Underachievers leicester show us hard it can be to manage expectations

 Leicester City’s story from League One to winning the Premier League was a feat against all odds and one of the best ever in sporting history. Seven seasons on,City have been relegated to The Championship.

One year after they were in the semi-final of the Europa Conference League makes this even more of a free fall than Leeds United who went down in 2003-04 after playing the Champions League semi-final in 2000-01.

Like with Leeds United then, Leicester got singed by the sun for aiming too high. So dire was Leeds’ financial situation then that it led to points deductions twice, in The Championship and in League One. 

 Champions have gone down faster in English football’s history –Manchester City were relegated one season after winning the league in 1938 and Liverpool were in second division in three years after doing that in 1904 – but among the seven who have won the Premier League, Leicester City are the s

econd after Blackburn Rovers to be demoted. And Rovers haven’t been in the Premier League since 2012.

It took a combination of financial missteps that included aggressive investment in infrastructure hoping for it to be funded by regular presence in Europe, Covid-19, a manager backed by owners based more on what he had done than on what he could do and key players not being able to hit the heights regularly that put the club on the road to perdition.

Bankrolled by a company that deals in duty free meant income slipped significantly as Covid-19 paused travel in 2020. Expenditure though didn’t as Leicester City were building a state-of-the-art training complex and, in a bid to be competitive, had run up a players’ wage bill of £69.5 million, the eighth highest in the league last term. 

Keeping faith in Rodgers, not unlike Arsenal and Arsene Wenger, too accelerated the slide that began at the start of the season. Rodgers had said at the start of the season, the club should aim for 40 points, the kind of negativity no club aspiring to be among the top six needed.

Dean Smith, Rodgers’ replacement, had seven weeks and eight games to salvage the situation. His target was 11 points from those games. He managed nine. “So I failed,” he told reporters on Sunday. Not all fairy tales, after all, have happily-ever-after endings.