashioned’ also neglects how modern and forward-thinking they are when it comes to off-the-field matters. . Leicester’s ability to keep a core group of players fit for most of the season is an integral part of their success, and their analysts and experts behind the scenes deserve due credit. Leicester are far from a bunch of amateurs and guessers; their story is based on cold analysis and hard-nosed science alongside the romanticism.
Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City have all underperformed this season. All quarters will demand that they invest heavily to make up for their deficiencies. Yet this season enforces something that many have found hard to grasp; that teams can improve without buying new players or appointing a new manager. Every summer, fans and the media lavish credit and praise on those clubs who possess shiny new toys, claiming that they have ‘stolen a march’ on their rivals. This season has shown that champion teams are made of a more complex concoction of attributes and contributing factors. Leicester City and Tottenham Hotspur were this season’s best performing teams, but both invested modestly last summer.
Leicester’s success curtail analysis that focuses on individuals. We’ve all heard this line of questioning. Can Arsenal win the title with Olivier Giroud up-front? Could Manchester City win the league with Eliaquime Mangala at centre-back? Such discourse is callow and underdeveloped. Spurs have had a fabulous season with Danny Rose and Kyle Walker at full back, while Leicester have reached the Premier League summit with a team of individuals that many would have considered ‘average’.
Moreover, Leicester have forced us to re-evaluate how we define the concept of ‘squad depth’. I believe it was Jose Mourinho in his first spell at Chelsea who first spelt out the desire for ‘two world-class players in every position’. In reality, this desire belongs to the confines of Football Manager or FIFA. Barcelona do not have two players of equal standard in each position. Compare and contrast the benches of Arsenal and Leicester this weekend:
Arsenal: Ospina, Gibbs, Coquelin, Wilshere, Cazorla, Walcott, Campbell.
Leicester City: Amartey, Schlupp, Gray, Ulloa, Chilwell, Schwarzer, Inler.
Now, if we take ‘squad depth’ to mean having layer of classy footballers beneath your first XI, then Arsenal have more depth than Leicester. Yet how much analysis this summer will state that Arsenal have lacked the depth to absorb the shocks of a title tilt? In a way, they would be right, but we need to refine what we mean by ‘depth’. In reality, squad depth is having a layer of players in your squad who can replicate the qualities of those in the starting line-up. In other words, Aaron Ramsey is a better footballer than Andy King, but King replicates the qualities of Danny Drinkwater far more than Ramsey replicates those of Santi Cazorla.
The fact that Leicester City have won the Premier League purchasing players for modest fees with a negligible wage bill has received a lot of attention, and rightly so. Yet how long will it take before those same commentators are berating clubs for not spending frivolously enough, thereby showing a lack of ‘ambition’? This season has shown everyone that football is far less deterministic than that. Norman Mailer once described the gift of writing fiction as a ‘spooky art’, and there is an element of spookiness involved in building winning football teams. All kinds of ingredients, skills, characters and happen-stance collide at the right time.
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