The Leicester effect, as it is already becoming known, is likely to last longer than a single season whether or not Claudio Ranieri and his players hold firm to claim the title.
What is the Leicester effect? Well let’s call it a model, because that is what Alan Pardew did when he was asked about it the other day. The old model for football success used to involve hiring one of only about a dozen coaches around Europe who could be relied upon to impress the dressing room and the fanbase with his previous achievements, then spending millions on upper-echelon players, two whole teams of them in fact, so that injuries, arguments and Champions League commitments could all be safely negotiated.
A bit like Blackadder’s Captain Rum and his crewless ship, the Leicester model dispenses with most of that. The Leicester model offers a persuasive argument that you can recruit players from non-league, from the Championship, or at bargain-basement prices from France, and still end up on top of the table with three or more of your first team being advanced as footballer of the year candidates. It suggests an affable, experienced manager who knows what he is about and can work with the players already at his disposal is both an effective and low-maintenance choice, even if the really big teams are no longer knocking on his door. It would also appear that you do not need tactical sophistication when plain old 4-4-2 will do fine, and all the headaches squad rotation brings can be circumvented by sticking to the same 11 players every week.
Detractors seeking to claim that Leicester have big-money backers like everyone else in football are missing the point. What they have achieved this season has essentially been affordable. So the question for everybody else next season, especially similar sized clubs who have always been content to consider themselves as outside the Champions League bracket, is can we do the same? And if not, why not?
That was the question put to Pardew earlier in the week, and here is what the Crystal Place manager had to say. “We all have to sit down after what Leicester have done and think about how to go forward, because for chairmen, chief executives and football club boards it has changed the concept of what it is possible to achieve,” he said. “At a club of our size you’ve got to think: ‘OK, why didn’t we do it? Why haven’t Watford done it, or can Bournemouth do it?’ You see something happen like Leicester and it’s natural to want to follow that model, but it might not work for us. Every club is different, we’ve seen that many times. What works at one club might not go so well at another.”
That is probably true enough. Indeed it would be a surprise if what has worked so well for Leicester this season proves as effective the following season at the same club. They might suffer more injuries next season, sell players to rival clubs, or lose the element of surprise that helped them climb the table by stealth. Yet what Pardew says is correct, and not just at boardroom level.
Supporters around the country understand there is nothing miraculous or mysterious about Leicester’s rise to join the Champions League elite. Last season they were fighting relegation, this season they are going for the very top honours with more or less the same group of players. Already that is becoming the new normal. Leicester have completely reinvented themselves, get over it.
But with the transformation come difficult questions for everyone else. If Leicester can improve by 20 league places in the space of a season, how come Arsenal cannot manage three or four? As Arsène Wenger said ruefully a couple of months ago, people would laugh if he went shopping in France and came back with a £500,000 winger with little reputation. Arsenal are stuck in the model of big-money buys from big-money clubs. Mesut Özil and Alexis Sánchez cost £42m and £35m respectively but Riyad Mahrez is ahead in the running for player of the season.
Everton have had a hugely disappointing season too, and supporters would be on Roberto Martínez’s back in any case for spending so much time in the bottom half of the table, but having Leicester flying so high provides an extra stick with which to beat the manager. Not just because Everton would appear to have a better class of player at their disposal, with four or five of their squad rated in the Champions League bracket, but because Martínez’s side cannot defend, and Leicester can. Everton find it hard to close out games, Leicester do it on a weekly basis. Leicester have imported character and toughness from somewhere, quite possibly their against-the-odds fight against relegation last year, while Everton are arguing amongst themselves about where the chemistry has gone.
The most obvious indication that Leicester are making everyone nervous came when even Sam Allardyce had a go at the weekend, albeit a ludicrously cheap shot about their not playing the right type of football. There spoke a manager who knew he would shortly have to take a break from making excuses in the media to explain to his employers why Sunderland were still in trouble and finding it difficult going on impossible to emulate what Leicester had achieved last season, never mind this one.
Allardyce is a manager with a reputation for playing dull, percentage football whose unique selling point of never having seen a team relegated, is currently facing its stiffest challenge. His comments must have struck Sunderland supporters as the equivalent of raising a white flag.
Leicester play a league-leading brand of football, Sunderland all too obviously do not. There is nothing more to say, except that Sunderland under Allardyce, if they do manage to escape relegation this season, will not be storming the Champions League barricades any time soon. As Pardew so rightly pointed out, doing a Leicester is simply not an option for everyone.
