Here we go then.
Those preseason friendlies and tours are over. Games against clubs you have never heard of. Games where all 11 players are substituted at half time. Games where you find your up and coming young striker starting at left back.
It’s here. The season starts and fans of not just Leicester City but all 72 League clubs can dream of what might be.
But at Leicester this season those dreams carry a bit extra weight with the new owners spending, if reports are to be believed, over £10m on new players and I’m guessing that doesn’t include their wages & agents fees. You have to guess at this amount these days as so many deals are agreed for an undisclosed fee. Why is that? Who is it to protect?
Add to that the cost of re-turfing the pitch, rebranding the stadium, rebuilding the club shop and not forgetting a certain Sven Goran-Eriksson’s wages and those that say Leicester are trying the buy the title may have a point.
Ah well, who really cares. All I want as a Leicester fan is to walk the league this year, and I am sure after all the investment it is also exactly what the Thai owners want as well.
The pressure therefore, is on. We will have fans of 23 other teams as well as neutrals around the country hoping that we will fail. But what if we do fail?
The new, (how long will they remain new before we just call them owners?) owners having put so much into this club and will expect results. They stated that they wanted to go up last year, and maybe if we had stayed with Nigel Pearson or we hadn’t replaced him with Paulo Sousa or we had got in Sven earlier who knows we may have done it.
But the bad start cost us dear after the playoff placing of the previous season. Sven will be hoping that this season, history doesn’t repeat itself. He was after all signed on a 2 year contract with The Thai’s must be expecting us to be in the top flight by then. Well this is Sven’s final season. A season that holds as much risk for him as it does for Leicester City as a club.
Sven arrived as England’s Head Coach with a reputation as a manager that probably couldn’t be bettered. However he failed to deliver at International level, then went on to a series of disastrous jobs. Manchester City wasn’t a total failure but he failed to impress. Notts County was a debacle but not his fault. The Mexico & Ivory Coast National Team jobs were failures and so he arrived at Leicester with a reputation, I believe, to be rebuilt.
Had he arrived at let’s say, at Manchester United, would he have been greeted as a god like figure? Probably not. But this was Leicester City, a team with a recent past that was not, shall we say, one the fans were particularly proud of. Not the best years in our history it has to be said. And yet here we are cash rich with an ex-England Manager in charge. A poor start under new manager Sousa which saw us sat at the bottom of the Championship, so yes Sven was greeted like a god.