Over the past three decades, Jon Rudkin has risen from enthusiastic part-time academy coach to become the most influential and important man in the Leicester City football operation.
He progressed through the ranks to become the club’s academy manager, before taking on the director of football role 10 years ago. Rudkin was then-chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha’s right-hand man, and even more so to his son and successor Aiyawatt, after his father’s tragic death in 2018.
Rudkin has helped guide Leicester’s Thai owners as the club won Premier League promotion, pulled off a relegation great-escape, and then became champions of England, FA Cup winners and European semi-finalists, but he has also borne the brunt of frustrations from some supporters as Leicester slipped dramatically into the Championship last year, only to bounce back at the first attempt.
Not one to court any public attention, Rudkin never speaks publicly or gives interviews, and has no social media profile at all. Little is known about him — and that is how he likes it.
So, who is Jon Rudkin, how has he risen to a position of such power at Leicester, and is the criticism he has received fair?
The Athletic spoke to people who know him, and have been coached by or worked with him to try to answer those questions.
Leicester City are in Rudkin’s blood.
Born and bred in Leicestershire, he grew up in the Wigston area, to the south of the city, and still lives close by.
As a boy, he went to Bushlow and Guthlaxton School, now Wigston College, where he met future Northern Ireland manager Ian Baraclough, who would go through the Leicester academy and play over 600 games as a professional. Rudkin, a Leicester fan, also spent some time as an academy player at the club but was released at the age of 16.
“He is three years older than me, but we went through school together and we shared a love of football,” Baraclough tells The Athletic.
“We didn’t play together for Leicester. I remember Jon playing for Leicester United (formerly Enderby Town, a local non-League club). He then started to come in (to Leicester City as a part-time coach) and work with some of the younger players. I’m sure he started voluntarily. Then, I went off on my path to having a career and he obviously stayed at Leicester, and worked his way through the club. He has done a fantastic job.”
Rudkin, left, is relied upon by chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, right, at Leicester (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Matt Piper, who played for Leicester in the early 2000s, recalls when Rudkin first turned up at Belvoir Drive, the club’s training ground at that time, and began volunteering to coach part-time while working as a sales representative in the building industry.
“He used to turn up to training in a suit and tie,” says Piper. “I think he was doing it voluntarily and wasn’t getting paid initially (that’s true — Rudkin received expenses only). He would work all day and then come and train us. I respected that.”
Rudkin, who had begun doing some coaching at Leicester towards the end of David Pleat’s reign as manager in the early 1990s, quickly identified he had a talented youth group which included Piper, Matt Heath and Jon Stevenson. Usually, each team would have a different coach each year but Rudkin stuck with them as they progressed through the academy.
He eventually joined the club full-time as an academy coach in 1998, working with two former Leicester players in David Nish and Neville Hamilton.
“David (Nish) and Nev (Hamilton) managed the under-19s, and there was Chris Tucker too, who is very close with Jon,” says Piper.
“David was the one you were s**t-scared of. Nev was David’s right-hand man. He was a lovely man. Chris was a potty-mouth who would be more like a No 2. He would just tell you how it was. And then there was Jon, who never shouted, never got upset. He was the softer version of all of them.”
Micky Adams, Leicester’s first team manager from 2002-04, is another who remembers Rudkin being softly-spoken and mild-mannered, and also very knowledgeable regarding the local youth football scene.
“I used to go into the academy and watch training, especially in my early time there, as assistant manager (to Dave Bassett),” Adams says. “If I had some time on my hands, I would go and watch, and Jon was always there doing his sessions. He was a good coach. He knew everyone in the academy system.
“When I became manager, we were looking for a head of the academy. The board at the time wanted to give it to someone outside the club, and Leicester. My argument was, ‘Why are we doing that when we have someone within the academy who knows all the Leicester kids and has contacts around the area, and with scouts? Let’s go with him’.”
After the trauma of administration in 2002, producing homegrown players became even more important for Leicester.
For the next 11 years, Rudkin managed their academy as it developed to achieve Category 1 status and oversaw the development of a host of young players who went on to play in the first team, including Andy King, who went on to win the League One, Championship and Premier League titles with the club.
Jeffrey Schlupp and Ben Chilwell followed the same pathway as King, and were part of the 2007 academy side which won the Premier League Group B title before being part of that astonishing Premier League triumph with the first team nine years later.
Behind them were the next generation of talents, players such as Harvey Barnes, who Leicester sold to Newcastle United for £30million ($38.6m at the current exchange rate) last summer, as well as Hamza Choudhury, who has gone on to make over 100 appearances for the club, including 34 in their Championship-winning 2023-24 campaign.
“He was very much like he is now: quiet,” says Adams. “You had to let him get to know you before he could trust you, but the kids liked him.”
Rudkin, who has his UEFA Pro coaching licence and his academy manager’s licence, also stepped in as co-caretaker manager of the Leicester first team on two occasions: in 2007, following the departure of Martin Allen, and in 2011, when Sven-Goran Eriksson after sacked.
He quickly became seen as a safe, steady pair of hands to the Srivaddhanaprabha family, who took control of Leicester in 2010, firstly under father Vichai and now his son, known at the club as Khun Top.
Rudkin, right, has had two brief spells as Leicester’s co-caretaker manager, the most recent in 2011 (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
The role of director of football was relatively new in the English game, but when the King Power group took over, they sought advice from former Sheffield Wednesday and Premier League chairman Dave Richards, who proposed hiring former Sheffield United chairman Terry Robinson.
Robinson only lasted 18 months and left in December 2014, with Leicester bottom of the Premier League in their first season back at that level after a decade in the second and (for one year) third divisions. Surprisingly, considering his lack of experience, Rudkin was immediately appointed as his replacement, but it proved to be a shrewd appointment at a difficult time.
Robinson could be a gruff, straight-talking, no-nonsense and old-school character. Unlike his predecessor, Rudkin was much more diplomatic. “Let’s not beat about the bush — he is a politician,” says Adams. “You don’t survive in the job without getting on with people.”
Rudkin became owner Vichai’s right-hand man at the club. It was clear he had the trust of the late Leicester owner to undertake important tasks beyond his football remit, too.
When Vichai was looking to get into horse racing, he sent Rudkin to scout stables and trainers for his horses, and Rudkin helped set up King Power Racing at the stables of trainer Andrew Balding, brother of UK television presenter and author Clare Balding.
Following Vichai’s death in a helicopter crash outside King Power Stadium in October 2018, Aiyawatt, who lost his business mentor as well as his father in the accident that took four other lives, stepped up to look after both the club and King Power International as chairman, and he has come to rely on Rudkin even more to take care of football matters at Leicester.
Rudkin also checks in regularly with manager Oscar Garcia and director of football Ariel Jacobs at sister club OH Leuven in Belgium, and reports back to Aiyawatt in Thailand.
Their relationship is close, and Rudkin’s importance to Aiyawatt is stronger today than it has ever been. Rudkin offers counsel but also carries out his instructions.
Rudkin hired and fired Premier League-winning manager Claudio Ranieri (Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
The owners came to rely on him for advice on football strategy at the club and one of his first tasks was to bring in a replacement for Nigel Pearson in the summer of 2015, after Leicester won seven out of their final nine games under him the previous season to avoid relegation having been bottom of the league in early April. Eventually, Rudkin and the board appointed Claudio Ranieri, sparking a period of unprecedented success.
The flip-side of the role was that he had to be ruthless too, delivering the news when the club decided to sack managers and coaches. Famously, he told Ranieri he was fired in a side room of a hotel at East Midlands Airport shortly after the team plane had landed back in England following their Champions League last-16 first-leg defeat to Spain’s Sevilla in February 2017. It was a difficult, controversial and unpopular decision.
The same fate subsequently befell Leicester managers Craig Shakespeare, Claude Puel and Brendan Rodgers, as well as numerous other coaches and assistants, including last summer when, post-relegation, long-serving coaches Mike Stowell and Adam Sadler departed.
“There are people who will paint a different picture of a guy that’s very ambitious, but that’s not the Jon that I know,” Piper adds. “But in nearly every other position of power, not just inside Leicester City, inside football, that’s the general character that you see, because if you are not like that, you won’t get ahead in the game.
“To go all the way in 20 years, from being a volunteer coach to becoming one of the most powerful figures at the club, other than the chairman, he would have to be strong. If I didn’t know him and someone told me about that character, I would think he must be a ruthless person.”
Rudkin, who oversees the entire football division at Leicester, including sports science, medical and recruitment departments, may seem ruthless but those who know him also speak of acts of kindness. These include Christian Fuchs, who says Rudkin reached out to offer help when he was told by Rodgers, the manager at the time, in 2021 that his contract would not be renewed that summer.
“I saw Jon in many different ways,” says Fuchs, an Austrian full-back who had been a regular in the club’s 2015-16 title-winning side under Ranieri. “Obviously, he could be hard to get hold of and he used short, minimal words, but then there’s also a part where you can tell he’s a good person.
“When Brendan told me, ‘Listen, we wish you the best and thank you for your service’, Jon came to me and literally said, ‘If you want to stay in England, I have two offers (of new clubs) for you’.
“It was great to see that, once they decided to part ways with me, they still wanted to take care of me as a player.”
Rudkin and chairman Aiyawatt celebrate Leicester’s 2020-21 FA Cup final triumph (Michael Regan – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
Back when he was an academy coach, Rudkin also helped Piper, who was struggling with addiction in the wake of an injury-enforced early retirement as a player at age 26, offering him a role in the academy which had developed him years earlier.
“At certain points, I wasn’t in a fit state to be coaching and it was Jon who I eventually opened up to,” Piper says.
“I was working with Mark Jackson, running the under-13s and under-14s — the team with Harvey (Barnes) and Hamza (Choudhury) in. Mark always drove the minibus to games. He probably suspected I was partying too hard at that point and wasn’t fit to drive.
“One day, we had a game in Manchester and Jon turned to me and said I would have to drive the coach because Jacko was sick, and the other coach was meeting us there. I had been out drinking and I was taking drugs at the time — I was steaming (still drunk). I remember I got on the coach, sat in the driver’s seat, and looked in the mirror back at the kids. I knew I couldn’t drive the bus.
“So I confessed, and told him my life was a mess, and I broke down. He told me not to worry, to go home. He gave me time off and pushed me to get help, and I went to Sporting Chance (a charity set up to help current and former footballers with mental health problems).”
Some who have met Rudkin, speaking to The Athletic anonymously to protect relationships, say he can come across as aloof and non-conversational, and Piper remembers moments thinking he was downright rude until he received an explanation. “He’s still approachable to me now but he did go through a period where he used to blank people in the hallways,” Piper says. “But a lot of people really close to him, Chris Tucker being one, say that he’s so focused on what he’s trying to do in his job because he has 100 million things going on, that he is in his own world sometimes. He has tunnel vision.”
Rudkin is known for being a tough negotiator. Part of his role is to work with head of recruitment Martyn Glover and Leicester’s manager on player signings. The latter and his coaching staff state what positions they think need strengthening, the recruitment team then draw up shortlists for each one, and then it is Rudkin’s job to negotiate the deals, where possible.
As Jonny Evans revealed in an interview with UK newspaper The Times in 2019, when Rudkin arrived at the office of his agent, he had a large dossier prepared, detailing every game Leicester had watched of the Northern Ireland international defender playing for West Bromwich Albion, with school-style grades. It persuaded him to sign for Leicester in 2018.
In February this year, Rudkin tried to finalise a deal to bring Stefano Sensi to the club from Inter Milan on the winter transfer window’s deadline day. Part of the reason the move collapsed was because an ankle issue showed up during the 28-year-old midfielder’s medical, and Rudkin wanted to add an injury clause to the terms in case the problem worsened. Shortly after the deal fell through, Sensi underwent ankle surgery.
In the back of Rudkin’s mind during those late negotiations with Inter will have been the Adrien Silva fiasco in August 2017, when the Portuguese midfielder’s registration was completed 14 seconds too late for him to be registered by Leicester after completing a move from Sporting Lisbon. Silva had to wait until the January to play for his new club.
One criticism of Rudkin made by Leicester supporters online has been that he is too stubborn in negotiations, especially when sales have been necessary and offers received have been considered below valuation.
In May, Dennis Praet, who has now left the club as a free agent, told Belgian news outlet Nieuwsblad that Leicester rejected permanent bids for him from Italian side Torino because “they thought I was too good, useful and versatile to let me go on the cheap”. Other sales that could have helped to meet profit and sustainability rules were also turned down because they didn’t meet Leicester’s valuations.
In fact, the biggest charge laid at Rudkin’s door has been that over the past few years, Leicester departed from their tried-and-tested transfer policy of selling one key asset every year and reinvesting the money those exits raised in the squad, while keeping a tighter control on expenditure.
This contributed to Leicester’s issues adhering to profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) as they overspent.
When their 2022-23 accounts were published, chief executive Susan Whelan expressed a desire for the club to return to this practice, writing: “As we look to continue to compete with more established opponents, profits from player trading and continued successful recruitment will continue to feature prominently in our strategy. This approach has served us well in the past, bolstering our capability to keep investing in the growth of the club and forming a cornerstone of the most successful era in Leicester City’s history.”
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Several big decisions were taken to support Rodgers as he quickly brought success after being appointed in February 2019. Leicester were challenging for European qualification and it was decided to try to keep the squad together, offer better contracts, and reward Rodgers with the biggest deal a Leicester manager has ever had.
Rodgers was also allowed to make his own appointments, replacing long-serving head physio Dave Rennie with Dr Bryan English and bringing in his chosen head of recruitment, Lee Congerton, from previous club Celtic.
Rudkin, centre, offered plenty of backing to Rodgers, right, during his time at Leicester (Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
The problems can be partially traced back to the summer of 2021, when Leicester had just won the FA Cup for the first time in their history. The club spent £55million on Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumare and Jannik Vestergaard in that window, while Ryan Bertrand arrived as a free agent but on a significant salary. Vestergaard and Bertrand were Rodgers’ picks. There were no major sales to counterbalance all the outgoing money.
Come the summer of 2023, after the shock of relegation despite having the seventh-biggest budget in the Premier League, seven senior players who had been recruited for a total investment of £107million were allowed to run down their contracts and leave on free transfers — Evans, Bertrand, Daniel Amartey, Nampalys Mendy, Ayoze Perez, Caglar Soyuncu and Youri Tielemans.
This spiralling spend, coupled with Leicester’s surprisingly poor performance in that 2022-23 season, led to a wage-to-turnover ratio of 116 per cent, as revealed in the latest club accounts — way above the recommended 85 per cent in the Premier League and European football governing body UEFA’s limit of 70 per cent.
The £89.7million latest losses have also come despite a trading profit of £75m. While commercial revenues increased, including gate receipts, sponsorship revenue and commercial turnover, the combination of squad costs and poor performance on the pitch are the primary cause.
Leicester fans hold up a ‘Rudkin out’ banner at a game in 2017 (Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
The events of those final two seasons in the Premier League are to blame for the fan discord towards Rudkin, although no decision taken at the club is made in isolation and is collectively discussed, such as the move to bring Enzo Maresca in as Rodgers’ successor last summer, which proved successful. A similar hive-mind approach led to the appointment of former Nottingham Forest manager Steve Cooper after Maresca left a month ago to take the Chelsea job.
“The club clearly have made mistakes over the last few years — the way that they’ve dealt with certain situations, certain players that they’ve brought in, the way that things have been set up and organised — and obviously, he (Rudkin) would be a big part of that,” Piper says.
“The thing about Jon, and what a lot of people don’t see, is he puts a lot into his work,” Adams says. “To be honest, (he does so) to the sacrifice of his own family life. He is extremely dedicated.
“I am not going to say he has got everything right or wrong but he can never be faulted for his effort, enthusiasm and work ethic. I think he has taken that into the director of football role.”
Leicester have fallen from a great height in dramatic fashion, before bouncing back last season. The question of accountability is a valid one from those disgruntled fans, and the decisions made on transfers, contracts and budget increases have had a significant impact, but Maresca said before his departure that responsibility should fall on everyone at the club.
However, with Leicester now preparing for what’s expected to be a 10-month fight to avoid relegation and so be part of the 2025-26 Premier League, they face a huge few weeks in the transfer market. Inevitably, there will be some wheeling and dealing, with the club also having to watch their budget to avoid falling foul of further PSR charges.
Rudkin, the quiet man in the background, somebody reluctant to step into the spotlight, will have to be front and centre in preparing the club he’s served for so long for their Premier League return.
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(Top photo: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
