Some managers arrive at clubs like missionaries, intent on converting players to their dogma. Claudio Ranieri is not one of those. For the Italian, management is not about preaching a philosophy. It is more like alchemy. The pleasure is in blending unique ingredients to concoct something that works. This Leicester City team, which on Sunday will try to take another step towards becoming English champions when they host Southampton with the opportunity to go seven points clear, are his most wonderful creation in a career spanning three decades and more than a dozen clubs.
But they are not his creation alone. That is the point. “I don’t decide, I watch,” he says. “Of course my knowledge helps me. I watch my players [and think] ‘what is our strength?’. And I combine them to play to their strength.”
One of Leicester’s distinctive traits this season has been their willingness to recoil into defence before springing forward to devastating effect thanks, in particular, to the speed of Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez.
Ranieri’s previous teams, in a variety of countries, had different attributes. So each time he adapted, experimented and usually figured out a successful formula. “If I don’t have fast strikers, I don’t play on the counterattack, I play another way. In Roma I played another way, in Monaco I played another way,” he says, citing the two clubs where he was closest to winning league titles before this season. “And in Greece I didn’t play,” he adds with a laugh, alluding to the one experiment that blew up in his face, the winless five-match stint as an international manager in the season before joining Leicester last summer.
That failure was partly due to a particularly thorny footballing environment, the opposite to the one he is enjoying at Leicester, where, he says, the unity is stronger than anything he has encountered. “I feel different because these players are full of energy. There is a good electricity between everybody: the chairman, the fans, the staff, ourselves. We stay very united.”
That might not have been the case if Ranieri had not been so intelligent and tactful. He inherited a squad who, for the most part, were saddened that Nigel Pearson had been sacked after leading them to promotion from the Championship and then survival in the top flight, albeit via a frantic late surge out of the relegation zone. It is wrong to claim that Ranieri only had to be smart enough to realise his luck in taking over a team that merely needed to keep on doing what it had done under his predecessor. Indeed, Ranieri had to be savvy enough to adapt quicker to his new surrounds than Pearson did, as the main reason Leicester got into such difficulty last season was that the manager was too slow to deviate, once Leicester got to the top flight, from the way they had played in the Championship. Leicester were too open until Pearson switched from 4-4-2 for last season’s run-in to 3-5-2, with Esteban Cambiasso dictating play from in front of the back three.
Ranieri, having been impressed by that run-in, was minded to stick with that system and convinced the experienced Swiss international Gökhan Inler to come from Napoli to replace the departed Cambiasso. That was a coup for Ranieri but if he was pleased with himself for attracting a player of such pedigree, he did not let pride stop him from changing his plans when other players – N’Golo Kanté, who was recommended by the club’s scouts, and Danny Drinkwater and Andy King, who were already at the club – proved more dynamic than the Swiss, who has made one league start since September.
Upon learning more about those players Ranieri also realised they could make 4-4-2 work after all. “In the beginning I said: ‘OK, in front of the defensive line, who is the best? Who can we buy? Inler.’ But after we started with another system. I chose who was ready for the Premier League, King and Drinkwater. Then slowly Kanté came in.”
Through coaching and cajoling Ranieri helped the players revel while staying tight, famously keeping his promise to take the whole squad out for a meal after their first clean sheet of the season, against Crystal Palace in October. “I bought pizza because we [used to] concede every time. Now we are much more solid than before.”
Just as the Italian relishes forming an effective whole from disparate elements, he enjoys being a part of the city in which he lives. Not apart from it. He is a common sight in the streets and shops of Leicester. “I have always chosen apartments close to the centre of the cities in which I live,” he says. “When I was at Chelsea too, I went to the supermarket, got on the tube and had a normal life. I want to live my life and my life is this. And I am happy to see how the people are happy because we are the expression of the people. If we win, I’m sure the people of Leicester work very well. If we lose, maybe Monday is not so good.”
For most of this season Mondays have been very happy in Leicester. Just a few more will make this year, this team and Ranieri, part of folklore for ever.
