How Leicester City deviated from the transfer norm to eliminate excuse in survival gamble

Leicester City signed five players from Premier League rivals during the transfer window, the same number as in their past five summers as a Premier League club

It may come as a surprise to learn that, by net spend, this summer’s transfer window was perhaps Leicester City’s biggest ever.

Six of their nine signings arrived for a fee, with the expenditure finishing at around £80m. With Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall leaving for £30m and with players like Lewis Brunt and Zach Booth comparatively sold for spare change, the net spend stands at around £50m.

The lack of details around fees, and the potential for add-ons to be met, means it’s hard to be definitive around transfer spending, but that £50m figure would just eclipse the estimated net spend from City’s previous record, in summer 2021. That, of course, was City’s anomaly, the one summer where there was no major sale.

Kamal Sowah left for a fee rising to £7.5m in City’s most profitable exit. So when Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumare, and Jannik Vestergaard were signed for a combined £55m, that represented a significant outlay.

That this may be City’s biggest summer ever feels unusual for a few reasons. For a start, they weren’t busy throughout the window, going three weeks through late July and early August without an arrival.

Secondly, they were still some way from being the league’s biggest spenders. For net spend, they ranked eighth in the Premier League, while both of their fellow promoted clubs spent more, Southampton coming in sixth and Ipswich, with a net spend of around £123m, were second only to Brighton.

The players at City have played a combined 2,015 Premier League games. That’s more than at seven other sides in the division. It’s much more in line with the league average. Southampton are only one place behind City, but have 300 fewer Premier League appearances in their squad. Meanwhile, City are within 300 appearances of seven sides above them.

Cooper has 10 players he can call on who have played at least the equivalent of two full seasons of Premier League football, with four of them added to the squad this summer. It is fair to say City, as a collective, know what this division takes.

While Cooper has played his part in requesting those experienced heads, he also wanted it balanced out. In Buonanotte, El Khannouss and Abdul Fatawu, City have three players aged 20 or under, and their job will be to bring a youthful exuberance and fearlessness to a group of cooler, older heads.

“It’s something that is important,” Cooper said on signing experienced operators. “Players that come into the Premier League for the first time, there’s a transition stage. Sometimes players can hit the ground running but other players can take a little longer, and that’s okay.

“And when players come to England for the first time, that needs a transition period as well. I know a lot about that. That’s probably where I was with making sure that if we brought players in, some of them we knew could play at Premier League level. We’ve been able to do that.

“We’ve also bought some guys from other countries who have come to England for the first time who will have to adapt quickly, even to training. When you speak to a guy who’s in England for the first time, they will always say that training is more intense. It’s about adapting to what English football is brilliant for, and that’s the intensity and the speed and the competitiveness.

“Because you also want that youthful wonder of guys going there carefree and just delivering. You want a mixture of both. You can’t have too much of one or too much of the other.

“The balance needs to be right, and then maybe dialled up or dialled down for certain games. We’ll put all of those things together when preparing for a game and hopefully we’ll have the right balance.”