Ten years after pulling off one of the most unlikely title wins in football history, Leicester City are about to drop into League One. A defeat to Hull City on April 21 confirms it. The 5,000/1 champions of 2016 will be playing third-tier football in 2025/26.
The anniversary couldn't be more grim.
How the title actually happened
What makes the 2015/16 story genuinely extraordinary is that it was built on the back of another astonishing achievement. Nigel Pearson's Leicester won the Championship in 2013/14 with 102 points from 46 games, with Kasper Schmeichel, Wes Morgan, Jamie Vardy — a £1m signing from non-league Fleetwood Town — and Riyad Mahrez forming the core of a side that then somehow survived the Premier League the following season despite sitting bottom in March 2015.
That escape set up the miracle. Pearson was sacked anyway — a breakdown with the Thai ownership doing for him — and Claudio Ranieri, widely written off as yesterday's man, walked into a squad supplemented by N'Golo Kanté for €8m and quietly got to work. Vardy scored in 11 consecutive Premier League matches. Mahrez was unplayable. Kanté covered every blade of grass on every pitch in England. Leicester went top at Christmas and never really let go, finishing 10 points clear and being serenaded on the pitch by Andrea Bocelli. It was absurd. It was real.
Ranieri was sacked nine months later. One point above the relegation zone in February 2017, seven defeats in nine games, and that was that. The title defence lasted less than a season. Kanté had already left to help Chelsea win the league. Vardy and Mahrez stayed but were shadows of themselves.
The slow bleed that followed
Brendan Rodgers arrived from Celtic in 2019 and, to his credit, built something worth watching. Back-to-back fifth-place finishes, an FA Cup won with Youri Tielemans's thunderous strike against Chelsea, a Community Shield over Manchester City. The squad — Maddison, Fofana, Tielemans, Iheanacho, a Golden Boot-winning Vardy — was arguably more talented than Ranieri's champions on paper.
But the finances were already buckling. The King Power duty-free business, the engine behind the owners' spending, took a serious hit during the pandemic. The bargain-hunting that unearthed Mahrez and Kanté was replaced by expensive acquisitions and bloated wages — a wage bill north of £200m when they were eventually relegated in 2023, the seventh highest in the Premier League at the time. That's not a club living within its means. That's a club spending like it's competing with the top six while finishing eighth.
Rodgers was sacked. Dean Smith couldn't save them. They went down.
Enzo Maresca got them straight back up and then Chelsea came calling and took him too. Steve Cooper lasted barely a season. Ruud van Nistelrooy took charge and was relegated. Now Gary Rowett is managing a side six points deducted for PSR breaches, watching a playing squad that will be gutted in the summer, trying to avoid League One.
- Leicester have lost £180m over the past three years
- Last season's pre-tax loss alone was £71.1m
- A £124m debt-to-equity conversion was completed in January 2025
- Six points deducted this season for PSR violations
Parachute payments won't cover it. The squad will be rebuilt from near-scratch in a division where attendances at the King Power will be measured against crowds from third-tier clubs. Whatever betting markets exist around Leicester's League One campaign, they'll be priced around a club that structurally resembles a Championship outfit trying to fund itself on League One revenues.
Leicester have only been in League One once before, in 2008/09, and Pearson won it at a canter with 96 points. There's no Pearson now. There's no Ranieri. There's no Kanté in the squad waiting to be discovered for eight million euros. There's a £180m hole and a date with Hull City that could make it all official.
