Leicester overcome EFL to win promotion

Warm congratulations to Leicester City on their promotion to the Premier League. In 1965/8 I was at university in Leicester and many of my tutors, including my personal tutor Bob Borthwick, were Foxes fans.

It has been a rough ride for Leicester with the EFL seemingly determined to make an example of them. Football finances are increasingly convoluted and if I was qualifying as a lawyer today, I would think that football finance was a lucrative area to practice in. The lawyers collect their fees and the fans suffer..

Leicester’s usual business model was based on them being a Premier League club challenging for European qualification every season. Relegation hadn’t been factored in. There was no safety net, and they had just come crashing down to earth.

The reality of dropping down to the EFL after nine seasons in the top flight was they had to sell players and dramatically cut the wage bill. Ten first-team players left, seven of them as free agents as their contracts had been allowed to run down. These were players who had been recruited for fees worth £100million combined and were big earners, too

The EFL felt the cost-cutting wasn’t far-reaching enough and more sales could have taken place but what probably irritated the league more was how active Leicester were in replacing departed players.

In March, it emerged that the EFL’s club financial reporting unit (CFRU) had tried to enforce a business plan on the club over concerns they were on course to breach the league’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR), which would have forced them to reduce their budget and sell players in the winter transfer window.

Leicester successfully argued against it at an independent arbitration hearing but PSR concerns had already made a huge impact on Maresca’s January transfer plans. He had hoped to strengthen while his side were in such a good position in the table and seemed surprised when he was then told he would have to sell before he could buy.

The financial problems weren’t because Leicester didn’t have money — it was because they couldn’t spend the money they had.

That attempted signing wouldn’t have helped their standing with the EFL, which seemed determined to punish Leicester, enforcing a registration embargo in March at the same time as the Premier League charged the club with a breach of its own PSR rules during the 2022-23 season.

The club’s accounts for that period hadn’t been published at the time of the charge but after Easter, they revealed an £89.7million loss, adding to a £92.5m loss the previous year. Add in a £31m loss for 2020-21 and the club’s losses were now over £200m for the three-year cycle when only £105m was allowable under Premier League rules.

Leicester came out fighting, beginning legal actions against both the Premier League and the EFL, while admitting in their accounts that they may have been in breach but insisting they would only accept a punishment in accordance with existing rules.

The EFL eventually accepted, after taking legal advice, that it could not punish the club this season for the alleged breach in 2022-23.

Things appeared to be unravelling off the pitch, with growing discontent among the fans towards some of the upper management at the club, as well as some anti-EFL sentiment too.

The stakes were getting higher and the pressure to achieve promotion grew, as failure would leave Leicester open to the EFL’s determination to make an example of a club it perceived to be flouting the rules in order to try to go straight back up. A possible points sanction once back in the Premier League was seen as the better of two potential outcomes.

How much all the off-field factors, the lack of additions in the winter window and the growing pressure internally and externally affected Leicester’s players is difficult to quantify, but the unstoppable juggernaut, typified in meme form as HMS P**s The League, began to slow dramatically.

What awaits Leicester in the Premier League next season, time will tell. A points deduction is likely but they can do nothing about that now. Leicester must enjoy the moment and face that in August. At least they will know what they have to do then. It has been a long, hard campaign but regardless of all the problems en route, it has been a successful one.

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The Political Economy of Football V2

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