GOAL Mark Doyle
Apr 22, 2026 03:45+06:00
The demise of Leicester City: How the fairy-tale Foxes have fallen from Premier League winners to relegation and League One in just 10 years
Analysis | Leicester | Championship | Premier League | FEATURES
Leicester vs Hull, May 2, 2026 - it should be a day of pure pride and celebration, nothing but touching tributes to Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, N'Golo Kante and every other member of Claudio Ranieri's Premier League-winning squad.
However, the imminent 10-year anniversary of the most miraculous top-flight title triumph the game has ever seen will also serve as a cruelly-timed reminder of just how far the Foxes have fallen.
After Tuesday's 2-2 draw with Hull City at the King Power Stadium, the 5000-1 shot who stunned the sporting world have now been relegated from the Championship to the third tier of English football for just the second time in their 142-year existence. Trips to Bromley, Burton Albion and Mansfield Town are now on the agenda.
So, how on earth has it come to this?
The Foxes may have experienced plenty of highs and lows since writing the greatest underdog story ever told, but when they dropped back down to the Championship last year, the presumption was that they would go straight back up.
Instead, they have suffered a second consecutive relegation, and the club responsible for what Sven-Goran Eriksson called "a dream for everyone that loves football" is now stuck in a seemingly never-ending nightmare of financial problems and fan fury.
Getty Images Sport | Financial strife
Leicester's relegation from the Premier League at the end of the 2022-23 season came as quite the shock. It wasn't just that they'd been champions just seven years previously; they were also only two years removed from winning the FA Cup under Brendan Rodgers.
However, the Northern Irishman had already flagged that the club was no longer on a sound financial footing, with Leicester's Thai owners forced to tighten the purse strings because of the devastating economic toll the pandemic had taken on their duty free business.
"Of course I want to improve the squad," Rodgers said in July 2022. "I want to develop the squad... but if it's difficult financially, I really respect the club, so I don't go to war with them."
Still, even though the reinforcements Rodgers requested never arrived, nobody envisaged Leicester going down.
AFP | Not too good to go down
Leicester's squad wasn't short on talent, with Vardy still leading the line, supported by the likes of Harvey Barnes and James Maddison.
However, Rodgers' reputation, coupled with the supposed strength of his side, arguably led to an air of complacency, a misguided presumption that they were too good to go down.
After a dismal 1-0 defeat at Southampton in March 2023, Maddison even took issue with a local journalist's assessment that the team was at real risk of relegation. "Rubbish," he tweeted. "Play like that and we’ll be absolutely fine."
Unfortunately, his confidence was misplaced. Leicester would win just two more games that season, and the team with the seventh-highest wage bill in the Premier League were demoted after finishing 18th.
Getty Images Sport | False dawn
There were several reasons for Leicester's relegation, but it was clear that after failing to back Rodgers, the owners then waited far too long to sack him.
Resisting the urge to give the job to interim boss Dean Smith and instead take a gamble on Enzo Maresca proved a masterstroke. He led Leicester back to the Premier League at the first time of asking - and as Championship winners.
Unfortunately, Maresca immediately left for Chelsea, and his departure created a major problem, one which the owners compounded with a couple of disastrous appointments. Former Nottingham Forest boss Steve Cooper managed just two league wins before being dismissed, while Manchester United legend Ruud van Nistelrooy oversaw a historic run of nine consecutive home games without a goal as Leicester were relegated with five rounds remaining.
Getty Images Sport | PSR penalty
Whereas Leicester had stormed to promotion with the biggest budget in Championship history, it was obvious even before the start of the current campaign that money had become a major cause for concern.
Indeed, Van Nistelrooy didn't officially 'part company' with the club until June 27 so that the cost of his dismissal could be deferred to the following year's accounts in a blatant bid to ease some of the club's Profit & Sustainability Regulations (PSR) concerns.
However, the damage had already been done. On February 5 of this year, Leicester were hit with a six-point penalty for breaching PSR rules during their Championship-winning 2023-24 season, prompting even further criticism of chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha and director of football Jon Rudkin.
The Foxes nonetheless expressed their "disappointment" with the ruling, and labelled the punishment "disproportionate", but their appeal was dismissed on April 8 - a hammer blow to their survival hopes.
Getty Images Sport | 'Disaster of a season'
Marti Cifuentes became Leicester's sixth coach in three seasons last July, and one of his main goals was to repair the broken relationship between the club's players and its fans.
"It is normal after relegation to have bad feelings," he told *The Athletic*. "I would like the players to be judged on what they are doing now."
However, Cifuentes failed dismally to get a tune out of a squad containing several players still on Premier League wages and was dismissed in January. Results have only worsened since, with Tuesday's draw meaning the Foxes have won just two of their last 20 league matches, and the atmosphere has unsurprisingly turned toxic.
"I can't understand that they don't give more," former Leicester striker Matt Piper told BBC Sport. "We have been massively underachieving... it would be a disaster of a season even without the six-point deduction."
Getty Images Sport | From fairy tale to cautionary tale
The hope was that the arrival of former Foxes full-back Gary Rowett as Cifuentes' permanent successor would help provoke a response, but the 52-year-old has sounded like a broken man.
"The 10 games I've had here has felt like 40," Rowett confessed last week - and that was before Leicester lost a match at Portsmouth that he admitted they simply had to win.
Almost inevitably, there were ugly scenes after the 1-0 defeat at Fratton Park, as midfielder Harry Winks was involved in an expletive-laden exchange with irate supporters, while there were further calls to "sack the board".
By that point, Leicester beating the drop would have been even more miraculous than their 2016 title triumph - which is both staggering and saddening. The Foxes were once a fairy tale; now they're a cautionary tale.
The Fall of the Foxes: From Premier League Champions to Relegation in a Decade
