A decade ago, Leicester City won the Premier League at 5,000/1. Now they're losing a six-point deduction fight in the Championship and staring down the barrel of League One. The anniversary is going to sting.
A defeat to Hull City on April 21 will confirm back-to-back relegations — their second and third drops since lifting the trophy in 2015/16. For context, they'd only ever played one season in the third tier before in their entire 142-year history.
The title win that papered over the cracks
Claudio Ranieri's side was genuinely special. Vardy scoring in 11 consecutive Premier League matches. Mahrez's solo goal against Man City that told the rest of the league the chase was real. A back five so organised that five 1-0 wins in six games closed it out. Tottenham's implosion at Chelsea on May 2 made them champions with two games to spare, finishing 10 points clear. Nobody who watched it will ever fully explain it.
But the foundation was always narrower than it looked. N'Golo Kanté left for Chelsea. Vardy and Mahrez regressed. Ranieri was sacked nine months after winning the title, with Leicester sitting one point above the relegation zone. The genius that built it — Steve Walsh's bargain-basement scouting — quietly disappeared as the ambition scaled up under Brendan Rodgers.
Rodgers deserves credit. He added an FA Cup and a Community Shield, produced back-to-back fifth-place finishes, and had arguably the better squad on paper. But two agonising final-day failures to reach the Champions League forced financial tightening. Then the coronavirus pandemic gutted the King Power duty-free business that bankrolled it all. Then Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha died in the helicopter crash outside the stadium in October 2018 — a tragedy the club hasn't fully recovered from in any sense.
Where the money went and what it bought
By the time Rodgers was sacked in 2023, Leicester's wage bill had ballooned past £200m — seventh highest in the Premier League. They were relegated anyway. The wage bill and the league position were both telling the same story: a club spending money it had already lost.
Enzo Maresca got them back up immediately, then walked out the door to Chelsea. Steve Cooper lasted barely long enough to unpack. Ruud van Nistelrooy took the drop without a fight. Gary Rowett is now managing a club six points adrift in the Championship with a gutted squad and three years of losses totalling £180m.
- A £124m debt-to-equity conversion completed in January 2025
- £71.1m pre-tax loss in the most recent reported season alone
- Six-point PSR deduction already applied this season
- Parachute payments won't come close to covering what's needed
The playing squad will be dismantled wholesale once relegation is confirmed. Whatever comes next has to be built from almost nothing, by a club that spent years confusing a miracle for a business model.
They were champions ten years ago. League One is three divisions below that. The maths doesn't get any crueller than this.
