Leicester City told to offload £10m star - 'there are clear issues' | OneFootball

Leicester City's financial position means that they can't afford to carry passengers and FLW's Foxes fan pundit knows one player who they should lose.

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…

Much has been made of Leicester City's financial plight since their relegation from the Premier League at the end of the 2024-25 season, and the club still has the threat of a points deduction hanging over their head as a result of PSR breaches.

The January transfer window is an opportunity for clubs to tweak their playing staff for the second half of the season, and Leicester's squad doesn't only need work for footballing reasons.

While it's true to say that the Foxes have not performed as fans would have hoped this season so far, there are also pressing financial reasons why the club need to make changes as soon as possible.

A reasonable start to the season, in which they lost just one of their opening ten League matches, has tailed off, with the team now treading water in midfield, and this is not the return that the club would be expecting from one of the division's highest wage budgets.

As such, one of Leicester's big priorities for both this transfer window and their next one will be to get that wage bill down.

"A player who doesn't want to be here at the club" - Harry Winks blasted over Leicester under-achievement

Football League World have spoken to our resident Foxes fan pundit Louchlainn Martin on the subject of which one player Leicester City should be looking to get rid of in the January transfer window, and Louchlainn's response was immediate: "The number one player that I think Leicester City should be aiming to get out the door now that Wout Faes has already left the club on loan to go to Monaco is Harry Winks."

Louchlainn cannot see a reason why the Foxes should wish to keep Harry Winks at The King Power Stadium: "I think Harry Winks is a player who doesn't want to be here at the club, and he's not featured at all in the last few weeks. He's been completely dropped from the team, and there are clear issues behind closed doors. I think he's kicked up a fuss under Ruud Van Nistelrooy last season, and I think something similar has happened this season."

And our fan pundit feels that the wage that Winks is on isn't a wage that should be paid anywhere in the Championship: "He's the highest the highest earner in the whole of the Championship.. Even if you're performing well in the Championship that's far too much to be paying someone in this division. But on top that, he's not even playing, and I don't even think he's training with the squad."

And Louchlainn feels that he would not be alone in this sentiment among Leicester City supporters, considering his performances since the club's last promotion from the Championship in 2024 : "He's a player who when he first came to the club had an excellent in the Championship under Enzo Maresca, but since Maresca left there's been far too many issues off the pitch. On the pitch, the performances have been hit and miss, but more recently they've been a complete failure. So he's the number one player that I think myself and pretty much every Leicester fan are looking forward to seeing the back of."

Harry Winks is a cost that Leicester City cannot afford, given their financial condition

Harry Winks has been a high-profile failure for much of the time since joining Leicester City from Tottenham Hotspur in July 2023 for an undisclosed fee reported to be in the region of £10 million. His first season with the club was a success. Leicester were promoted back to the Premier League as champions, and Winks played a full role, appearing in 45 of their 46 League matches.

But since then, everything has gone downhill. Winks has only made 39 League appearances for them in more than a season and a half since the end of the 2023-24 season, and he hasn't played at all for them since playing 45 minutes against Sheffield United at the end of November.

And Winks is the highest-paid player in the entire Championship, with Capology estimating his earnings at £90,000-a-week. For a club in the financial position that Leicester City have been reported to be in, that's an amount of money - more than £4.5 million a year - that they cannot afford to be spending on anyone, never mind a player who's not even making the first-team substitutes bench.

Leicester may have issues getting rid of him before the end of the January transfer window. Winks is under no obligation to go elsewhere, and if he did, it's likely that the Foxes would still have to pay at least a proportion of his wages. The good news for them in this respect is that his contract expires in the summer, so they would be able to get him off their payroll at that point, but this also means that there's a strong possibility that the player will just seek to run his contract down until that point.

At the point of his signing, Harry WInks was meant to be a sign of Leicester's ambition to get back to the Premier League. But with that having been accomplished, the player and the club have clearly reached an unhappy impasse, and his time at The King Power Stadium is now likely to be coming to an end, whether this month or in the summer. It doesn't seem likely that many Leicester City fans will be sad to see him go.