Is Ayoze Pérez unfairly scapegoated by Leicester City fans?

On pitch performance (continued)

Unfortunately, hard work without sufficient quality is simply not enough. Pérez seems to go missing too much and there are many games where he hasn’t contributed enough going forward, ultimately reflected in his poor output. If anything sums up his season, it would be that miss against Chelsea. Granted, the team performance was poor, but a player of Pérez’s position and quality should have scored this chance. Yet he didn’t, and this is the most referenced ‘flashpoint’ which cost LCFC the £40m jackpot of UCL football, as well as haunting many Leicester fans.

The infamous COVID-party

Now, this is where the party gets started. Excusing the pun, Ayoze can be handed chief blame for his frankly absurd decision to host a house party during a global pandemic. It’s bad enough that anyone would decide to do this in these circumstances, but being a footballer is a massive privilege. With great privilege comes responsibility as role models, which Pérez failed to uphold in this instance.

The fewer details said about this the better, but it had a massive psychological effect on the team and probably on the rest of the season. In the game against West Ham, the blame for this defeat can probably be mostly laid at Pérez’s door, with the absence of both Pérez and Maddison stifling LCFC’s creativity. To make matters worse, Pérez did not make up for his error in either apology or in performance which is why he has lost a lot of his popularity with the fanbase.  Furthermore, it’s no coincidence that team performances never recovered after this scandal, and this represents another nail in the Champions League coffin.