The demise of Leicester City: How the Foxes have fallen from fairy-tale Premier League winners to cusp of relegation to League One in just 10 years

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, who had also led the Foxes to back-to-back fifth-placed finishes.

However, the Northern Irishman had already flagged that the club was no longer on a sound financial footing, with Leicester's Thai owners, The King Power International Group, 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. I said that midway through last year, but if it's difficult financially. I really respect the club, so I don't go to war with them.

"It's unfortunate. We have to do some work and if we can do that, then hopefully we can affect the squad because if we are going to compete anywhere near where we have been, then we need to be able to do that. If not, then it's a different expectation."

Still, even though the reinforcements Rodgers requested never arrived, nobody envisaged Leicester going down.

Leicester's squad wasn't short on talent, with Vardy still leading the line up front, supported by the likes of Harvey Barnes and James Maddison, while Rodgers could also call upon Youri Tielemans and Kiernan-Dewsbury Hall in midfield. However, Rodgers' reputation as a top manager, coupled with the supposed strength of his side, arguably led to an air of complacency at the club, a misguided presumption that they were too good to go down.

After a dismal 1-0 defeat at Southampton on March 4, 2023 that saw Leicester drop to 15th in the standings, Maddison even took issue with the assessment made by a local journalist, Rob Tanner, that the team was at real risk of relegation.

"Rubbish," the attacking midfielder tweeted. "Watch and analyse the game properly and stop writing headlines like that which you know makes fans pile on with negativity. Play like that and we’ll be absolutely fine. Created numerous brilliant chances and win comfortably on another day."

Unfortunately for Maddison, 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 to the Championship after finishing 18th with just 34 points.

There were several reasons for Leicester's relegation, but it was clear that after failing to back Rodgers in the transfer market, the owners then waited far too long to sack him, thus giving interim boss Dean Smith just eight games to try to turn their season around. However, resisting the urge to give the job to Smith on a full-time basis and instead take a gamble on Enzo Maresca proved a masterstroke.

The Italian's only previous experience as a head coach, at Parma, had lasted just 14 games, but he showed precisely why he was considered such a valuable member of Pep Guardiola's backroom team at Manchester City by leading Leicester back to the Premier League at the first time of asking - and as Championship winners to boot.

Unfortunately, Maresca immediately left for Chelsea, and while not every Foxes fan was sad to see him go, his departure created a major problem for the owners, one which they compounded with a couple of disastrous appointments.

Former Nottingham Forest boss Steve Cooper managed just two league wins before being dismissed in November 2024, 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 of fixtures remaining.

Whereas Leicester had stormed to Premier League promotion in 2022-23 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 at the King Power Stadium.

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 in that regard and, 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 over the way in which they were running the club.

The Foxes nonetheless expressed their "disappointment" with the ruling, and labelled the punishment "disproportionate", but their appeal was dismissed on April 8 - which represented a hammer blow to their survival hopes.

Without the penalty, the Foxes would be just two points below 21st-placed Blackburn Rovers and West Bromwich Albion, and with a game in hand over the former. However, few would have been backing Leicester to beat the drop anyway, as this is a team that Srivaddhanaprabha and Rudkin have saddled with highly-paid, underperforming players.

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. "It would be strange not to, but I want to bring a fresh start, a new beginning. I would like the players to be judged on what they are doing now and how they are performing today. Hopefully, we can show that all of them are engaged and trying to commit to the club."

However, Cifuentes failed dismally to get a tune out of a squad containing several players still on Premier League wages and the Catalan coach was dismissed in January with Leicester 14th in the table. Results have only worsened since then, while the atmosphere has turned toxic. Consequently, playing at home is no longer an advantage for Leicester, with the supporters enraged by a perceived lack of effort from the players.

"I can't understand that they don't give more," former Leicester striker Matt Piper told BBC Sport. "Leicester have had some shocking teams over the years and some really poor players - and I've been part of those squads so I'm not excusing myself - but what I will say is that even when we were really poor, you still had players that pulled on the shirt and gave it everything.

"The thing that highlights things most with this group is that there are some really talented players. We have been massively underachieving with the group of players we have and it would be a disaster of a season even without the six-point deduction."

The hope was that the arrival of former Foxes full-back Gary Rowett as Cifuentes' permanent successor would help provoke a response out of his struggling side, but the 52-year-old already sounds 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 that they simply had to win to have any chance of survival.

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 some irate Leicester supporters, while there were further calls to "sack the board" and for Srivaddhanaprabha and Rudkin to resign. Of course, the Foxes aren't mathematically down yet and Rowett is still trying to impress upon his players the devastating financial and human cost of relegation.

"I don't think getting the tea lady crying in front of the players necessarily is going to have the desired effect," he told BBC East Midlands Today. "But you are just trying to give the players the enormity of the situation.

"It might not affect you as a player, that is a reality, but what it certainly will do is affect quite a lot of people at the club. And it will affect a lot of fans who pay their hard-earned money and who have got behind the team brilliantly well in a tough period for the club. We have got to give them more."

At this stage, though, Leicester beating the drop would be 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, a shocking example of how not to run a football club.

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