Now You're Gonna Believe Them

“You must’ve cheated”
“I didn’t”
“Yeah, don’t give me that. You’ve changed the database to add some big players who wouldn’t ever join your club”
“No, no I didn’t.  Here, have a look at my squad. All these players are those who weren’t wanted by other clubs”
“Ok, well then you must’ve manipulated the scores. Each time you went behind you turned it off and started again”
“Well…..we were hardly ever behind so I didn’t need to”
“Ok, well bless you, you enjoy your fantasy.  It would never happen in real life”

This is a scenario that’s gone on around the world for any of us who’ve played Football Manager and published blogs of our progress.  One of the ultimate addictive facets to the game is the ability to take control of a ‘little club’ and guide them to glory, dreaming of press conferences, awards and team talks where you get to pit your wits against Barcelona, Bayern Munich or Real Madrid.

What we have just witnessed in English football is an achievement of Football Manager proportions.  These things weren’t supposed to come true, in these days of clubs as behemoths burning more money than some countries GDP, football looked for all the world as though without money no club could hope to succeed.  Maybe in cup competitions the minnows could progress, mainly through luck of the draw as the bigger sides knock each other out, and maybe through the luck of timing.  A little club could come up against a big side who field a side to protect their stars as they are days away from a crucial European match.  Plus, cup competitions may only require you to negotiate six or seven matches.  But a league competition?  Surely that goes on too long for a lesser side to prevail?

But Leicester City has defied all the odds and overturned considered convention. 

There are plenty of reasons, or maybe even excuses, clubs can identify to suggest why they’re not currently winning titles.  Maybe they don’t have enough money to buy the quality of player to win trophies, their ground isn’t big enough to bring in enough revenue to afford these players’ wages.  They’ve given youth players a go but they’re struggling to come to terms with the higher standard of play.  All their best players get poached by bigger clubs.  They need a quality goalscorer, or a quality centre-half or a talented goalkeeper.  All those cost money and none of those players are interested in playing for clubs who don’t compete in European competitions.

Leicester has just blown all those excuses out of the water.  They ripped up the rulebook and laughed in the face of “it cannot be done”.  Of course there are a number of factors which have helped them achieve this, mainly the abject performances of other clubs who really should’ve won a league title when only 77 points were required for success.

It’s not just the big boys who’ve had their noses put out of joint and given homework for the summer to work out how they take on Leicester, but clubs who were above The Foxes in early 2015 are all now going to reassess their goals and aspirations.

DREAM BIG

There is a story often given by positive speakers about fleas in a jar.  If you put fleas in a jar and put the lid on, the fleas will jump up and hit their heads on the lid.  They keep doing this for a while until they work out that if they jump just below the level of the lid then they don’t get a headache.  They condition themselves so well they keep on doing this.  If you then remove the lid what happens?  The fleas keep jumping to the level of just below the lid as they’re not aware the lid has been removed.  You can keep them in that jar with the lid off for ages as they’ve been conditioned to believe that jumping any higher will bring them pain.

This is where many clubs who would consider themselves on a par with Leicester, now find themselves.  The lid has been lifted but have they got the ability to realise or the dreams to be able to jump higher?

Some clubs appeared to start the season with acceptance of a relegation battle.  They only really got to work once the drop was a very real possibility and suddenly they put in big enough performances to get them out of the mire.

Leicester’s success isn’t a fluke.  Although it is true this should give many people confidence in aiming to achieve the impossible, you can’t just turn up with a group of players, run around a lot and hope to win the league.  Leicester’s success may actually have been a perfect storm.

Will there be another season when Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea all lose a total of 38 matches between them?  Compare that with last season when they lost a total of 25 between them.  That is not to belittle Leicester’s achievement, it’s not their fault those big four clubs all had a meltdown at the same time.  One of the benefits for Leicester for next season is the panic which now pervades the boardrooms of all four clubs to try and work out how to re-arrange their business plans.  Already two of them have announced new management, with another one rumoured to, and the fourth resisting the urge for now. 

There is no single factor which has contributed to Leicester’s stunning title win and in a way what this has proven is that money alone cannot win you a title, but then Manchester City are evidence you need a little more than just money to win league titles.  The fact Leicester staved off relegation last season from a seemingly desperate position will have gone someway for them believing they could achieve anything.

Leicester fell to the bottom of the Premier League at the end of November 2014 when they lost 2-3 at QPR.  It was their seventh defeat in the first thirteen matches of the season, and began a run of six straight defeats.  They ended it by beating Hull City but on New Year’s Day they were still bottom of the pile

The table on New Year’s Day morning makes interesting reading.  Leicester were bottom, with Burnley and then Crystal Palace three points above them.  The fortunes of those bottom three eighteen months on is interesting.  Leicester are now Premier League Champions, Crystal Palace are in the FA Cup Final and Burnley have just won the Championship title.

When Leicester lost at Tottenham in late March they were seven points from safety with just nine matches to go.  The proceeded to lose just one of those nine, at home to the eventual champions Chelsea, and drew at Sunderland.  All the rest they won.  Back-to-back wins against West Ham and West Brom saw them finally drag themselves from the bottom of the table in mid-April.  Those remaining seven matches are enlightening when looking back now.  They only conceded in two of those matches, the Chelsea defeat and the final game 5-1 thrashing of QPR.  Fast forward to this season and they have kept fifteen clean-sheets.  More tellingly twelve of these have come in the second half of the season.  Between the Boxing Day defeat at Anfield and the 2-2 draw at home to West Ham in mid-April, they played fifteen matches and only conceded in four.  They lost just once, at Arsenal and the consistency is one huge reason for their success.

WORK ETHIC

They have a work ethic, as so many have identified, and this where they work so hard for each other.  They swarm all over sides.  They don’t need to worry about possession of the ball as they’ve proved their ability to retrieve possession, they lead the league in interceptions, and then counter attack at pace.  They possess a striker, Jamie Vardy, who never stops running and has scored 24 goals.  He also broke the Premier League record for consecutive games scored in.  They’ve identified their strengths and worked them thoroughly.  Not worry about not having the ball as long as they can nick it when their opponents are pushing forward, get it up the pitch quickly and then have a striker who can convert more often than not.  Largely Vardy has made the same run time and again every game, all season and yet sides have still to combat it.  They have a greater conversion rate of chances than any other club in the league.

There is also a fascinating synergy between the last two seasons.  They’ve been crowned Champions after 139 days at the top of the table.  Last season they were at the bottom for 140 days.

Claudio Ranieri deserves all the plaudits heading his way, so do the owners for choosing him against others better judgement.  But the groundwork within the club set up by the backroom staff and Nigel Pearson last season, is what has gone a long, long way towards their success.  The medical staff have found a way of preparing and looking after players who have been able to survive the rigours of a 38-game season without a soft-tissue injury anywhere.  Many felt sorry for him when a re-financed Chelsea ditched him for Mourinho in 2004.  Leicester is his sixth club appointment since then and he came from a less than auspicious experience as manager of Greece.  He was not to know of the turmoil behind the scenes within the Greek FA and was only in charge for four matches.  In nearly thirty years of management this is his first league title.  Few begrudge him that.

Have they been lucky? I think they have, but then again they’ve seized on an opportunity and run with it.  They’ve lost three games all season, with only two clubs ever getting the better of them (Arsenal, twice, Liverpool, once).  Chelsea lost just three last season, which puts that into perspective.  They have been clear of injuries, but then as has just been mentioned, they have created their own luck in that department.  They didn’t seem to suffer from any contentious decisions by officials, possibly until the Vardy sending off against West Ham.  They didn’t have many goals chalked off or many goals given against them where replays suggested otherwise.

What Leicester has proved is that there is no substitute for hard work, planning and preparation.  Ranieri didn’t make too many adjustments to the 2014-15 side but the changes he did make were crucial.  There are all sorts of stats about how little they’ve spent compared to the bigger clubs in English football, but what they have generated is a fantastic team spirit where the players are prepared to sacrifice themselves for each other.  There are no huge egos at the club, no big names.  At the end of last year I read a comment from someone about how Leicester would struggle to keep hold of players like Vardy and Mahrez.  Now I’m sure the club is looking forward to barging in on their rivals transfer negotiations, saying “don’t go there, they haven’t got Champions League football”.

PREDICTIONS ARE USELESS

I tweeted towards the end of November about the incredibly tough run of fixtures they had coming up.  They’d just won at Newcastle and gone to the top of the table after thirteen games.  Their run was Manchester United (h), Swansea (a), Chelsea (h), Everton (a), Liverpool (a), Manchester City (h).  My argument was they’d gained a lot of points against weaker opposition.  They’d only picked up two points from games against Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester United.  I, like many others, expected them to fall away.  I expected them to find the going tough, players would pick up injuries, etc, etc.  .  Most people were likely to have agreed with me about Leicester’s chances, although there was one chap who reckoned they’d get “12 points there easy”.  Take a bow Ross Bell (@RossBell1984), you were almost on the money.  They picked up thirteen points, winning three, drawing two and losing just one of those six matches, at Liverpool.

When they lost at The Emirates in mid-February many people expected Arsenal to go on and take the title.  They were two points behind Leicester and with a supposedly far superior squad and a manager who’d experienced a title win.  But from there Leicester really hit a rhythm, gaining nineteen points from a possible twenty-one over the next seven games, conceding in just one.  A series of 1-0 wins took them further ahead of the pack.  In contrast, Arsenal’s seven matches earned them just nine points.  In the days of George Graham at Arsenal the fans frequently sang “one-nil to the Arsenal”.  All these years later they’d been “out Arsenal-ed” by Leicester City.  58,000 is the average attendance at Arsenal, whereas Champions Leicester only house 32,000 every week.  Even Aston Villa command a higher average attendance.

NO COMPARISON

Was this the ‘greatest story ever told’ in football?  There have been a couple of contenders to challenge this.  Ipswich winning the title in 1962 a year after winning the Second Division title.  Nottingham Forest won the league in 1978 a year after finishing third in the Second Division.  They then went onto win back-to-back European Cups.  The Forest side is a decent comparison with Leicester in that they didn’t have any superstars, until Brian Clough signed one of the best goalkeepers in the world, Peter Shilton.  But other than that they had a lot of players who inidividually weren’t necessarily anything special, but collectively were very hard to beat.  Liverpool had just won back-to-back league titles and also the European Cup, a year after the UEFA Cup.  They contained internationals such as Clemence, Neal, Hughes, Hansen, Thompson, Souness, Dalglish, McDermott and Ray Kennedy.  They won the league by seven points which is the equivalent of ten points today.

In the sixties the league was won by eight different teams.  In the seventies six different clubs won the First Division.  In the last ten years just three different clubs have won the title.  This is not to denigrate either Ipswich or Forest’s achievements but money has changed everything, especially expectations.  

WHAT NEXT?

Leicester may do quite well in Europe, particularly as their brand of football should be very difficult for foreign teams to contend with as they rarely come up against it.  The key could be to keep the same group of players.  It will be important for them to recruit well, paying particular attention to attitude and temperament.  All the talk coming out of the King Power Stadium is they intend to do just that.  What remains for them next season is anybody’s guess.  So many, including their own supporters, got this season wrong so it seems churlish to try and predict anything further of this wonderful story.  Personally, I’m going to just sit back and enjoy it.  One of the most popular successes for many a year.  Let’s hope that success doesn’t ruin the players or the team spirit.

What is Going on Out There?

This season has been different right from kick-off.  Up to the halfway point there is no runaway leader and the previous big four are now spread throughout the table.  Chelsea’s awful season has opened up opportunities for other clubs, but also Leicester City’s emergence has thrown the form book out the window.  Right from the early part of the season Crystal Palace and West Ham have occupied top seven places, and Watford’s recent run has seen them move into that once longed for esteemed group.

The big clubs have struggled to put consistent runs together as what was thought just a strange start to a season has become a constant source of frustration for those who believed they knew the script.  For some this is a welcome alternative to believing you could predict the top four or top six before a ball has been kicked.  For others, the trend of each team beating each other has created the sense that despite losing a few matches, a club can still climb several places with a few wins.  My own club, Liverpool are a case in point.  Despite taking just one point from games against Newcastle, West Brom and Watford, we are only five points off a top four place.

So what is it about this season that has made it so close?

I believe there are several important factors which have all contributed.  During this article I will make reference to ‘bigger’ and ‘lesser’ clubs.  This is not to denigrate or disrespect any club, it is merely to demonstrate how some clubs are perceived to be perennial achievers or strugglers and how some clubs performances this season has been very different to how they were expected to perform.

Fancy Dans

First of all the Premier League is a poorer place as far as world class players are concerned.  When you look back a number of stars of the world game have left these shores over the past five years or so.  Players such as Suarez, Modric, Bale, Mascherano, Tevez, van Persie, Drogba, Gerrard and Lampard have all vacated the league and it is poorer for it.  The likes of Aguero, Toure, Hazard, Ozil, Sanchez, Di Maria, Falcao have come in with varying degrees of success but it is difficult to say who is the best player in the league right now.  Hazard was fantastic last season and a deserved player of the year but this season has been a shadow of his former self.  Aguero can’t seem to string more than a couple of games together, Di Maria came in and was a complete failure and Falcao looks as if he’d be better off in another country.  Ozil is beginning to show his class and Sanchez has been excellent since his arrival at Arsenal, but he’s suffering an injury at the moment.

My point is there are some decent players, some very good ones but world class?  Not sure.  But what does seem to have happened is we have gone back to the type of player from abroad who is given the label “he’s good but can he do it on a cold Tuesday night at Stoke?”

When the Premier League began to plunder foreign leagues for new talent this was a common problem.  Often it would take foreign players a season or so to adjust to the pace and physicality of the league.  Which is what made Fernando Torres debut season for Liverpool all the more stunning.  Of course there have been a whole host of players who have come in and hit the ground running, but for those who possess ‘potential’ or maybe just average ability then they can take a while to settle in.  Some of the ‘bigger’ clubs have gone for this type of player, a fancy dan rather than a grafter. 

TV Deal

The new TV deal, a reported £5.14bn, has given many clubs the ability to buy players who once may have been out of reach.  The equality with which the Premier League dishes out the prize money from TV has contributed to many lesser clubs being able to sign players who may only have previously come over here for the bigger clubs.  Yohan Cabaye at Crystal Palace is an example.  He was at Paris St. Germain and with Champions League football almost guaranteed every year, but he chose to return to England to play under Alan Pardew who’d been his boss at Newcastle. 

Stoke City is another example where they have been able to sign the likes of Bojan Krkic and Xherdan Shaqiri.  Bojan was signed from Barcelona, having spent time at Roma, Milan and Ajax, yet he chose Stoke City for his chance to play in the Premier League.  This in no way is to suggest there is anything wrong with Stoke but Bojan is not the type of player they have attracted in the past.  Shaqiri, a Swiss international, was at Basle when there was intense speculation over his next move.  He was reportedly a target for Liverpool but when Bayern Munich came calling he found it too tempting to turn down.  He then moved onto Inter yet Stoke managed to lure him from Serie A. 

The new riches enjoyed by more clubs within the Premier League has enabled players like Cabaye, Bojan and Shaqiri to go to clubs not really considered ‘big’.  The FFP rules have also had an effect on stopping the bigger clubs from just hoovering up all the best talent, and so this talent can now be spread more evenly within the league.

Counter Attack

Many of the lesser clubs no longer just turn up at Old Trafford, Anfield or The Emirates believing they should just lay down and hand over the three points.  They believe if they have a go they might be able to get something from the game.  The other major contributory factor with this is the adoption of the counter attack as a tactic.  Teams are happy to sit back and soak up the pressure and then hit their opponents on the break, at pace.  Leicester City is a prime example of that.  This has been particularly effective in enticing the bigger clubs to keep the ball, knock it around and generally show off but then when they lose it, they’re hit on the break and found to have not left anyone manning the fort at the back.

If you put these two factors together you have a toxic mix, as far as the bigger clubs are concerned, where many league games can be like cup ties with a baying crowd urging their team on as they smell the blood of big names who have spent the past ten to fifteen years lauding it as if it’s some sort of birth right.

It makes for an exciting season and with points seemingly more generously spread throughout the table then few can be sure of where they will finish until we move towards March and April.

Is this a trend or a freak? 

Going back to the point about the type of foreign player who has been recruited by Premier League clubs, many of them are young and come under the ‘potential’ category.  Within a few seasons many of these players should start to realise this potential and become stars.  We may well find those clubs who have recruited more wisely will begin to pull away from the others again, but until this happens we can enjoy a much more equitable competition than we have had to endure for the past five years or so.

No Mour I Love Yous

Another season and another Chelsea manager gets the chop.  Another Chelsea manager gets the sack after the players refuse to play for him.

Just seems like those two statements could be from any of the past ten years in English football but there are some surprising factors to the story this week.  Not least that the once untouchable, almost demi-Godlike Jose Mourinho would go the same way of Carlo Ancelotti and Phil Scolari as stories of the players not playing for the manager anymore, began to do the rounds.

This was Mourinho’s second spell as manager at Stamford Bridge with his first one bringing six trophies in three seasons, the second one had not been as prolific yet still he delivered the Premier League title for the third time. 

Back in May Chelsea were crowned Premier League Champions for the fourth time in their history and the fifth time they have been Champions of England.  They won the league by eight points and looked odds-on to retain it again this season, albeit fending off a sterner challenge from Manchester City.  Yet here we are barely five months of football later and the Champions have jettisoned their most successful manager.  So what has gone wrong?

There doesn’t seem to be any one factor which has contributed to this, but what certainly can’t be denied is Chelsea have not been unlucky.

When comparing with other big clubs who have sacked managers in the last couple of seasons, Brendan Rodgers and David Moyes for example, you can point to them having suffered some bad luck.  Of course you can also point to many of their problems being self-inflicted.  But Chelsea haven’t really had many injuries in the past five months, they haven’t been victim to many poor refereeing decisions.  They haven’t had some of their best players just decide to leave or retire.  What they do seem to have is a vast number of players either alarmingly losing form or just finding it impossible to get themselves going this season, or they just decided they didn’t want Jose in charge anymore.

People have pointed to things going wrong right from pre-season.  It was suggested the players didn’t have a proper build-up to the season with the club preferring to fly them all over the world to add more shirt sales than preparing the players to be the first club to retain the title for seven years.  They were also called back to pre-season training a little later than usual owing to many of them needing a longer rest.

Then on the opening day of the season Mourinho had a spat with club doctor, Eva Caneiro when the Portuguese objected to her going onto the pitch to administer treatment to Eden Hazard.  This always seemed a strange episode and looking back perhaps started the downhill slide which eventually lead to his demise.

Chelsea were struggling to see off a Swansea team at home and things were compounded by the sending off of their keeper, Thibaut Courtois.  Hazard went down under a challenge and immediately Caneiro and physio, Jon Fearn, went to assist.  As Hazard was treated on the pitch he was then obliged to walk to the touchline and wait for the referee to allow him back on.  This meant Chelsea were down to nine men and this seems to be what incensed Mourinho.  The club backed their manager, Caneiro was demoted and made her way to her lawyers, and the spectre of Hazard being injured was to re-emerge this week to haunt Mourinho.

After dropping points at home to Swansea, they were then well beaten at Manchester City and their first win of the season (at West Brom) was soon expunged by defeats at home to Palace and away to Everton.  By the time Southampton came to Stamford Bridge and came away with all three points, the Champions had lost four of their opening eight fixtures.  Within this sequence was an impressive win over Arsenal where they finally showed the form of last season.

But consecutive defeats to West Ham, Liverpool and Stoke City just compounded the misery.  At home to Liverpool they took an early lead but were ultimately swept aside showing defensive frailties unheard of from a Mourinho side.  What did for Jose in the end were back-to-back league defeats to Bournemouth and Leicester City.

Mourinho’s record at Stamford Bridge this season has taken a real pounding.  He went seventy-seven games without losing at home as Chelsea manager before Sunderland prevailed in April 2014.  But thirteen points from a possible twenty-seven at home just hasn’t been good enough for the owner, and with just one win away from home this is what sat them just above the relegation zone.

We may never know why many players, who were excellent last season, have suffered such a slump in form but the likes of Azpilacueta, one of the best defenders in the league, Hazard, footballer of the year last season, Ivanovic, Costa, Fabregas and Oscar have just been woeful.  On Monday night at Leicester, Hazard went down under a challenge from Jamie Vardy and received treatment.  Mourinho tried to get him back on the pitch but the player took one step and then shrugged his shoulders and flounced off.  Mourinho’s comments at the end of the game suggested he was not best pleased with this behaviour.

That post-match interview ultimately put the nails in the coffin as Mourinho chose to criticise his players rather than desperately try and defend them.  He had tried to criticise them earlier in the season, even dropping Matic, Terry and one or two others, but had recently sought to build them up.  He appeared to lose patience as he accused them of ignoring his pre-match tactics.

I think there’s far too much fuss made of whether a manager should criticise his players or not.  For a player who seeks to share no responsibility in a defeat, he may clearly object to any negativity towards him.  But a player has to be able to take criticism of his performance, however it is offered.  There are plenty of opportunities for a manager to back his players, but if he cannot ever make his disappointment known then he is making a rod for his own back where some players believe they are above criticism, and therefore do not have to play to their best in every match.  Players need to be treated differently by managers and who are we to suggest that the manager does not understand how his players’ minds work?

But if a player is to take his manager’s criticism and decide not to bother playing for him, then his sulking is letting down himself, his teammates, the club and their supporters just because he wants to spite the manager.  It’s a measure of the power players have these days they can afford to risk the fortunes of their club in order to force the owners into making a managerial change, knowing their future at that same club may pass unaffected.

But have the Chelsea players underestimated their position with the fans?  From the reaction at the first game of post-Mourinho Chelsea mark two, it would appear they have.  The supporters seem pretty clear in who is to blame, singling out Ivanovic, Costa and Hazard.  Diego Costa was booed off when substituted and no doubt some of the cheers for Ivanovic scoring the first goal were ironic.

As I mentioned at the start of this piece, Chelsea players have form where this is concerned and previously the fans have always backed them.  But it appears they have over-egged their popularity one time too many.

The club have moved quickly to appoint a stop-gap with Guus Hiddink returning to Stamford Bridge for his second spell after he held that position in 2009 after the players decided they’d had enough of Scolari.  He lost just one match during his four month spell and oversaw an FA Cup victory.  Ultimately, Chelsea will need to find a permanent replacement with Pep Guardiola and Diego Simeone being mentioned.  Much may depend on the freedom a new man is given, but he would be taking over a squad much unchanged from that which lifted the Premier League title in May.

It could be an interesting end to the season if Chelsea find themselves still embroiled in a relegation battle.  Clubs who have come through the battle successfully often point to team spirit being an important factor.  But if some players still hold resentment in Mourinho being ousted by other players then when the pressure reaches boiling point it will be interesting to see whether they stick together or start ripping each other apart.

I expect Chelsea to get themselves out of the mess they’re in and where I said you couldn’t point to them being unlucky, this would now be to their advantage.  It may sound simple but all they need to do is play as they can and they should gain enough points to fight off any threat of relegation, but European qualification for next season looks impossible, unless they can win the Champions League.