Why are Leicester moving so slowly in the transfer market?

With the Premier League summer transfer window set to open in a couple of weeks, Leicester City is yet to have any strong player links. Many of the Foxes Premier League rivals have gone into the transfer market full steam ahead, strengthening their squads with hopes and expectations of a top-six finish.

In the usual Leicester fashion of never doing anything the easy way, will the summer rebuild be the same? Seeing other Premier League clubs, who also won’t be playing any European football next season attracting top footballing talents is a good sign that playing in Europe isn’t the only thing the top players look at when considering a move. The attraction of being an established Premier League club alone will allow City to draw the attention of some of Europe’s finest players.

However, a limited spending capacity could mean the Foxes struggle to attract the talent necessary when you have top-four hopes in mind. Without the big player cash-ins that Maguire, Mahrez, Kante and Drinkwater have provided us within recent years, Leicester’s spending capacity is now much less than some of our biggest rivals and with Youri Tielemans potentially being sold for just £25 Million, it doesn’t give us much to play within today’s market.

It’s a good thing that spending hundreds of millions on a few players has never been Leicester’s style and although another £500k Algerian wonder is highly unlikely, the Blue Army could still pick up a few bargains from Europe. The recruitment has been a bit hit and miss in recent years, I won’t name them, but you know who’s done well and who hasn’t.

I hope the summer rebuild will see some young, hungry and exciting players give the squad a much-needed boost and a bit of inspiration that we’ve lacked during the 2021/22 season. To do that, The Foxes will have to ship out some of the squad to raise funds and free up some of the wage budgets. With that in mind, Leicester City’s squad depth isn’t great, so we need to have quality replacement deals ready. The last thing we want to do is sell off some of our squad and end up with nobody to cover, or panic buying sub-par players at the end of August again.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall had a huge influence on our performances during the second half of the season after coming through the ranks of the academy and into the first team and with our transfer situation considered, could it be time for more of our academy players to do the same?

It’s difficult to accurately reflect on this season and predict the next. We had a slow start with some players taking a while to get into gear, and countless injuries with key players missing several games at a time. Maybe the most important thing for the 2022/23 season, aside from some new player signings is introducing some new faces behind the scenes who can help develop players and keep them match-fit.

I remain hopeful for the summer transfer window even if we are starting slowly, after all, it hasn’t officially opened yet and it could mean that we have a very particular plan of who’s coming in and who’s going out, maybe there could even be a surprise contract extension of a certain Belgian midfielder in the works, who knows?