Fosse Friday 059 - 27 June 2025: Ruud van Nistelrooy leaves Leicester City
This week's update is hastily rewriting
The good
Sweet clarity. An hour ago, Leicester City Football Club announced the departure of Ruud van Nistelrooy.
Or, to put it in LCFC-speak:
“Leicester City Football Club and Ruud van Nistelrooy have mutually agreed that Ruud’s contract with the Club as First Team Manager will terminate with immediate effect”
Few people saw this coming before 1st July and the opening of the new PSR window. Speculation has already begun among the fanbase about why the club would do it now as opposed to July. Could the dreaded birthday issue have forced their hand after all?
The leading theory is currently that a player has been sold to make Ruud’s payoff feasible. If so, how confident are we that they’ve got the numbers right after previously appearing to comply - only to be hit with charges?
The official statement contained nothing from the owner, chief executive, director of football or anyone else vaguely associated with the actual decision-making process.
In the vacuum, the media went in on the decision-makers with some BIG PARAGRAPHS.
As ever, we click straight to John Percy - who was quick out of the blocks with a damning article about the club’s treatment of van Nistelrooy.
On a successor, Percy says:
“Sheffield Wednesday’s Danny Röhl will emerge as a possible target, despite fears over the amount of compensation required if he remains at the rival Championship club. Sources have dismissed the prospect of former Everton and Burnley manager Sean Dyche taking charge.”
He ends with these apt words:
“Leicester need to examine themselves more than anything else right now.”
This has been the case for a very long time. Van Nistelrooy made himself unpopular with some of his team selections but he was dealt an appalling hand and the decision to appoint him in the first place was at best a dangerous gamble, at worst a catastrophe.
We actually wrote the obit on Ruud’s time in the Filbert Way hotseat way back on 23rd May:
“Van Nistelrooy has benefited on a personal level from the chaos around him. It’s legitimate, and surely true, to argue that he was handed a horrible job, hamstrung by a poor quality and poorly built squad, and then probably misled about the backing available in January.
But it is also true that he took these dismal ingredients and, instead of producing some low quality baked goods, proceeded to burn the house down instead.”
This period will go down as one of the most baffling and uncomfortable in the club’s recent history. A time when past decisions have come back to haunt the hierarchy and their response, as always, has been to squirrel themselves away and wait for it all to die down.
With this inevitable block removed, we can finally move on to the myriad other things that need sorting at our football club.
But how much confidence and trust remains?
After the Football Club successfully confirmed our place in the 2025/26 Sky Bet Championship back in April, Foxes fans have been relishing the opportunity to start planning their away days under [don’t forget to insert manager name here].
Bring your whole squad for two mouth-watering showdowns with Hollywood giants Wrexham and hotly-anticipated clashes with fierce local rivals Coventry City and Derby County.
Sorry, not sure what came over us there… #WriteLikeLCFCsCommsTeam.
That’s right, it was fixture release day yesterday!
A bit of a change from this time last year when we were frantically scrolling to find a winnable game. With Leeds dispatched back into the big league, they all look fairly winnable - especially given we’ve beaten the other two relegated teams in the past couple of months.
Just need a manager, some coaches, a striker to replace our greatest player of all time, ideally a few more players too, a kit and we’re sorted.
There are still a handful of tickets left to see the Lionesses’ send-off for Euro 2025 - a friendly with Jamaica on Filbert Way this Sunday.
Today (Friday 27th June) is the final day you can complete the Foxes Trust end-of-season survey.
This is a fantastic opportunity to have your say on the state of Leicester City Football Club and contribute your voice to more than 3,000 others who have given their thoughts.
Recent efforts from the Foxes Trust and other fan groups seem to have helped. The club released the matchday ticket pricing for this season and it’s a lot more reasonable.
They’ve added two new categories aimed at making it more affordable, with tickets starting at £20 for adults. More importantly, tickets for younger fans look more accessible too now, starting at £7 for Under 16s and £5 for Under 12s. They’ve also guaranteed that at least 5 fixtures will be deemed within the new categories C and D.
Yesterday also saw the draw for the first round of the Carabao Cup - we’re making the trip to Huddersfield, which brings back all kinds of happy memories for Leicester fans, including Lloyd Dyer’s looping effort and wild ensuing celebrations, and Jamie Vardy hammering a penalty past (another) ex-Fox Ben Hamer.
But it has to be this, doesn’t it? Name a better brace - we’ll wait…
The bad
What’s that black cloud gathering over the KP? Maybe the lack of managerial news and transfers isn’t solely PSR-related. After rumblings of financial bother, intrepid journos Nation Thailand were the first to suggest King Power are in real trouble and others have followed suit with pieces in The Athletic and elsewhere.
Milan Mandaric is in the market for a new club, but he’s been eyeing up Sheffield Wednesday apparently.
That could be a fun opening fixture if they did land Mandaric and we got Danny Röhl.
Maybe you were hoping the new CEO of King Power would put a positive spin on the task ahead and provide some reassuring words in his first interview?
Well, this is him describing their various corporate shenanigans:
"It's like a patient surviving on oxygen. The company's intention was to ask AOT (Airports of Thailand) to remove the oxygen because we can't cope anymore.”
Er, cool?
The daft
Up at Hillsborough, things are even wobblier than they are down here - with wages not being paid, the club in takeover talks and the manager on the verge of leaving.
The Sun and Talksport have both led with the concept of Sean Dyche coming in next week in place of RVN, although the stories so far seem to refer mainly to the betting odds rather than any searing insider insight. The Telegraph’s sources are saying it won’t be Ginger Mourinho.
In our Instagram poll earlier this week, we offered the choice of Dyche, Röhl, Wilder or Carrick and our survey said… Dyche with 49% of the vote (Röhl 38%, Carrick 9%, Wilder 3%). It would at least stop us having to copy and paste this bloody ö from Wikipedia every five minutes.
Hot goss
Moving on…
Belgian journalist Sacha Tavolieri is making a connection between Bilal El Khannouss and Bayer Leverkusen as the German club look to replace Liverpool’s new man Florian Wirtz.
Presumably the new Bayer coach Erik Ten Hag has had a word in his former Old Trafford assistant Ruud van Nistelrooy’s ear for the lowdown.
The prospect of Bilal at Championship level is tantalising but money talks.
Any ‘hot goss’ on incoming players is all from patchy sources but apparently we want Michael Keane (he’s free) and Luton’s Millenic Alli.
There’s a bit more chat about outgoings though.
Conor Coady is still stuck in traffic heading up to Glasgow to go and see Russell Martin.
Elsewhere, Wilf might have his pick of Manchester United, Everton and Saudi Arabia with a widely-reported £9m relegation release clause set to bring that sweet, sweet PURE PROFIT to the KP coffers.
Thing we learned
Get ready to be haunted by many ghosts of Leicester City past in the Championship. Our crack team research has found some ex-Leicester presence (players, coaches or managers) at 12 of the 23 Championship clubs. Blackburn Rovers secured the latest on the list, signing Sidnei Tavares.
They even gave him a rose.
This is also operating based on the rumours that Birmingham are looking to bring back Demarai Gray. He’s definitely scoring against us if that happens.
One last thing…
We managed to haul another article over the line this week. It’s been a slog recently but we’re slowly chugging back to life ahead of pre-season.
This one was on the need to move from apathy to action - so pretty similar vibes to any point over the past 3 or 4 years.
The long-held belief that those in charge of Leicester City Football Club have been asleep at the wheel was given more credence in two conversations at the Union FS charity tournament last weekend.
Traditionally, you would associate young people with protest and rebellion when the thing they love is in decline.
But Union FS are seeing fewer and fewer young fans join their attempts to improve the atmosphere and the lowest take-up of the Foxes Trust’s survey on the state of the club has been amongst younger supporters.
The club can no longer take it for granted, if they ever should have, that young football fans in Leicestershire will inevitably “go down the Citeh.”
We’re always open to fresh blood on the writing team too, if you fancy turning your hand to a bit of Leicester City opinion or analysis.
Read on for how to get in touch…
Post Horn
We always want to hear what you think - drop us an email with things you’d like to ask, discuss or see at posthorn@thefosseway.net.
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