Brendan Rodgers paid the price for Leicester’s drive to balance the books

F or Brendan Rodgers, it had been business as usual on Sunday. The Leicester manager called his players into the club’s Seagrave training ground to analyse the bitterly disappointing last-minute defeat at Crystal Palace that left them in the bottom three and he was fully expecting to take charge of the meeting with Aston Villa on Tuesday until the bad news was delivered by the chairman, Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha.

But if the timing of Rodgers’s departure four years after he succeeded Claude Puel came as something of a surprise, even he must have expected it would eventually end like this given the way things have unravelled since the start of the season. One win and seven defeats from the opening 10 Premier League games after a summer of only two signings – the defender Wout Faes for £17m on deadline day, to replace the £75m Chelsea-bound Wesley Fofana, and the third-choice goalkeeper, Alex Smithies – were followed by signs before the World Cup that Leicester might have turned a corner. But their regression since has culminated in six defeats and no wins in their past seven matches and forced Srivaddhanaprabha’s hand.

The 37-year-old Srivaddhanaprabha, who became chairman in 2018 after the death of his father, Vichai, in a helicopter crash, wrote off nearly £200m of debt owed by Leicester to the owner, King Power, in February and clearly felt his faith in the manager who led the club to a first FA Cup success less than two years ago had run dry with relegation looking increasingly likely. “He is an amazing guy and I will say the same when I leave here,” Rodgers said of his chairman’s generosity when that debt was cleared.

After the fairytale Premier League title triumph in 2016, Srivaddhanaprabha has overseen the