Online Reporter
TRIUMPH, tragedy and turmoil.
The past decade at Leicester City has had it all.
It started with a season that delivered the most unlikely — and previously unfathomable — English Premier League football title to King Power Stadium in 2016.
Two years later, the stadium was also the site of the club’s most shocking tragedy, as owner and chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha died alongside four other people in a helicopter crash outside the ground.
Now, in a season where Leicester will mark the 10-year anniversary of their greatest sporting moment — which Vichai was instrumental in creating — the club finds itself back in England’s second tier after a second relegation from the Premier League in three years.
And this time they have dropped into the Championship under a cloud of uncertainty, the threat of a points penalty hanging over the club for allegedly breaching spending rules when they were promoted from the division as title winners just over a year ago. “It’s been an emotional rollercoaster,” said lifelong Foxes fan Kate Blakemore, a regular Leicester contributor for BBC Sport.
“We’ve had tragedy thrown in there with the passing of Vichai, and winning the FA Cup is not something I thought I’d see in my lifetime, let alone the Premier League.
“We have had some amazing highs this past decade and yet here we are feeling rather glum that we have been relegated for the second time in three seasons and things seem a little bit unsettled at the club.
“We are rounding out the decade with a very different feeling to how we started it, and it’s quite tough to take for the fans really.”
The departure of talismanic striker Jamie Vardy, the last of Leicester’s Premier League-title winning side, and the club’s failure to spend to bolster the squad this summer, emphasises just how this latest relegation marks the end of a golden era for the Foxes.
The years that were bookended by Championship football in 2014 and 2023 are the greatest in the club’s history.
It started with the Foxes returning to the Premier League after a 10-year absence, included a relegation “great escape” under Nigel Pearson, a Premier League title masterminded by Claudio Ranieri, a Champions League quarter-final, then winning the FA Cup and Community Shield during Brendan Rodgers’ reign as boss.
Leicester even reached the semi-final of a European competition for the first time in 2022, losing to Italian side Roma in the Europa Conference League, a year before they became the most expensive and highest-paid squad to suffer Premier League relegation.
“You can’t predict anything with Leicester City and you can’t assume you are on any kind of trajectory, positive or negative, because they always scupper your expectations,” Blakemore said. — BBC Sport.
