Leicester City are set to make changes in the January transfer window. With a month to prepare, here are two players likely to leave when the window opens.
Brendan Rodgers’ Foxes sit 12th in the Premier League though only being five points off fifth place Arsenal. It remains close, but the King Power side should be in a much better position with the squad available.
Due to the poor start, it is likely there will be some changes in the January window in an attempt to reinvigorate the side ahead of a big second half of the season. Of course, there is still December to be played before that window, so things may start looking up by then.
With Wesley Fofana and James Justin on the comeback trail, and a couple players left completely unused, it might be time to sell two to make room for a new signing. It seems Leicester have already decided the two to leave.
Leicester City’s transfer mistakes
According to LeicestershireLive, Papy Mendy and Filip Benkovic are the two who are very likely to leave, though it is unclear whether or not ‘Benko’ will leave permanently or on loan. Mendy will be leaving permanently though. Please click below for the next page.
Clubs always make mistakes in transfer windows. They sign and sell players they simply should not. Even the East Midland side make mistakes, from Islam Slimani to Adrien Silva, though many of these players are not really all that bad while playing regularly for their new clubs.
Not selling or loaning out the Senegalese international will be added to that list of mistakes. In so doing, and not even registering the player for the league or European football, the midfielder has got very little game time and will likely leave for a pitiful fee.
By contrast, the Croatian defender is a strange inclusion on this list. Our Northern Irish head coach trained and played the centre-back at Celtic and he performed well. His later loans were shambles. Sent to not even play football at Cardiff and OH Leuven.
Even in that context, Benko is a known ‘good’ defender. Though he might not be an exciting talent anymore as the game time the Croatian has had is minimal, he remains a strong and tall player who is good at corners – something Leicester is not good at.
At the start of this season, Jonny Evans and Little Wes were injured. As a response, the towering defender was kept on while Jannik Vestergaard was purchased. Even when the Danish international was injured, Rodgers selected Daniel Amartey ahead of Benkovic.
The defender was not even used as a substitute for Amartey or Caglar Soyuncu. Since then, the player has essentially only featured for the U23 side in Premier League 2. There was no point in keeping him.
This situation is reminiscent of Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s treatment of Donny van de Beek. When you have a decent player and injuries in that position, a logical decision would be to give the youngster a chance rather than rely on playing others out of position.
We saw success in this approach last season when Jurgen Klopp brought in youngsters like Rhys Williams and Nathaniel Phillips at centre-back instead of continuing to rely on playing Jordan Henderson and Fabinho out of position.
To be blunt, despite the hard work rate of Amartey and his relatively good form, the Ghanaian international is technically inferior to most of our defenders and lacks a positional awareness in defence. That being said, the player has scored goals and when he does actually push forward as expected of him Amartey can create dangerous scenarios.
However, Leicester City will never know if that could have been Benkovic rather than Amartey. Benko should have been given the chance alongside Big Dan. Now, the Foxes risk losing two players for a large deficit.