LONDON, AFP – It is a downfall that has shaken English football: a decade on from one of the most extraordinary underdog triumphs the sport has ever seen, former Premier League champions Leicester City have been relegated to England’s third-tier League One, marking only the second time the club has dropped this low in its 140-year history.
The fateful result came on a tense Tuesday night at the King Power Stadium, where Leicester hosted Hull City needing all three points to keep their faint survival hopes alive. The script unfolded with heartbreak for the Foxes faithful: Hull took an early lead through Liam Millar’s 18th-minute strike, before a 52nd-minute penalty from James Justin drew Leicester level. Two minutes later, Luke Thomas put the hosts ahead, sparking fleeting hopes of a dramatic great escape. Those dreams were snuffed out just 11 minutes later, when Oli McBurnie netted Hull’s second equalizer to secure a 2-2 draw.
With just two matches remaining in the 2024-25 Championship season, second-from-bottom Leicester sit seven points adrift of safety, confirming their drop to League One – the club’s first appearance in the third tier since the 2008-09 campaign. The milestone caps a stunning three-year decline for a side that defied 5000-1 odds to lift the Premier League title in 2016, one of the most iconic fairy-tale achievements in modern football.
In the immediate aftermath of the relegation confirmation, interim manager Gary Rowett called on the club to confront the scale of the failure and learn from its mistakes. “We have to learn. I think the club have to accept this is the horrible part of the journey of a football club,” Rowett told reporters. “This club won the Premier League not too many moons ago. That was an incredible high at the time for the fans, for everyone associated with the club. I think everyone saw that as an amazing achievement. I think we can be equally as disappointed with how poor this moment is.”
This relegation marks Leicester’s third drop in four seasons: the club exited the Premier League in 2023, slipped from the top flight again in 2025, and now faces the unpalatable prospect of facing lower-league sides including Bromley, Mansfield Town and Wycombe Wanderers next term. The 2016 title triumph, masterminded by Claudio Ranieri with a squad led by Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kanté, was followed by a run to the Champions League quarter-finals in 2017 and an FA Cup title in 2021 – a golden era that now feels like a distant memory.
“The bigger picture is you don’t get relegated over three or four games, you get relegated over a season,” Rowett added. “The club has to rise again but it has to learn its lessons because it’s certainly been a season of an awful lot of regret.”
Analysts and fans point to a string of missteps on and off the pitch that led to the club’s historic collapse. Relegation from the Premier League in 2023 was widely expected to act as a wake-up call for Thai owner Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha and under-fire sporting director Jon Rudkin, but the club’s hierarchy failed to address critical structural flaws in the squad and business model.
Compounding on-pitch struggles, Leicester’s ruinous financial management resulted in a six-point deduction this season for breaching the EFL’s spending rules. The departure of Jamie Vardy at the end of last season severed the final remaining link to the title-winning 2015-16 squad, leaving the side without the talismanic leadership that had carried it through years of top-flight football.
The club’s management chaos only compounded their problems. Marti Cifuentes was hired in the summer to mount a promotion push, but struggled to right the ship of an unbalanced, inexperienced squad and was sacked in January. Interim manager Andy King was unable to reverse the club’s slide, with relegation fears turning to near-certainty after Leicester blew a 3-0 first-half lead to lose 4-3 to promotion-chasing Southampton.
By the time Rowett, a former Leicester defender, was appointed in February, the Foxes were already two points adrift of safety, and he has managed just one win from 12 matches in charge. A pattern of boardroom misdecision stretches back years: Ranieri, the architect of the 2016 title, was infamously sacked just months after lifting the trophy, and successive managers including Craig Shakespeare, Claude Puel and most recently Brendan Rodgers – who delivered the 2021 FA Cup and two top-five Premier League finishes – were unable to stem the long-term decline before also being dismissed.
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s Championship action, Coventry City secured the league title with a resounding 5-1 victory over Portsmouth. Frank Lampard’s side already sealed promotion back to the Premier League on Friday, ending a 25-year absence from the top flight. Millwall climbed into second place with a 3-1 away win over Stoke City, while fourth-placed Southampton’s bid for automatic promotion was hit by a 2-2 draw against Bristol City.