How would you "do a Leicester" in the SPFL?

PunkScott

PunkScott

Well-Known Member
Meek voting has exposed what we already strongly suspected, other than us and them nobody cares about winning anything, they're happy with the occasional run maybe a victory over one the Old Firm.

3rd place minimum should be expected for a team with a little bit of ambition, but if you were making a team to break the 35-year-Old Firm stranglehold, what would you go for?
 
Don’t forget Leicester are backed by a billionaire who is committed to them.

Any team that wanted to challenge would need mega money behind them, if only to stave EPL teams from taking their players.
 
It's impossible these days without an owner prepared to throw millions at it. Hearts under Romanov could have challenged the old firm more (they did come second one year) if the money was spent more wisely. Ideally you would be signing the best of the SPFL, picking up bargains from smaller foreign leagues and trying to get the odd unpolished diamond from the smaller English sides or the premier league clubs reserves. Basically what us and Celtic are doing but with a far greater share of the funding falling upon the owner.
 
BrooklynBlue said:
When you have to play us and them 8 times, it's very unlikely another team can sustain a challenge.
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The top wage at Hearts or Aberdeen is probably about £5k per week. If they get a player good enough to justify that sort of money he will immediately be a target for Rangers, Celtic, and about 25 other teams in the Championship and League 1 who can afford to pay a lot more. If he's a really good young player teams in the premier league might be interested too. They can never hang on to quality players, that's the biggest issue for me.
 
PunkScott said:
Meek voting has exposed what we already strongly suspected, other than us and them nobody cares about winning anything, they're happy with the occasional run maybe a victory over one the Old Firm.

3rd place minimum should be expected for a team with a little bit of ambition, but if you were making a team to break the 35-year-Old Firm stranglehold, what would you go for?
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They sad but true with their current team would romp the league.
 
I think an ambitious club could be 3rd and in cup final or two. As said no clubs care about it and there is scope for a driven, focused squad to do well.
 
It would take a Hearts/Hibs or Aberdeen to maybe have an influx of youth players into their team all having break through seasons and maybe 1/2 loans from bigger clubs and then the regular experienced players step up their performances.


Add in a striker who will have a freak 35 goals season a keeper having the season of his life and a lot of luck.



Not impossible as seen with Leicester but can't ever see it happening up here would take an extraordinary set of circumstance
 
madridista said:
Don’t forget Leicester are backed by a billionaire who is committed to them.

Any team that wanted to challenge would need mega money behind them, if only to stave EPL teams from taking their players.
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Compared to the salaries and fees paid out in EPL to the bigger traditional winners it was still a big difference money wise.
 
It would probably require a genius level manager of the calibre of Ferguson or McLean with an established conveyor belt of young talent on long term contracts and an ability to transform relatively ordinary players into much much better ones.

Kilmarnock under Clarke was the closest anyone has come in years and even then both were still a considerable distance away.

At the same time it would need both halves of the Old Firm to have poor seasons.

It also has to be acknowledged that Leicester was really just a freak occurrence, a bit like Hearts in ‘85/86 where they hadn’t really hinted at that level of performance before and never really did again after.

It was just a weird alchemy that is unlikely to ever be repeated.
 
Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs have the potential to do it, Dundee United have been the most recent team to look like they have a chance of doing it.

Ultimately it comes down to scouting and recruitment, these clubs shop in the British market almost exclusively. It's no coincidence that the best Hearts team in living memory dipped into the foreign market heavily, you get much better value for money.

The current Rangers and Celtic teams aren't unbeatable and actually look quite vulnerable away from home when teams play at a high tempo and look to win.

Less investment in the best jobbers you can find in Scotland and the English lower leagues and more investment in scouting systems, data analysis and youth coupled with forward thinking managers is how you do it.

You could give Derek McInnes £100m to spend and he'd finish 2nd at best.
 
Hearts under burley probably had the best chance of doing it but f@cked it.
Rumours of burley being on the drink and Romanov trying to pick the team didn’t help. Can’t remember if there was more to it or not at the time, but they certainly weren’t as good a side after he left.
Bizarrely I was walking along princes street when one of my mates phoned me to ask if I’d heard about burley. (Was he sacked or did he resign)
 
Chris-to-pher said:
Hearts under burley probably had the best chance of doing it but f@cked it.
Rumours of burley being on the drink and Romanov trying to pick the team didn’t help. Can’t remember if there was more to it or not at the time, but they certainly weren’t as good a side after he left.
Bizarrely I was walking along princes street when one of my mates phoned me to ask if I’d heard about burley. (Was he sacked or did he resign)
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Dundee United a few seasons ago could have had a chance too but decided to become Celtic's feeder club
 
Dundee United and Aberdeen had their chance to do it while we were out the league. Celtic were poor under Deila but Aberdeen didn't have the bottle and as pointed out, Dundee United chose to get a quick quid in from Celtic instead of a title challenge.
 
I still struggle to believe a team managed by Claudio Ranieri with Wes Morgan, Danny Simpson, Mark Albrighton etc as key players won the league legitimately.

Most likely they were on some form of performance enhancers and got away with it.
 
KensingtonBlue said:
I still struggle to believe a team managed by Claudio Ranieri with Wes Morgan, Danny Simpson, Mark Albrighton etc as key players won the league legitimately.

Most likely they were on some form of performance enhancers and got away with it.
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Every other big club had a poor season. I don't think there was much more to it than that.
 
madridista said:
Don’t forget Leicester are backed by a billionaire who is committed to them.

Any team that wanted to challenge would need mega money behind them, if only to stave EPL teams from taking their players.
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True but the Leicester squad cost a fraction of the other teams they beat.
 
Smkz23 said:
At Aberdeen it’s half that according to reports.
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I'd have thought they would be paying a multi million pound asset like McKenna more than that. They knocked back £6m for him, can't see how he would have extended his deal for two and a half grand a week. Certainly don't think they would have many on that wage though.
 
Let's face it - if you fancied throwing tens of millions at it you wouldn't be far away. In fact there may be the same sort of goodwill that was evident in the Leicester win - teams knew how they would play yet didn't set up to really nullify them until much later in the season.

Always had the feeling that some of the bigger teams weren't too fussed whether they got beat from them in the latter part of the season as they don't really have any fierce rival in the EPL.

Contrast that with the way teams raise their game against us and the way they set out to park the bus in most games - that probably wouldn't happen with our version of Leicester.
 
Tugay83 said:
The top wage at Hearts or Aberdeen is probably about £5k per week. If they get a player good enough to justify that sort of money he will immediately be a target for Rangers, Celtic, and about 25 other teams in the Championship and League 1 who can afford to pay a lot more. If he's a really good young player teams in the premier league might be interested too. They can never hang on to quality players, that's the biggest issue for me.
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Yes, but we're talking about even a one-off challenge. Players have to perform to earn their move.

A 16 or 18-team League would allow a team to potentially challenge.
 
Leicester's title winning season was superb, but the cynic in me says it was largely down to the fact there was a perfect storm and they happened to navigate it best.

All the big names were taking points off each other and dropping silly points elsewhere. Vardy had an outstanding season and they won a watch by having Kante and Mharez in their squad to support him. We won't see another title win like that for a long time.

As far as up here goes, in my lifetime it's been the Sheep and Hearts that have threatened us and them in terms of breaking the duopoly as far as titles go.

The Sheep challenges were when I was really young but they had a decent side (the remnants of the Fergie era) and of course there was the decider in 1990/91.

1997/98 Hearts were still in with a shout until quite far on in the season but both us and them were dropping points all over the place for Hearts hanging onto the coat-tails. In 2005/06, we were really poor (Europe aside) and I think the mentally challengeds had a hangover of sorts from Helicopter Sunday coupled with Strachan taking over and getting up to speed. Burnley suddenly being bagged was a shocker but the bottle job at new year against the mentally challengeds finished Hearts.

I do wonder if the Hibs team under John Collins might have sustained a challenge had they been able to hold that squad together. Obviously we took Thomson and Whittaker while Brown and Riordan ended up at them and Gary O'Conner fucked off to Russia and the gear. But if Collins was backed by the Hibs board a bit more then I reckon they could have caused a few problems as far as the title goes.
 
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BrooklynBlue said:
Yes, but we're talking about even a one-off challenge. Players have to perform to earn their move.

A 16 or 18-team League would allow a team to potentially challenge.
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An 18 team league might be the only way a team outside of glasgow will ever win the league again
 
BrooklynBlue said:
Yes, but we're talking about even a one-off challenge. Players have to perform to earn their move.

A 16 or 18-team League would allow a team to potentially challenge.
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Soon as they have a good player performing regularly he gets snapped up though. They cant build anything even to the point of a 1 year challenge.
 
PunkScott said:
Meek voting has exposed what we already strongly suspected, other than us and them nobody cares about winning anything, they're happy with the occasional run maybe a victory over one the Old Firm.

3rd place minimum should be expected for a team with a little bit of ambition, but if you were making a team to break the 35-year-Old Firm stranglehold, what would you go for?
Click to expand...
One of Hearts money men they like to give out millions no strings attached.
 
Tugay83 said:
I'd have thought they would be paying a multi million pound asset like McKenna more than that. They knocked back £6m for him, can't see how he would have extended his deal for two and a half grand a week. Certainly don't think they would have many on that wage though.
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Madness they turned that down. They could have brought in a decent 3-4 players that could do a turn in scottish football and still had a million or so for the bank. They would be lucky to get half of that now. Business decisions like this are another reason I doubt we'll have a scottish equivalent of Leicester anytime soon.
 
MickF24 said:
Madness they turned that down. They could have brought in a decent 3-4 players that could do a turn in scottish football and still had a million or so for the bank. They would be lucky to get half of that now. Business decisions like this are another reason I doubt we'll have a scottish equivalent of Leicester anytime soon.
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Yep agree. Wont be seeing that sort of offer for him again either.
 
Leicester did have some decent players but certainly not superior to their rivals that season

What they also had though was great organisation, decent tactics, knew their own strengths & weaknesses, a squad that would run through walls for each other & ultimately developed determination & a belief in themselves

So theoretically that combination is open to a lot more teams than most would expect
 
It needs one half of the OF to be struggling. It happened in the 80s with us being poor (although there was also the best ever Sheep and Dundee Hibs sides) and in the 90s when the Tims were poor. It shows how bad the other teams were when we were out of the top flight. No one were anywhere near Deila's team. If we hadn't beaten them in the cup semi, he might have stayed and who knows what would have happened.
 
Aberdeen should have been the team when the scum were managed by Delia. Part of it has to be what some of the Rangers team have lacked ... a win at all costs mentality. This culture of its ok to lose, no not when you are a professional.
 
KensingtonBlue said:
I still struggle to believe a team managed by Claudio Ranieri with Wes Morgan, Danny Simpson, Mark Albrighton etc as key players won the league legitimately.

Most likely they were on some form of performance enhancers and got away with it.
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Vardy, Mahrez, Kante. Did you forget that those 3 are world class!?

Kante is a world cup winner.
 
None of the other teams have a winning mentality.

You could give them a 20 point head start at the beginning of the season and they'd probably still blow it.
 
Won't be done without someone investing hundreds of millons in a club probably as soon as a club has anybody sellable in Scotland they sell asap look at Dundee United with Mackey Steven and Armstrong they could have kept them and build around them and challenge the paedophiles when we were out the leagues but the first thing they done was sell them to their rivals
 
As great an achievement as it was for Leicester - their overall points total was still lower than nearly every other champion in the last 20 years.

They got lucky in that Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea etc all had very poor seasons.
 
Out with us and them the rest of scottish football teams set up not too lose defend for life Nick a goal no chance any of them will ever win a league again until this mentality is removed
 
Granted, nobody wants to think about another team winning the league at our expense, but there isn't many optimistic approaches.

I think I'd go for a mix of veteran players that might come cheap and really reach out for loan signings that wanted a move to us or them.

Aberdeen when Celtic had Delia should have gone for it in the 2016 January window.
 
I think it’s impossible. There are only two powerful clubs in Scotland whereas in England you have half a dozen big clubs vying for power. It’s easier to buy off or intimidate when it’s one against one. It’s much more difficult when you have several competing interests. I think this situation allow Leicester to slink past them undetected.

On the field of course anything is possible. Get the mix of players right and have them playing consistently on top form and you can beat any team. So it’s a question of team chemistry, management, and a touch of luck. Anyone can do it once, it’s doing it consistently that’s the problem.Fortunately for Leicester they were able to keep it together long enough to win a campaign
 
The problem is the size of the league here they would need to win at least four of the 8 rangers celtic games and prob draw two draws and 2 defeats.

The set up here dictates that just won't happen
 
Can’t see it myself but if it was to happen I think it would take 6 or 7 talented youths all coming through at the same time who the club would be willing to hold on to for more than one season. Add to that a good tactical manager who can organise, 4 experienced pros/old heads, team spirit and a shed load of luck.

Nah....
 
KGR98 said:
Won't be done without someone investing hundreds of millons in a club probably as soon as a club has anybody sellable in Scotland they sell asap look at Dundee United with Mackey Steven and Armstrong they could have kept them and build around them and challenge the paedophiles when we were out the leagues but the first thing they done was sell them to their rivals
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They couldn't have kept them. They had debts and the players were being offered probably ten times their wages at the time. There is no way provincial Scottish teams can stop their best players getting picked off without offering to pay them money that would bankrupt any club that didnt have a sugar daddy owner prepared to lose millions.
 
Hearts pay some of their current players more than £5k per week (Naismith and Boyce for starters) and have been known to pay as much as £12k per week in recent years.
I don't think it would take that much to challenge in all honesty. A team that could beat the rest 90% of the time shouldn't be that expensive and the games against us and them would take care of themselves. Don't forget we'd both drop points against each other too.
 
Chris-to-pher said:
Hearts under burley probably had the best chance of doing it but f@cked it.
Rumours of burley being on the drink and Romanov trying to pick the team didn’t help. Can’t remember if there was more to it or not at the time, but they certainly weren’t as good a side after he left.
Bizarrely I was walking along princes street when one of my mates phoned me to ask if I’d heard about burley. (Was he sacked or did he resign)
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Sacked when they had won 9 and drew 1 of their first 10 games, as far as I remember.
 
KensingtonBlue said:
I still struggle to believe a team managed by Claudio Ranieri with Wes Morgan, Danny Simpson, Mark Albrighton etc as key players won the league legitimately.

Most likely they were on some form of performance enhancers and got away with it.
Click to expand...

Bit of a claim there! Think it was just a case of the stars aligning and a hell of a lot of belief.
 
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