Leicester celebrated the impossible a decade ago by winning the Premier League title against 5,000-to-1 odds.
Fortunes have changed, though.
Not only did the Foxes drop into the Championship this season, they’ve slipped into the relegation zone and are in danger of tumbling into the third tier of English soccer — League One.
“Everything that was there 10 years ago when we won the Premier League — which was heart, determination, the underdog story — that’s gone, completely flipped, and now we’ve got overpaid players who don’t seem very bothered,” said Phil Holloway, editor of Leicester Fan TV.
“Sadly, we’re staring at going to League One, which could mean absolute catastrophe financially.”
With Jamie Vardy off to Italy, Leicester muddled through the first half of the season and fired manager Marti Cifuentes in late January. It then lost three straight league games under interim coach and former Leicester star Andy King. During that time, the club was also docked six points for breaching spending rules in the 2023-24 season.
Under new coach Gary Rowett, Leicester has taken six points from six games. They couldn’t protect an early lead in last weekend’s 3-1 home loss to Queens Park Rangers, with Rowett lamenting the giving away of “three really poor goals.”
Leicester is next-to-last in the Championship with eight games left. The Foxes, who haven’t won any of their last nine away games in the league, visit playoff-chasing Watford on Saturday before the international break.
“We need results, we need performances,” Rowett said Thursday at a press conference. “You can’t just wave a magic wand and suddenly win every game. It has to be down to the hard work and the consistency. I do believe we are close to being a very good team. It’s just those little moments are costing us.”
Jordan James, a 21-year-old Wales midfielder on loan from Rennes, leads Leicester with 10 league goals this season.
Wrexham up, Leicester down
Wrexham is the feel-good story of English soccer, with the Welsh club trying to reach the Premier League, and the Foxes know the feeling. Fans and small clubs from around the world got behind Leicester’s improbable run to the title in the 2015-16 season.
“It was kind of like living in a sporting fairy-tale,” said Holloway, a lifelong fan.
The following season, Leicester reached the Champions League quarterfinals. Four years after that, the team won the FA Cup for the first time in club history. Relegation followed in 2022-23, then promotion, then back down after last season — which Vardy called a “total embarrassment.”
In 142 years of existence, Leicester has played just one season in the third tier of English soccer. The Foxes won the League One title in 2008-09 and were promoted back to the Championship.
Slipping down the football pyramid is costly mainly because of the decreasing broadcast revenue.
In the 2023-24 season, League One clubs’ average total revenue was 9.1 million pounds ($12.2 million), which was about one-quarter of Championship clubs’ average revenue, according to Deloitte. The average revenue for Premier League clubs that season was 316 million pounds ($422 million).
“Being a Leicester fan, I do believe in miracles,” Holloway said, “because we’ve all seen one.”
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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
