What’s going wrong at Leicester City?
Burnley signed Jamie Vardy on Sunday, taking the former Leicester City striker off the free agent market after his spell in Italy with Cremonese.
The Clarets need Vardy to give them a lift. Months after relegation from the Premier League, Burnley are bottom of the Championship and winless after five matches. It’s not going much better for Leicester in the division below.
Vardy and Leicester reached the heights together, winning the Premier League in 2015/16. The Foxes were in the Premier League as recently as 2024/25 and their precipitous slide shows no sign of slowing down.
What’s happening at Leicester?
Last August, FourFourTwo visited the King Power Stadium to watch Leicester’s first game back in the Championship and their first since Vardy’s departure. His shadow was everywhere.
Leicester’s opponents that day were Sheffield Wednesday, at the time the very definition of a crisis club. The away supporters took to the concourse early in the game by way of a protest against the club’s owner.
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Leicester going down to League One with them wasn’t in the script. Wednesday are top of the third tier now. Leicester have won one game and sit in 17th in the embryonic league table.
This is a football club touched by tragedy. The losses of chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, Kaveporn Punpare, Nusara Suknamai, Eric Swaffer and Izabela Lechowicz nine years ago have unavoidably affected the one-time Premier League winners. In Vichai’s case, the direct impact over time has to be acknowledged.
Leicester have spent questionably in terms of quantity and quality in the subsequent years. Last season, with the Foxes heading for the drop for a second consecutive season, chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha blamed himself.
Long-term, a lack of sustainability and dalliances with the fringes of financial regulations tend to catch up with clubs. Those that stay at it on the pitch can weather it. Those that mirror their off-field decisions with footballing calamity are likely to find themselves in more than a spot of bother.
The buck for Leicester’s decline stops in the boardroom but it’s the more mundane, more immediate decisions that transform theory into application on a Saturday afternoon.
So numerous are Leicester’s failings in recent years that it’s necessary to draw one’s own conclusions about where this path, the path that led them to the bottom of League One’s middle, began.
Leicester were promoted to the Premier League in 2023/24 after they won the Championship. Enzo Maresca was their manager. Vardy scored 20 goals in all competitions.
Maresca left for Chelsea that June and Leicester have had five permanent managers since: Steve Cooper, a hero at rivals Nottingham Forest; Ruud van Nistelrooy, snubbed by Coventry City; Marti Cifuentes, who lasted six months in the Championship; Gary Rowett, who didn’t even get that far and also managed relegated Oxford United; and Russell Martin, an extraordinary risk given his recent record.
Martin is the man tasked with getting Leicester back on the straight and narrow, at least on the pitch, but the same old story is playing out.
Leicester have won once this season. Martin’s last league win before that was with Rangers. The last before that was with Southampton. Meanwhile, Leicester have the most possession by miles in League One and only two teams take more shots per goal scorer.
In Saturday’s 4-0 loss at home against Oxford United, Leicester had 63 percent of the ball and fewer shots on target than the opposition. Their xG barely scraped above one goal.
The Foxes are at yet another pivotal point. Without getting things right on the pitch, the bigger problems will start to bite harder than ever. The decisions that are made above the manager carry more weight when the manager and players aren’t capable of making their own merry way regardless.
According to reports this weekend, there are two familiar decisions for Srivaddhanaprabha to make. The first now seems unavoidable. The second could make or break a football club.
