Fosse Friday 017 - 6 September 2024: We fought the law, and the law... was poorly-worded

This week's update is being very careful how to word things

The good

In case you haven’t heard, Leicester have won our legal battle with the Premier League.

This doesn’t seem to mean we’re completely out of the woods. A points deduction for a second breach, that occurred last season, is still on the cards. But it is clear that we’ve avoided the doomsday scenario of a 10-12 point deduction.

While good for Leicester, the whole situation is irredeemably stupid. The Premier League wrote its financial rules on the assumption that no team who broke them could possibly be rubbish enough to get relegated. How was that possible? Have they ever met a football club before?

Whatever good intentions there may have been in putting these rules in place to begin with, this is surely the final nail in the coffin. All the PSR rules have done is freeze the status quo at a certain point in time, and incentivise the exact opposite sort of behaviour to what they (presumably) hoped to do.

Clubs were encouraged to invest in their academies, only for the products of those academies to become financial levers to pull whenever you need to cook the books to sign Johnny Reserve Left Back from Sporting Gijon. All while the clubs stockpile young players from abroad as an accounting trick.

The transfer window is now a procession of clubs making even more short-term decisions than they were beforehand, mingled with dismal swap deals to exploit the rules. You can’t trust the league table, because half the clubs are under investigation for breaking said rules.

And after all that, they can’t even enforce the rules properly. So Leicester have spent the whole summer under a widely-acknowledged threat of a points deduction that isn’t going to happen.

But what a result, eh!

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On the pitch, things are looking bright for two of Leicester’s teams.

It feels like a month ago now but last weekend, LCFC Women and the men’s Under 18 side both won 5-2.

Down under, LCFC Women beat West Ham in the second game of their friendly tournament in Perth. Meanwhile in London, the men’s Under 18s were sticking five past Chelsea. A promising season awaits for both.

Amandine Miquel’s new-look City side certainly look more dangerous going forward with Noémie Mouchon, the scorer of Leicester’s fourth goal, leading the line. Missy Goodwin’s give-and-go third goal was also a highlight, while Saori Takarada’s deft chip was the pick of the finishes. The other goals came from Yuka Momiki and Sam Tierney. The WSL season kicks off for Leicester away to Liverpool at 2pm on Sunday 22nd September.

As for the men’s Under 18s - if you don’t know already then get to know: Jeremy Monga. Remember the name.

Monga, the scorer of Leicester’s fifth and final goal at Chelsea on Saturday, is so good at such a young age that you might not ever get to see him in a league game for the mighty Foxes. It seems probable he’ll go the way of Trey Nyoni, now of Liverpool, and move to one of the traditional giants hoovering up young talent before they reach adulthood. But we can hope.

The bad 

The grubby nature of modern football means it’s impossible to simply sit back and revel in our glorious victory over the Premier League this week.

Not just because of league tables being decided by lawyers but because of some of our fans’ reactions to the news.

Calls for Union FS to create a tifo celebrating Nick De Marco KC may have been tongue in cheek. But even as a joke, it doesn’t work. There’s still been zero accountability for the catastrophic failings of this football club over the past few years, with fans having to pay more to watch a weaker team and money needing to be poured into legal cases.

Fan groups are still being sidelined or ignored. The club’s communication of its long-term vision remains unclear, if not completely absent. The abandonment of any ethical concerns in pursuit of the highest bidder for shirt space exposes the ongoing need to play catchup after the disaster of the 2022/23 season.

Leicester City Football Club’s current custodians may have avoided being responsible for the first points deduction in its 140-year history. But they did so on a technicality which involved underperforming so badly even the law didn’t account for the possibility.

The only celebration here is about what the successful appeal means for Leicester City’s fortunes this season. It’s not any kind of vindication of what led us to this point.

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It’s been a tough few weeks for the wider Leicester City family.

Coming far too soon after the loss of both Craig Shakespeare and Sven Goran Eriksson, we learnt the tragic news of another loss this week in Sol Bamba. The defender was Eriksson’s first permanent transfer and a cult hero of sorts to Foxes fans.

The standout memory is his debut goal, the fastest we’d had by a player on their debut, in the FA Cup against Manchester City. With his first touch of a ball in Leicester blue it was certainly a way to make an impression. He looked like he was going to score from every set piece that game.

He got a brace later that month in a home win over Millwall (the photo below celebrating one of those goals), another commanding performance. While his goals stand out, he was also a master at some last-ditch tackles and recoveries. Equal parts terrifying sometimes when he decided to charge forward with the ball.

Most importantly of all, he seemed like a true gentleman. Every fan, every staff member and every journalist only have lovely things to say about his character. Rest in peace, Sol.

The daft

Just one more thing…

We have to go back to the points deduction farrago to examine this EFL statement in a bit more detail…

“We share the frustrations of the Premier League.  It cannot be right that Clubs potentially escape the scrutiny of the agreed rules and sanctions due to movement across the divisions.

Cost control rules have been agreed by the member clubs of the Premier League and EFL, and it is incumbent on the Leagues to apply the rules as intended to uphold the integrity of competitions, with Clubs required to act in utmost good faith towards one another for the benefit of all Clubs and their supporters.”

This is all a bit “oh, you knew what we meant”, which isn’t a particularly strong legal argument.

Laws are just words. You wrote the words.

One could argue the roots of all this lie in the decision to have (at least) two different organisations governing the same football pyramid. In that sense, this is a rod the Premier League and Football League made for their own backs a long time ago. Equally, the need for different spending limits depending on which division a club is in exists purely because of the greed and fundamental inequality associated with the top flight.

And we can’t help wondering whether “clubs [acting] in utmost good faith towards one another for the benefit of all Clubs and their supporters” includes selling hotels to themselves?

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Daniel Storey, Chief Football Writer for The i Newspaper, 19th March 2024:

“De Marco is currently at “sign him up, sign him up” status amongst some [Nottingham Forest] fans. Room for another statue?”

Daniel Storey, Chief Football Writer for The i Newspaper, 3rd September 2024:

“If you're Nottingham Forest, and you're punished with a points deduction for a period that involved two seasons outside the competition, I'd imagine that you're pretty peeved at the intricacies of this.”

You probably don’t have to guess which football club Daniel Storey, Chief Football Writer for The i Newspaper, supports.

Loan watch

There are duelling loan watches already with entrants from the official Leicester City website and the Leicester Mercury. We’ll summarise:

English Championship

• Tom Cannon (Stoke City)
  Last game: Not registered in time
  Next game: Saturday 14 September v Oxford (A)

• Ben Nelson (Oxford United)
  Last game: Not registered in time
  Next game: Saturday 14 September v Stoke (H)

• Harry Souttar (Sheffield United)
  Last game: Started, played full game - W 1-0 v Watford (H)
  Next game: Friday 13 September v Hull (A)

Oh, plus this yesterday from Big Soutts…

English League One

• Amani Richards (Exeter City)
  Last game: Sub from 73 minutes - W 2-0 v Bolton (A)
  Next game: Saturday 14 September v Blackpool (A)

• Silko Thomas (Wigan Athletic)
  Last game: Started, played full game - L 2-1 v Birmingham (A)
  Next game: Saturday 14 September v Bristol Rovers (A)

English League Two

• Brandon Cover (Port Vale)
  Last game: Started, played 76 minutes - L 2-3 v Doncaster (H)
  Next game: Saturday 7 September v Newport (A)

• Chris Popov (Barrow)
  Last game: Started, played full game - W 1-0 v Harrogate (A)
  Next game: Saturday 7 September v Swindon (H)

English National League

• Brad Young (Hartlepool)
  Last game: Did not play
  Next game: Saturday 7 September v Halifax (H)

Scottish Premiership

• Sammy Braybrooke (Dundee)
  Last game: Started, played 62 minutes - D 2-2 v St Mirren (H)
  Next game: Saturday 14 September v Ross County (A)

Dutch Eerste Divisie (second tier)

• Wanya Marcal (De Graafschap)
  Last game: Did not play
  Next game: Tonight (Friday 6 September) v FC Eindhoven (H)

Thing we learned

After falling down a rabbit hole that started with thinking about the scenes in Goal 3 which were shot at the King Power Stadium (don’t ask), it got us thinking about other film and TV that features LCFC specifically.

Coronation Street is the obvious one for TV, although did you know The X Factor held auditions at the King Power in 2016? Blue Peter shot at Filbert Street back in 1972. Film was a little trickier to track down. However, digging for examples did underneath the, largely free, BFI Football on Film library.

Acting as a brilliant time capsule of short films on the sport from years past, there’s a variety of content. The LCFC gems range from video of Jock Wallace’s unpopular training routine, featuring a hill (it looks more like a giant sand or mud pile), from 1978 that may well have been inspired by a Sidney Lumet film from the same year.

There’s a silent film shot by a Leicester school of a pupil daydreaming of playing for the Foxes. Apt, given that same school produced Gary Lineker. Or another video talking to different managers about what the job required featuring Frank McLintock. Worth a browse when you’ve got a few minutes and want to look back at the history of the sport.

One last thing…

The shuddering halt that is the early September international break has been around for a while now - for example, Leicester have only played one game on this day since 1986: that was a 2-1 win over Ipswich in 2000.

But the first three games Leicester played on this day in history were all notable.

When the Football League first began, the season started in September. So on 6th September 1902, Leicester Fosse’s trip to Small Heath was the opening game of the campaign. Fosse lost 3-1, with George Lewis scoring for the visitors. Fosse finished the season in 15th place in Division Two.

On 6th September 1913, Fosse travelled to north London for the first ever competitive game at the Arsenal Stadium, better known as Highbury. Thomas Charles Benfield’s opener for Leicester was the first goal scored at the stadium but Arsenal came back to win 2-1. You can read more about Tommy Benfield and some of his contemporaries in our feature about Leicester Fosse’s win at Fulham in 1914.

By 6th September 1919, Leicester Fosse had become Leicester City and it was on that day that Leicester registered a first Football League point as City - a 1-1 draw against Wolverhampton Wanderers. The City goalscorer was Hugh Richmond, who had made his debut for the club just one week earlier - against the same opponents. In those days, you played home and away against the same club back-to-back in almost all cases.

In all, Leicester’s record on this day reads: P21 W7 D7 L7, including a 1-1 draw at Arsenal on the 62nd anniversary of the first game at Highbury - the programme that day cost 10p but it can now be yours for just £5.99. That’s inflation for you…