Conor Coady pinpoints where Leicester City problem lies with honest verdict

Former Leicester City defender Conor Coady has claimed that the problems at the club must run deeper than the manager and players after their slow start to life in League One.

The Foxes have picked up five points from their opening five league games under Russell Martin and suffered a humiliating 4-0 home defeat to Oxford United. Martin is the fifth permanent manager at the King Power Stadium since Enzo Maresca led the club back to the Premier League in 2024.

Martin has received criticism for his start to life at Leicester, with fans also continuing to call for change at boardroom level. However, Coady, who is currently a free agent, believes the problems over the past few years must run deeper than the performances on the pitch.

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"Yeah I think it is, but it's been in transition for too long now, if we're going to be completely honest," Coady said on BBC Radio 5 Live's Monday Night Club. "From the first time they dropped out of the Premier League to then when we went back up and back down again, it's been too long in transition now.

"For me to sit here and state the obvious that things aren't great and aren't going well, they've got five points in League One, it's the obvious, we all know that. But there's got to be something deep down that's wrong there because it's been going on for too many years now.

"Everyone will sit there and go, 'the players aren't good enough, they haven't been good enough', and rightly so because the players ain't good enough and I was there, I felt it, I wasn't good enough. That's what it was, but there's got to be a deeper issue."

He added: ""I think over the summer, the club did a good job, and Leicester fans won't want to hear this, they'll probably turn their head at what I'm saying, but I actually think they've done a good job in shifting the energy.

"The last couple of years, it's been tough because the club's been in such a spiral and dropping down, the same players were involved in that. So they had a big summer in terms of changing the energy. So a lot of people wanted to see the younger players coming through.

"They've got Sammy Braybrooke, who is a fantastic footballer. They've got Louis Page, linked with Man United, they've got Will Alves, who's been around the first team for years and he trained with me, a really, really good footballer.

"You have players who can come in, Bade Aluko, who plays right-back, scored against Ipswich. Some really good young players and they've done well in the summer to really change the energy of it, because the last couple of years have been tough. I think a big part of when it's tough is shifting the energy away from the players who've been there, or keeping that little bit of a sprinkle of experienced players.

"But for whatever reason, I go back to it, it's got to be deeper. It can't just be now, 'oh the manager's not good enough and the players aren't good enough'. It's got to run deeper than what we're doing because they've decided to bring Russell in, you decide to tie your flag to the mast, if you want to say, 'right, we are going to go with this because this is a way that has got to have time to improve'.

"If they're going to make a decision after four or five games, there was no point in bringing Russell in because that's not the sort of manager he is."

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