'Doing a Leeds, only stupider': How Leicester City blundered their way into League One

Leicester City will be playing League One football next season after a second successive relegation.

It is just ten years since Leicester won the Premier League title and just five years since they were in contention for a Champions League place.

So what's gone wrong at the King Power Stadium to lead them to this point? Let's take a look at five years of mismanagement, bad decisions, and reckless financial gambles that have led to one of the steepest declines English football has seen in years.

Leicester City have done a Leeds, only stupider

The cause of Leeds United’s strikingly similar decline in the early 2000s was simple: the club spent extravagantly on the assumption that they would secure regular Champions League football and make their money back. When they failed to do so, financial calamity ensued.

It’s a similar story with Leicester – only their reckless spending actually came after they had a couple of seasons of failing to qualify for the Champions League.

Instead of taking two straight fifth-placed finishes in 2019/20 and 2020/21 as a signal to tighten their belts, Leicester abandoned their previous player trading strategy and went all out. In the 2021/22 season, they recorded a pre-tax loss of £92.5m, a figure not at all helped by a profit of just £9.2m on player sales.

The main culprits behind that were the loss of European football and the substantial boost to the club coffers that brings; continued spending on players who frankly weren’t good enough; and an annual wage bill (including benefits, pensions and National Insurance) that swelled by over £51m in just three years from 2020 and 2023.

That left Leicester as the only club in the Premier League who were spending more on wages than they were making in revenue in their 2022/23 relegation season.

Leicester’s total wage bill that season was the highest in the division outside the big six of Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham and Arsenal.

Leicester were far closer to spending what runners-up Arsenal were paying their staff and players (£234.8m) than to most other sides in the division – and more than double what Brentford (£98.8m) and Bournemouth (£100.1m) spent that season. That is a hell of a lot of money to spend on finishing 18th.

Empty cupboard, bad recruitment

That relegation came after Leicester had already tried to start adjusting. Unfortunately for them, the rot had already set in.

An eighth-place finish in 2021/22 meant no European football at all for Leicester the following season, and their financial situation grew even more perilous.

Leicester once again made an enormous loss, this time of £89.7m, despite a profit on player trading of £74.8m, largely thanks to having sold Wesley Fofana.

Fofana’s exit alongside Kasper Schmeichel came after Leicester had already sold Ben Chilwell, Harry Maguire, James Maddison, Danny Ward, Riyad Mahrez, Danny Drinkwater, and N’Golo Kante over the previous few years.

The cupboard was getting increasingly bare of saleable assets, though, and Leicester’s awful Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) position didn’t just lead to a points deduction that only ended up getting imposed this season thanks to a Premier League snafu.

That also weakened their negotiating power when selling players to other clubs. That issue was only compounded by their relegation to the Championship.

In the meantime, Leicester spent plenty of money on a series of flops (of varying magnitude) including Patson Daka, Boubakary Soumare, Victor Kristiansen, Wout Faes, Harry Souttar, Oliver Skipp and Caleb Okoli.

It’s easy to see why fans have aimed much of their ire at long-serving sporting director Jon Rudkin.

A tactical error

This one is only easy to see in hindsight, but it could very well have cost Leicester extremely dearly.

Leicester fought hard against their points deduction for breaching PSR after being promoted back to the top flight last season, and succeeded in an appeal against it on the basis that the rules, as written, meant the Premier League had no jurisdiction to punish Leicester; only the EFL did.

Leicester ended up finishing 13 points away from safety regardless – and as soon as they were relegated, the EFL were in a position to impose that punishment.

The league duly opened their own case against Leicester for their prior transgressions, which resulted in a six-point deduction that pushed them towards the relegation zone. Psychologically, they have never recovered.

Refreshingly, the Foxes Trust quite rightly aimed their ire at the club for that points deduction, rather than getting up in arms about the injustice of it like many other sets of fans before them have done.

The Trust wrote in a statement that the club's points deduction was ‘not a punishment for ambition, it is a punishment for sustained mismanagement … rather than learning lessons and adjusting accordingly, the club continues to contest PSR rulings. All focus must now be on ensuring compliance for the current and future seasons’.

The irony is that if Leicester had taken it on the chin from the Premier League after their promotion, instead of appealing, they would now be two points away from safety with two games still to play. As it is, they have been relegated with games to spare.

Losing Enzo Maresca and never finding the right replacement

Leicester were sensational at times in their Championship-winning campaign of 2023/24 under Enzo Maresca – but lost the influential Italian to Chelsea before making their return to the Premier League.

Replacing him with Steve Cooper was explicable in terms of style of player, but after his experience at Nottingham Forest, Welshman always felt more like a manager you would rely on to get a club promoted rather than someone you necessarily turn to confidently steer a club well away from the relegation zone.

Ruud van Nistelrooy fared no better and took Leicester down, and Marti Cifuentes never convinced in the Championship.

Leicester won just four of their first 14 league games of the season, against doomed Sheffield Wednesday, newly-promoted Charlton and Birmingham, and a drifting Swansea. Leicester also crashed out of the Carabao Cup at the first hurdle to League One Huddersfield.

Having strongly valued a particular style of play for years – from Brendan Rodgers to Marseca to Cooper – Leicester left it too late to make their change to the rather more robust stylings of Gary Rowett.

The club had form for indecision over managerial changes, too: they waited for week upon week after their relegation to finally make up their minds on van Nistelrooy, whch only served as yet another knock on Rudkin.

Most bafflingly, Cifuentes was sacked with just a week of the January transfer window left to go, with the club in 14th. Leicester have won just once since then.

Contrast that with Southampton, who came down into the Championship alongside Leicester. The Saints got off to an even worse start under new manager Will Still, sacked him in November after slipping to 21st place in the table, and have since roared up to fourth under Tonda Eckert, with January signings Daniel Peretz and Cyle Larin playing a crucial role.

Southampton's fans have not been entirely enamoured of their owners in recent years, but they may well be heading for the Premier League now because they were able to fix their mistakes quickly.

Leicester are going to League One precisely because they have repeated compounded one mistake with another, and another, and another.