Why Leicester’s high wage bill has proven to be a disaster

As Foxes of Leicester reported, a Planet Football piece revealed the remarkable fact that seven out of the 10 top earners in the Championship – Jamie Vardy, Ricardo Pereira, Kelechi Iheanacho, Boubakary Soumare, Wilfred Ndidi, Dennis Praet, and Patson Daka – are Leicester City players.

At one level, assuming that the more a club pays a player the better he is, then this spells good news for the Foxes as they prepare to embark on a season in English football’s second tier. This is all a bit simplistic though. Indeed, there is a case for saying that Leicester’s high wage bill tells us a great deal about what has gone wrong at the club as well as pointing to the biggest challenge it faces in the immediate future.

Even by top-flight standards, the wage bill at the King Power outfit was large. The accountant Deloitte found that in the 2021-2 season, LCFC had the 7th highest wage bill in English football and, more importantly, wages constituted 85 per cent of the club’s revenue. Only Norwich City, Everton and Newcastle United had a higher ratio and none of those clubs spent as much on wages as the Foxes did.