Football
Richard Jolly, ESPN.com writer 8y

Leicester have spent big for the future, but what about this season?

It represented a case of going back to basics. On Aug. 27, Leicester secured their first win of the season against Swansea with a starting 11 comprised entirely of players who were at the King Power Stadium last year. Ten of them had been automatic choices during their spring surge towards the title. The odd man out, Daniel Amartey, stood in for N'Golo Kante, sold to Chelsea. It looked like a case of business as usual.

In reality, Leicester have done some very unusual business this summer. When they visit Liverpool on Saturday, they could give a debut to Islam Slimani, their deadline day acquisition. Leicester, the club who bought the men who would become the PFA Player of the Year and Footballer of the Year respectively, Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy, for just £1.4 million, now have a £29.8m signing. They have broken their transfer record three times in a summer, spending £13m on Nampalys Mendy, £16m on Ahmed Musa and a sum comparable with their combined fees on Slimani.

Include the £7.5m Poland winger Bartosz Kapustka and £2.6m goalkeeper Ron-Robert Zieler, unless he is required to deputise for Kasper Schmeichel in the team, and Claudio Ranieri could name a bench that cost £67m and a starting 11 acquired for around a third of that.

It all suggests a bit of a paradox. Leicester's winning method required their cheaper acquisitions, an imbalance and a divide between old and new. Now, the challenge for Claudio Ranieri will be to assimilate the higher-calibre of recruits into a group that was bought with little fanfare but became the band of brothers who captured imaginations and silverware alike.

There is no doubt Leicester have spent the spoils of success. Relapse, and they risk being accused of disrupting the dynamic that propelled them to glory. Yet just as there is something remarkable about seeing the prefix "champions" applied to them, it is strange, even in an age of inflationary prices, for them to pay close to £30m for one player. It requires a further suspension of disbelief to accept that Musa and Slimani, scorers of a combined 48 goals for "traditional" big clubs CSKA Moscow and Sporting Lisbon last season, now ply their trade at one of England's often overlooked middle class.

Maybe the eventual verdict will be that success went to Leicester's head. Although their buys have played a negligible part so far, Leicester's strategy seems sensible and not merely because clubs with an excellent recent record in the transfer market tend to be given the benefit of the doubt more often. There are the logistical difficulties in continuing their earlier approach of signing for such small prices -- realistically, finding one player for £450,000 and turning him into officially the finest in the country was so extraordinary that the likelihood of lightning striking twice is slim -- and the recognition that this summer represented a unique opportunity.

If Leicester's title was a one-off, it gave them rare pulling power. They may never have the carrot of Champions League football to entice prospective arrivals again but they have used this transfer window to position them for years to come. Their trophy-winning team was assembled in part in the lower leagues and from still lowlier origins. Now, with an injection of pedigree, a top-eight squad for the foreseeable future is taking shape.

It is not merely the ages of the arrivals, though Luis Hernandez, 27, is half a decade younger than the established centre-backs Robert Huth and Wes Morgan, or that Mendy and Musa are 24 and 23 respectively and Kapustka still a teenager. Nor is it just the sense that while the talent-spotter supreme Steve Walsh has gone to Everton, Leicester have mined his knowledge as much as they can so that his fingerprints may be found on a variety of deals despite him no longer being there.

Ultimately, there is the impression that Leicester have secured replacements for some of their greatest team before they have even gone. Mahrez signed a new four-year contract last month but should a player Xavi has touted for Barcelona leave next summer, Kapustka may be ready to slip seamlessly into that role.

Vardy was another to commit his future and seems likelier to remain for the long haul, but there is still the possibility that his 24-goal haul last year was an outlier or that his raw speed will fade as he approaches 30. Musa bears distinct similarities to the extent that his league debut at Hull prompted suggestions that he and Vardy were getting in each other's way. But he also offers the potential that should they gel, they can cause twice as much trouble for outpaced defenders. He also affords another option given his ability to play on the wing.

Jurgen Klopp, for one, believes his incisive running renders him ideal for Leicester. "Musa is the perfect player for their system," said the Liverpool manager a few weeks ago. It was all the more revealing an answer because he had been asked about neither Leicester nor Musa.

Mendy, meanwhile, is charged with being the "new Kante" although Amartey did a decent impression of the Frenchman against Swansea. Homegrown Ben Chilwell, a decade Christian Fuchs' junior, is Leicester's long-term left-back, which helps explain why they rebuffed Liverpool's interest in the teenager. In an industry where short-termism has been institutionalised, Leicester seem to have planned for the years ahead better than most.

Their immediate challenge as they go to Anfield this weekend is how and when to integrate the newcomers. If Slimani joins Musa and Kapustka among the substitutes, the bench may contain more stardust than a title-winning team. It is a rare state of affairs but then again, Leicester's past few years has marked them out as strangers to normality.

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