A Decade Through Eras: The Rise and Devastating Fall of Leicester City

Just over a decade ago, Leicester City pulled off one of the greatest sporting feats in history; now, they languish in League One, desperate to avoid another devastating relegation.

Both turns in fortune represent a transitional point in Premier League history.

After introducing two of the best players of their generation, N’Golo Kanté and Riyad Mahrez, Leicester spent the subsequent decade in a freefall. No team, outside of perhaps Newcastle and Sunderland, experienced the Prem’s evolution quite like the Foxes.

Built as a relegation fighter in the Barclays days, Leicester took advantage of a Prem that had yet to monopolize talent. Striking while the iron was hot, Claudio Ranieri’s men took the pitch every week on fire. The mixture of talented players and manager allowed them to be the ultimate surprise in a way that will never be replicated.

The decade following that historic win saw the Foxes reach the Champions League and fall into the Championship. Unprepared for the direction the Prem took in the early 2020s, a once-magnificent side fell apart. As bad transfers and managerial appointments piled up, no one at the club figured out how to stop the tailspin.

A League One side playing in a stadium meant for European nights, Leicester will not touch the Prem again until they understand the modern game.

No team will do what Leicester did in winning the Prem in their manner; just as equally, however, no team seems likely to fall as they have.

In near-perfect synchronicity, the Prem’s title sponsorship with Barclays ended as Leicester lifted the trophy. Few teams represented the dreams of that era quite like Leicester.

Barclays football feels so different from the modern Prem, as the league and its clubs were yet to exert total financial dominance and bow down to a different sort of football. An era of imagined parity saw the same four or five teams win, yes, but with more chaos. The perfect football image of Arsenal and Chelsea today never existed in the Barclays era. 

Out of that chaos came Leicester. Built in a manner so alien today, everything from the manager down could only fit in an older era.

By the time he arrived in Leicester, the Italian manager had coached at the highest level of football. Despite his lack of results in previous stints, it seemed almost impossible for a side that escaped relegation to hire a manager of his reputation. The medley of players, from unknown gems to veterans of the English game, combined for a magical season.

One way the Foxes took opponents by surprise was by fielding the same sort of lineups week in and week out, while other contenders struggled to rotate. Without total market dominance, contending sides mixed starting-caliber players with whatever youngsters or veterans they could find. For example, as the favorite, Arsenal still needed to rely upon washed-up Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshere.

Today, a team like Arsenal or Manchester City can essentially field B-sides of players who could start for any top four side. This discrepancy doesn’t mean the Barclays era didn’t feature enormous financial monopolies; it just means the market still had some balance.

Leicester took advantage of the end of the Barclays era with a squad that could only have come together at one moment.

Rather than focusing solely on that luck, it’s a beautiful moment in time that will remain forever.

As the seasons piled on, the Foxes failed to keep up with the rest of the league. Always a step behind and moving in the opposite direction, they were also plagued by financial issues. 

After selling off key players to win the title, Leicester never found a way to replace them adequately. While they occasionally found gold in the transfer market, see Youri Tielemans and James Madison, the constant misses caught up to them.

One, if they had the time, could trace Leicester’s downfall to the transfer of Patson Daka. Paying over 20 million Pounds for a striker who only showed up in the Austrian league while Jamie Vardy still had plenty of life was a strange choice. To no one’s surprise, the Zambian failed to adjust to life in the Prem and ended up only scoring 22 league goals over five years.  

While not his fault, Daka’s tenure with the Foxes saw three different relationships, and the inability to properly address their weaknesses sank the club. Even when the Foxes tried to fix issues, moves like Wout Faes have hurt the club more than helped. In turn, their inability to flip players left the club in disastrous debt.

Additionally, while other clubs like Southampton better represented advanced scouting, Leicester also cornered the market. Finding the likes of Kanté and Mahrez and getting the most out of Vardy will never really be replicated. However, the Fozes spent the next decade looking for their next duo.

In reality, despite their title win, Leicester resembled the modern midtable club best represented by the likes of Brighton and Brentford. Unable to replicate that success, this new model was eventually overtaken by better scouting and strategy. By acting as a bridge between eras, they eventually collapsed.

Leicester were both too late and too early for the eras that they straddled. Falling into the chasm, the bottom fell out, and they tumbled down the football pyramid. 

Ten years have passed since the Foxes stood atop the Premier League, and they’ve never felt more irrelevant. If that side popped up today, they likely would never have won the league, instead settling for midtable mediocrity.

Truly representing the end of the Barclays era, Leicester became the sacrificial lamb for what the league eventually became.