I'll try and be as balanced and fair as I can.
Before Rodgers we had Puel. By all accounts the football was turgid and dire for quite a long time. He made a few astute acquisitions and rejuvenated the playing squad but couldn't transfer things onto the pitch. The latter probably as a consequence of his personality and perhaps also his lack of English. Eventually, he got the sack.
Then Rodgers came in and had an almost immediate impact. Things looked much better. In his first two full seasons, we spent most of the time in the top four but missed out on CL football narrowly twice. Players seemed to buy into his way - even though behind the scenes he had already started to dismantle things (e.g. let Rennie go, implemented Congerton). In his second full season he won the FA Cup - narrowly and with a little bit of luck admittedly but you always need that.
In his third full season and from Summer 2021 onwards, things started to go wrong. Fofana's injury, bad transfers (Vestergaard, Bertrand, Soumare), a significant decline in form. Loss of confidence in the squad, and probably also loss of buy-in from the players into Rodgers' ways. Then the debacle at Notts Forest in February 2022 and our poor European showing. In hindsight, at some point during 21/22 he should have been let go but they didn't act: a fatal blend of negligence, distractions due to the pandemic, misguided loyalty and simply error of judgement. We still finished 8th though. Personally, I would not have let him go then just yet, and I was even quietly optimistic last summer.
From Summer 2022 onwards I'd say he started madly banging the self-destruct button though. In hindsight I'm not even sure what happened then:
1) Did he try to engineer his sacking by throwing away the game against Brentford?
2) Did he do the same regarding how Schmeichel was apparently shipped out?
3) Or was he just stubborn and tried to send concealed messages to the board?
4) Or all the above, i.e. "if they don't give in to my requests, they'll have to sack me!" - in hindsight it looks almost as if he tried to engineer a constructive dismissal, so to speak!
---not to mention the various fall-outs with players (Soyuncu, Praet etc.), Ward's promotion to 1st team GK (which cost us points, too).
I think it was the bad start to this season that made me worry about the club's future for the first time.
I'm not sure how to align this run of events with Covid-19 and King Power's financial woes but certainly both the years 2020 and 2021 must have been awful for them. The video above mentions the losses of over £92.5M in 2021/22. They must have known about this much earlier but it certainly explains why there was no transfer activity in Summer 2022. And it partially explains (Vichai's death comes into play here as well) why they took their eyes off the ball and let Rogers' wreak havoc until it was (almost) too late!
Well, what now? No matter what league we end up in, there is a massive rebuilding job to do. Even if we stay up we'll most likely lose both Tielemans and Maddison, and Vardy will be another year older. Maybe the board will accept any offer for any player? So IF (and it's a huge IF) we survive, the future manager has got his work cut out, and we're not even sure the get the recruitment right this time. A lot depends how well Smith et. al. perform over the next few weeks and whether they can be entrusted with more next season!
So to conclude, I won't put all the blame at Rodgers' door but onwards from Summer 2022 at the latest his behaviour was openly destructive. There are many, many posts where worries by fans were expressed and where his misdemeanours were pointed out, not just on here but on FT also (there is a thread called "
Relegation" which I found last night, starting on 27th August 2022). Some people saw this even earlier (myself NOT included). It's almost criminal that the board didn't see all this and didn't react but - see above!
