Premier League champions in 2016, League One in 2026: how Leicester City fell so far so fast

Oli McBurnie's 63rd-minute equaliser for Hull City on Tuesday night settled at the back of the King Power Stadium net, and Leicester City were relegated to League One. The players collapsed on the pitch at full time. The fans, who had been booing their own side before kick-off and chanting “you're not fit to wear the shirt” throughout, stayed behind after the final whistle to protest outside the ground. Chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha had “Get Out of Our Club” directed at him for ninety minutes and then issued a statement on social media apologising for what had happened.

Three streets away from the stadium, there is a mural of Claudio Ranieri. Ten years ago this month, the man in that mural lifted the Premier League trophy with this football club. Next season, they're playing in England's third tier.

Leicester won the Premier League in 2016, defying 5000-1 odds in what was seen as one of the most extraordinary sporting stories in history. The following season they reached the Champions League quarter-finals. In 2021, under Brendan Rodgers, they won the FA Cup, the club's first domestic cup in their history. It felt like the beginning of something sustained. Instead it was the peak, and the descent began almost immediately.

Relegated from the Premier League in 2023, promoted back up the following year, relegated again in 2025. And now, after a Championship campaign in which they managed one win in their last 18 games, they are in League One for the first time since 2009.

At the time of their drop into the third tier, Leicester had the most expensive squad in the Championship by some distance, an estimated market value of over £140 million. That exceeds the combined squad value of Charlton, Portsmouth, Oxford and Blackburn, four teams who finished above them in the table.

Gary Rowett's side weren't even close to safety. They were docked six points earlier in the season for breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules in the Premier League by more than £20 million over a three-year period, but the deduction didn't cause the relegation. Without it, they were still in the bottom three. The squad was too expensive and too dysfunctional to keep them up, which is as a result of failures that go beyond ownership, recruitment, management and culture all at once.

The off-field story is inseparable from what's happened on it. The PSR breach was the public confirmation of something that supporters had been watching develop for years. Jon Rudkin, Leicester's much-criticised sporting director, remained in post through many managerial changes and two relegations. Steve Cooper was appointed in the summer of 2024 to rebuild after the second Premier League drop and was sacked after 12 games. Ruud van Nistelrooy replaced him and couldn't arrest the slide. Gary Rowett was brought in this season. The fans have been booing Harry Winks for much of the campaign, a symptom of a wider frustration that has nowhere coherent to go.

When a club is in freefall this complete, the supporters can feel it in the stands before the table confirms it.

There is also something about what this means in English football. Leicester's 2016 title held up as proof that the Premier League's financial structure, for all its inequality, still had room for a miracle. The narrative that followed from Vardy's pace and Kanté's engine and Mahrez's left foot wasn't just about football. It was about what football could still mean.

Ten years on, the club that embodied that narrative is about to play Bromley, Mansfield and Wycombe. The fairy tale has a third act that nobody wrote and nobody wanted to read.

The structural comparison that hurts most is looking at what Coventry City did at the same time. While Leicester were being relegated from the Championship with the third tier's most expensive squad, Coventry won the Championship title and returned to the Premier League for the first time since 2001, on the lowest average wage bill in the division.

Two clubs, two completely different outcomes, one unambiguous lesson about what money does and doesn't guarantee when institutional decisions are consistently poor.

The chairman's statement acknowledged that “the highest highs and the lowest lows” have both been felt at the King Power, and that's true as far as it goes. What it doesn't quite capture is the speed of the fall. Three relegations in four seasons. A squad worth more than most of the division combined, sitting bottom. Fans demanding the owners leave while standing in a stadium built on the back of the owners' investment. There is no clean narrative here, no villain who is entirely wrong and no victim who is entirely blameless.

What there is, simply, is one of the most dramatic collapses of a football club in the Premier League era, and a League One season that begins in August and will feel, for everyone who remembers that title parade, completely surreal.