Leicester City stumble to Premier League relegation, putting full stop ...
It's safe to say, the chapter of the fairytale that was Leicester City's Premier League triumph is now well and truly closed.
Leicester — who stunned the sporting world with the most unlikely of sporting triumphs in 2016 — have been relegated from the Premier League into the second-tier Championship.
This Brothers Grimm-style slant to the Foxes' fairytale has been looming large for months now, as they tiptoed around the trapdoor out of the Premier League.
Now their relegation has been confirmed, the trapdoor finally opening and plunging Leicester back down to the second-tier Championship, where they last were just nine seasons ago.
The club's meteoric rise from champions of the second tier, to champions of England and relegation back down to the second tier all took place within a decade.
The thing is, look even closer, and Leicester's rise to the top was even more dramatic.
From League One to number one in eight yearsLeicester's recent history shows not only their incredible rise from lower league football back into the Premier League, but the pace at which it occurred.
In 2007/08, the Foxes were relegated from the second tier into the third, having dropped out the Premier League four years prior in 2003/04.
From there, Leicester's rise was precipitously steep.
Winning League One at the first time of asking, Leicester instantly challenged at the top end of the Championship, eventually forcing a return to the Premier League as champions in 2013/14.
That six-year rise from third tier in 2008/09 to rejoining the Premier League for the 2014/15 season was the second fastest rise in the Premier League era.
That season was a struggle, as is the case for many promoted teams — Leicester only stayed up that season by winning seven of their last nine games to end up 14th.
The year after, they won the league.
In the space of eight years, Leicester went from champions of League One to champions of England, winning the Championship on the way.
That stat alone highlights the astonishing impossibility of their title-winning season.
Famously, bookies had offered odds of 5000-1 of Leicester winning the league that season. By all recognised laws of football, it simply should not have happened.
And yet, magically, it did.
The thing is, just as a team can have a season in which all its constituent parts harmoniously combine to create a miracle, a perfect storm of ill-fortune, complacency and poor form can make a season in what remains a hugely competitive league a complete nightmare.
Perfect storm precipitates Foxes fallIt doesn't take much in a competition as competitive as the Premier League, especially given there are 19 other clubs — a handful with vast, excessive fortunes behind them — all aiming to do the same thing.
Immediately following Leicester's stunning league triumph the club struggled, sacking manager Claudio Ranieri less than 12 months after the affable Italian guided the club to its first top flight crown as it teetered above the relegation zone.
Things improved under Craig Shakespeare, who guided the club to a 12th-place finish, but the club continued to flirt with the relegation zone the following season, at which point he was also sacked.
Claude Puel was bought in and led Leicester to 9th on the ladder, but was himself replaced by ex-Celtic boss Brendan Rodgers, who guided the team to ninth place and then consecutive fifth-placed finishes, just outside the Champions League placings.
Rodgers also led Leicester to win the FA Cup for the first time in the club's history in 2021, making them the 14th club to have won all of the major trophies on offer in English domestic football.
On the face of it, Leicester had arrested their post-title slump and were back to winning silverware, but in reality, there were more than enough hints at the beginnings of their imminent decline.
In part, the problem was some faulty activity in the transfer market.
Leicester's title-winning side was built on picking up quality players at bargain prices, going on to sell one player a year for a huge profit to help fund another trawl of football's bargain basement.
It's the only way a club the size of Leicester can compete with clubs with huge financial backing like Manchester City and Newcastle United to name but two.
N'Golo Kanté, Riyad Mahrez, Harry Maguire and others were all signed for paltry sums before being sold on for massive profits. More recent transfer windows though, have been a disaster.
Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumaré, Jan Vestergaard and Ryan Bertrand all arrived in the 2021 transfer window and have all struggled to settle at the club.
This outlay of almost 60 million pounds ($113 million) came at a time when King Power, the company that finances the club, was struggling with its cash flow due to the closure of airports — the COVID pandemic was a rough time to own a chain of duty free shops in airports.
A lack of goals from their talismanic striker Jamie Vardy, whose 36-year-old legs don't quite have the same speed in them as earlier in his career, leading to a precipitous decline in goalscoring.
Vardy has scored just 6 goals in all competitions for Leicester this season, his lowest return since the 5 he managed in the 2014/15 season which is, by no coincidence, the last time Leicester were seriously threatened by relegation.
Can Leicester come back?Leicester are just the second team in the Premier League era to have won the title and later be relegated, and first since Blackburn Rovers who were relegated in 1999.
Of course, Leicester are far from the first champions to suffer relegation soon after their greatest moment.
Manchester City won the English First Division in 1936/37 and were relegated the very next season, suffering the ignominy of being replaced in the top flight by cross-city rivals Manchester United, no less.
But football in the 1930's was a very different beast to the finance-driven behemoth it has since become since the advent of the Premier League in 1992/93 — which is why the Premier League's introduction is used as a helpful historical marker by which Leicester's collapse can be measured.
Because pinning this relegation saga to events in English football since 1992/93 marks the exact point when the untold riches began pouring into the top flight and made relegation from the top table so devastating for clubs — some of which have never recovered.
Ranieri himself said after Leicester's triumph that it would take 20 years for another underdog to win the top prize, given the riches at the top end of the table.
"Big money makes the big teams and usually the big teams win, but now we can only say 99 per cent," he told the British press in 2016.
"How many years after Nottingham Forest [in 1978] and Blackburn [in 1995] have another team won? Next season will be the same, for the next 10 or 20 years will be the same.
"The richest will win or who can pick up the best players to make a team. If 20 owners have the same money for the players, only one can win and three will go down. That is football."
Swift falls from grace are not unheard of in this modern era though.
Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League in 1994/95, but were relegated just four years later at the end of the 1998/99 season.
By that measure, relegation seven years since Leicester stunned the world with their 5000-1 rise to the top of the English pyramid has been positively sedentary.
The odds of Leicester being relegated at the start of this season, by the way, have been recorded as 1400-1 by some bookmakers.
But now Leicester faces another challenge, to bounce back while cutting costs necessary to avoid the same fate that befell other similarly-sized clubs like Blackburn, Derby County, Bolton Wanderers, Portsmouth and the two Sheffield giants United and Wednesday, amongst others.
Leicester were the eighth wealthiest club by revenue in the Premier League over the past year according to Deloitte.
They also, according to the clubs' accounts, posted a record 92.5 million pound financial loss in March.
Clubs dropping into the Championship are given the security blanket of parachute payments to ease the blow of losing a huge slice of broadcast revenue ring-fenced by the top 20 sides in the land.
But bouncing back from the Championship is far from a cakewalk, so Leicester fans may have to steel themselves for an extended stint in the second tier.
The memories of their league title will live on though and may arguably shine brighter as the most magical moment in football's recent history.
