The hole left by Wesley Fofana continues to haunt Leicester City

To say Leicester City have been a shadow of their former selves is getting to a point it almost sounds like an understatement; the Foxes went down to Aston Villa 2-1 and now sit 11th in the Premier League standings.

Leicester City, in their second attempt under Brendan Rodgers, are vying with a few others for Champions League football for next season.

Unfortunately, the Foxes have fallen further away from their goal with yet another loss in their 2021/22 run — this time losing to Aston Villa — questioning the club’s ability in the transfer market to properly plug the hole left by key centre back, Wesley Fofana.

Wesley Fofana’s untimely injury for Leicester City

Just afore the current Premier League campaign got underway, Leicester were met with the untimely injury of Wesley Fofana, whose leg was broken in a challenge when they beat Villereal 3-2 in a warm-up match.

This led to them acting quickly in the summer market and signed Jannik Vestergaard from Southampton for a reported fee of £15m. This clearly hasn’t helped that much with them doing worse than what they did, compared to last season at this point.

Without Wesley Fofana, Leicester City have:

• Dropped points after scoring first in two Premier League fixtures; the Aston villa loss and the 2-2 draw against Crystal Palace on Matchday 7
• There have been six fixtures where they have conceded one or more goals in the opening 20 minutes of the match — just unacceptable, as that is just under 50% of the games they’ve played
• They have only kept 1 clean sheet this season and across all competitions, they have only managed three clean sheets
• They have conceded 27 goals to date. Last season after Matchday 15 they conceded less with 21 goals — they are 23 goals away from meeting last season’s total of 50 goals let in
• They’ve now already lost six games and drew four; 26 points dropped in total — last season at this point in the campaign, they lost the same amount (six games) but only drew one, keeping three clean sheets in the process. They too only dropped 20 points, six less than this season’s 26

To put that into perspective: If they had collected the extra six points where they lost the lead, they would have been level on points with Tottenham (25 points) and above Manchester United (24 points), who sit fifth and sixth, respectively, in the Premier League standings.

Set-pieces have been a major downfall for the Foxes as we saw with Villa’s winning goal scored in the second half. They now have become the team that has conceded the most from set-pieces.

Next up for the Foxes is a crucial Europa League clash against Napoli. Brendan Rodgers and his men lead the group and are one point ahead of Thursday night’s opponents. A win and they will qualify as Group C winners.