Deconstructing Brand Brendan

Deconstructing Brand Brendan

“When I came into here, this was a team just happy to stay in the league. Now it’s a team disappointed not to win trophies”. 

The Brendan Rodgers PR machine has been in overdrive for almost an entire year now. That the rising energy costs across Europe in that time have not seen a slowdown in its output is, in many ways, quite a remarkable feat. However, when you’re reportedly the joint fourth-highest paid manager in the Premier League - taking home more than Eric Ten Haag, Mikel Arteta and the vast majority of the rest of your peers on £10m a year - perhaps the cost of living crisis doesn’t have quite the same impact.

The date that pearler of a quote was delivered was 8th May 2021. Leicester City had just limped to a 2-1 home defeat against an Everton side fighting for their Premier League lives. A team in the kind of crisis to which Brendan Rodgers, in the mind of Brendan Rodgers, is seemingly immune.

At best, Rodgers has an unerring self-belief. Small in stature, but big in character. Brendan Rodgers does not stand on the shoulders of giants. Brendan Rodgers is a giant.

At worst, Rodgers is a conniving, self-serving egotist, gaslighting the footballing nation. Looking at the definition of gaslighting is like holding up a mirror to Leicester City fans’ lived reality right now: “a manipulative tactic in which a person, to gain power, plants seeds of uncertainty in another person’s mind. The self-doubt and constant questioning slowly cause the individual to question their reality”.

Are we?… Are we?… Are we being gaslighted by Brendan Rodgers?! 

Maybe it was all just a dream. Those 90s nights against Red Star Belgrade and Atletico Madrid. Matt Elliott’s brace. Claridge in extra time. The dilly dongs. The eleven, it’s heaven. When Ranieri told us to keep dreaming. And Bocelli. Beautiful Bocelli.

Do us a favour and bring us out of this distorted reality and back to a fair and just world where the entirety of time is segmented into that before Rodgers walked into Leicester City Football Club in 2019: Before Brendan (BB). And that from that fateful day onwards: After Brendan (AB). The start of World War Two? That would be 80 years BB. The 9/11 attack in New York? 18 years BB, of course. And what a time to be alive during the Covid-19 global pandemic: from 1 year AB to 2 years AB.

Forgive me for jolting us back to earth with a sharp dose of reality: Leicester City have just lost their fifth consecutive game. A wretched season has a squad crammed with players coveted by other clubs 3 points off the bottom of the table and dumped out of the FA Cup by the second string side of a team in the division below. The year is of course 2023, not 4 AB, but Rodgers is somehow still taking home his £10m a year.

In the coming months, one of a couple of potential scenarios will also become reality. Leicester City will be relegated. Leicester City will scrape survival and the malaise will limp in year 5 AB. Or Leicester City will finally sack Brendan Rodgers and avoid the disastrous outcome of scenario one. In any scenario, the football media will eulogise about what a great manager Brendan Rodgers is and what a great job he has done at Leicester City.

The truth lies somewhere between those inevitable platitudes - Brand Brendan has to be worth something after its careful cultivation after all - and those who will use those lazy labels disgruntled football fans love to use like ‘fraud’ and ‘charlatan’. The truth is that Brendan Rodgers is a good manager, who has done a good job at Leicester City (winning the club's first ever FA Cup of course), but he is not elite and it has long gone stale.

A reluctance to acknowledge this and make the necessary managerial change at board level is what could change stale to rotten.

This is not the first time that Leicester City have been in horrendous form under Rodgers. Prior to the World Cup, an awful start to the season saw them lose 6 of the first 7 league games. In consecutive seasons where they had played their way into the top 4 with seemingly unassailable positions, late season collapses saw them miss out on Champions League football. And for large parts of last season Leicester languished in the bottom half of the table whilst also struggling in a Europa League campaign that had started with them as favourites to win the tournament. If you find the words ‘European semi-final’ in the pros column when assessing Rodgers’ tenure, please give yourself a quick slap in the face, apologise to the rest of the class and remember it’s a competition we shouldn’t have even been in had we performed as expected in the Europa League.

In pursuit of his ‘philosophy’ (another 21st century football buzzword), Rodgers has filled his squad with nice boys who play pretty football. After a second top four collapse, he spoke about needing to bring in players with a winning mentality. His answer to this was to sign Boubakary Soumare - who is yet to show anything like the right mentality - and Patson Daka. League winners in substandard European leagues but far from the nous required to add some steel to a Leicester side with a soft underbelly.

It’s an underbelly that has oft been their undoing. When Leicester faced crunch games to secure Champions League football, they wilted. The wheels came off at Bournemouth where a 1-0 half time lead turned into a 4-1 defeat to a side who went on to relegation. A 2-1 lead over Tottenham with 80 seconds left somehow finished with a 3-2 victory for Tottenham. On consecutive occasions they’ve been humiliated away to Nottingham Forest, losing on both occasions to an opposition inferior in quality but vastly superior in grit.

This summer Rodgers elected to exit Kasper Schmeichel, one of the few with a winners’ mentality, from the club. In January he let Marc Albrighton, a man elected vice captain following Schmeichel’s departure, leave on the final day of the transfer window. Leicester are sleepwalking into a relegation scrap without the men who know what it takes to win.

The captain’s armband has been passed round more often than a parcel at a kid’s birthday party. The favoured candidate prior to his injury was Youri Tielemans. Tielemans has been sensational at times for Leicester - Rodgers’ ‘coach on the pitch’ as he likes to label him. But for two years he has refused to commit his future to the club. Winding his contract down with a clear intention to leave the club for nothing this summer. He is a man with no skin in the game regarding whether Leicester City are a Premier League club next season. The armband now resides with James Maddison who is now treading the exact same path.

Is this really the best this squad can offer up in terms of leadership?

Of course another reason why the armband has been passed round so many times has been thanks to injuries. In an era where sports science teams can predict with relative accuracy a player’s likelihood to sustain an injury, the injury record during Rodgers’ time at the club has been nothing short of a disgrace. At first it was supposedly due to Covid schedules, then the number of games being played due to European competition. But it continues to be a theme - exactly as it has at Rodgers’ previous clubs - and he made changes to a department that had delivered years of impressive injury records upon his arrival at the club. Whether through his training schedules or his team selections, Rodgers is running multi-million pound footballers into the ground.

Injuries have placed a huge strain on the squad. And it’s a squad already creaking under pressure thanks to poor recruitment and bad man management. Caglar Soyuncu has been cast aside in favour of Dan Amartey - a man who looks like the thought of anything more than a simple 10-yard pass absolutely terrifies him. Soyuncu meanwhile is reportedly wanted by Diego Simeone, a manager who has pretty much trademarked defensive solidity. Jannick Vestergaard, a man that Rodgers tracked for a year and a half but somehow failed to spot turned slower than planet earth (something sorely exposed when Rodgers asked him to play in a high defensive line), is the latest in the shadows, just as Rodgers has decided he wants to play with three central defenders again. What could possibly go wrong?

In recent times the likes of Nampalys Mendy and Ayoze Perez have been out in the cold then desperately thrown into the fire as Rodgers looks to address the short-comings created by his poor recruitment and that dire injury record. It is in many ways remarkable that any player would want to keep playing for Rodgers given that there remain not many buses in Leicester that squad members have not been thrown under by Brendan when things have gone wrong. 

That brings us to perhaps Rodgers’ biggest crime over the past 18 months: his serial disrespect of the club, its owners and its fans.

After being backed financially in the transfer market better than any Leicester manager in history, last summer the club made a decision to reduce the unsustainable spending that had been allowed to accumulate in recent seasons. Post-match interviews for the first four months of the season became a weekly whine. How could this £10m a year manager who prides himself on his coaching pedigree be expected to get a tune out of a squad containing the likes of James Maddison, Harvey Barnes, Jamie Vardy, Youri Tielemans, Timothy Castagne, Wilfred Ndidi and Kelechi Iheanacho? How could a squad that had been competing in European football for the previous couple of seasons be likely to achieve anything other than scraping Premier League survival?

Read any sports performance book and mentality or mindset will be mentioned as one of the most critical enables of high performance. This manager has repeatedly talked down capability, set a criminally low bar for expectations and showed a huge lack of faith in those expected to go out and perform for him week in week out. Where Ranieri once said “I don’t want to wake up. I want to keep dreaming”, Rodgers has been saying “This is a nightmare”. His latest soundbite being that it would be a ‘huge achievement’ to keep this team in the Premier League.

The fish rots from the head down.

Prospective signings: roll up, roll up. Come to a club with no money, a manager who has no faith in your potential new team mates and where, if the magician in charge continues to work miracles, you can hit the heady heights of 40 points. The self-preservation exercise that Rodgers has been on for some time now damages the club. Were he to find a bus big enough, the entire club would be under it before Rodgers showed any signs of accountability.

It all begs the question, how the hell is he still in a job?

The style of play has become laboured and unadventurous. Even the newest of signings are now getting long-term injuries. The recruitment has been poor (not identifying a need for a new goalkeeper in January a sackable offence alone in my book). The manager's conduct has unquestionably harmed the club's brand. Results and league position are massively out of sync with the calibre of the squad... Leicester City Football Club, what on earth are you doing to yourself?!

If this really is a club “just happy to stay in the league”, the board have to act now. It’s high time Brand Brendan found a new home.