Admiral Muskwe has been released from 6th tier club Morecambe. His stay lasted a season as the Zimbabwe international is yet an example of a player hyped in the youth set up at Leicester, to just vanish from the limelight of the game, to see his future, more or less in the wilderness of football.
The 27 year old should be in his prime. But to be part of lower league structures you will find yourself in environments not able to ever bring you back to the level you left. This is a clear reason for the fall you see among players who has left the better parties. Admiral Muskwe looked fresh and special during his years at Leicester. He scored 2 goals in 4 outings for England U17. He later became a Zimbabwe full international, being capped on 7 occasions.
Yesterday LCFC.com published a story on Tommy Wright and his journey in the game. We thought the striker would be given time to be nursed forward and becoming a full member of the Leicester first team, but in some way, just as Admiral Muskwe, wandered around, like a journeyman, with no real purpose or plan set up for him.
Everything feels random; with constant management changes at football clubs, people and their careers are treated as if they don’t matter. This is a culture that needs to change.
We have earlier looked in the back mirror, to look at previous youth stars at this football club, ending up, where you would probably not believe they would end up. The pathway is in some way seen as a good example of the total opposite with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall. He never played in an England youth side, overlooked or just not good enough at the time at that level. In some way he managed to pave his way into the first team frame, being looked after by the club.
There are of course difficult to argue as the players the club have let go, never really managed to get back into the top flight circus. Che Adams, Calvin Bassey and Sam Clucas were exceptions, but in fact and truth, the club had better alternatives at the time themselves. Che Adams and another player who was on Leicester books, George Hirst, are both in the Scotland 2026 World Cup squad.
There of course many examples of players who have found it possible to play at a good level, strangely enough goalkeepers Daniel Iversen and Viktor Johansson are both playing in a league above Leicester, both given away on a free transfer. Johansson, in the Sweden 2026 World Cup squad, is a player at Stoke, Iversen in goal for Preston.
Brad Young was last summer pushed out from Leicester. He ended up at Bristol Rovers on a free transfer. He was signed from Hartlepool and at the time playing for England U19. He is a top goalkeeper prospect and one who could have been a brilliant understudy, instead of bringing in third choice goalkeepers from abroad.
When you see new managers starting doing those type of decision making, you just stop trusting them and puts a cross over their face. Sadly Marti Cifuentes made it easy to just stop trusting him, doing strange moves in squad logistics that will be fatal for your situation as a manager.
"A dream." 🤩
— Leicester City (@LCFC) June 11, 2026
Tommy Wright on playing for his boyhood club after emerging through our Academy.
We do have a number of players in the academy and the development squad that has some potential, but looking at it in perspective, this is a very unbalanced situation. The best players are under the age of 18, the group between 19 and 21 are not at the same level. Then you have a major problem in your recruitment system, just keeping players around to fill out the numbers, hopefully that can be changed to the better in the seasons to come.
The fact that players at the age of 15 are better players than those from 19 to 21, makes it very difficult. Darren Motsi is a special example. He looks to move on to a bigger and better, Liverpool and Man City the vultures to bring him in.
The cruel factor is that if you are in the youth set up at Arsenal, Man City, Man Utd or Liverpool, you will, if let go from these clubs, have a much better platform to make it in professional football at a good level. There are many examples. Jadon Sancho left Man City to join Borussia Dortmund. The same with Cole Palmer, Liam Delap, James Trafford and Hannibal Mejbri, all of them previously in these academies.
We believe that Leicester will be seeking a new and better foundation with the way they work with players from the time they reach the development department and leaves the academy. This is a crucial time and one to understand better for the club as we do see most of the youngsters struggles to get this correctly and ending up leaving the club with no transfer fee, just a release and off you are in some sort of limbo in your football career.
Leicester do not have a clear strategy, looking at the set up of FC Copenhagen, you start to wonder, how you build your set up and follow these rules for the purpose of using your time and resources on a great academy.
If you have no idea how to nursing the group into becoming great first team footballers at Leicester, the time is wasted and it is just not good enough. If you start working with frames and limits, you will be able to keep the path as clear and obvious as is needed. Then having a manager at the top, not working inside these limits and frames will be catostrophic.
Athletic Bilbao is a good example of a club with strict recruitment rules. They could allow the first team manager more freedom, but they choose stability instead. All players are from the Basque region, and the team is built around that. Currently, they have two players representing other nations, but both were born locally and are eligible to play for those countries for different reasons.
Leicester is currently struggling, as player recruitment across the club is unbalanced, leading to a belief that agent influences and staff decisions are creating chaos. This kind of situation can be common in football, resulting in a corrupt and toxic atmosphere with a lack of culture, strategic control, and limited understanding of what the good mechanisms are and how you should max your capacity based on the type of club you are.
We have seen different fan groups talking about having influence and being heard, but they are not focusing on these elements at all, which shows their lack of understanding what the total of a football club are. They tend to just focus on the results for the first team, not really having a clue about how long term life should be build. The different fanbases can in different areas be even more short eyed than the people inside the club.
At this point Leicester looks a difficult project, not really having the correct mindset among supporters, the inside management at the club and of course the recruitment department doing silly mistakes on almost every move made in the transfer market over the last four to five years.
Leicester looks to be in a sad place at the moment, far below their expectations level and standard. Hopefully an open dialogue, will see some improvement, but at this point nothing looks much settled. The fact that two pre-season friendlies are scheduled even without a manager in place, makes it difficult to believe in any improvement and a long term strategic approach to be in place.
This club use the manager as an excuse for bad results, then the boat sails in a different direction for a few months, before it makes another turn and moves to another harbour. Hopefully we will see some sort of controlled action going forward, but sadly, the belief of that happening is fading day by day.
If you talk about limits and frames, you will have to deal with all of it as you build your plan for improvement. Ajax use their TIPS approach and also of course very much obsessed with 4-3-3. That in itself are far from what we would like to see at Leicester. The type of system to play, the type of marking you prefer, should not be the base, but you need to have something in place as a guide to how football should be played at the football club.
If everything comes with a random approach, fire sales are set to be the pattern and playing style and recruitment will be another random affair, then this could be a difficult place to be in the next season. Hopes are that we calmly can see a pathway in the correct direction. So far no evidence of that to happen.
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