Leicester City are caught in a vicious trap

ON THE ROAD Leicester City are caught in a vicious trap

Ten years on from their Premier League fairytale, Leicester face the prospect of a bleak future. The Foxes are paying the price for outright terrible mismanagement

Leicester only have themselves to blame for their current predicament (Photo: Getty) Daniel Storey is The i Paper's chief football writer, covering the Premier League, EFL, England national team and the European game. November 28, 2025 6:00 am (Updated 3:48 pm) cancel email X WhatsApp Facebook link share Share bookmark Save share cancel email X WhatsApp Facebook link bookmark

Watching Leicester City win at home is an odd experience these days, not least because it doesn’t happen very often. The usual upbeat pre-match rigmarole quickly gives way to a tepid murmur. After five minutes, a low-key chant of “We want Rudkin out” is issued towards the director of football, but last season they were far more vociferous.

There is joy in the moment of course; that will always happen and a surprise win over Stoke City was both necessary and welcome, but it never exactly feels like goodwill is being accrued and banked to generate momentum. It’s like everyone gave up a while ago on this team being dependable.

You see their point. Between 3 December 2024 and last Saturday, Leicester won four home league games: Ipswich Town, Southampton, Birmingham City, Sheffield Wednesday. Three of those sides are now above Leicester and the other has minus points.

Here’s another fun fact: the only Leicester player to score more than once in a match in the last year and a half was James Justin. I was at the King Power to hear him booed by his own supporters last season and he’s since left for the Premier League. It doesn’t suggest that the environment is entirely indicative to anyone – players, managers, supporters, owners – having much fun.

This might have been different had they sought an alternative manager; Marti Cifuentes is below old club Queens Park Rangers and he will lose his job if there are more repeated setbacks and the home wins remain infrequent. But then Leicester aren’t great at managerial recruitment: Steve Cooper was not liked by fans from the start and Ruud van Nistelrooy was an extraordinarily foolish gamble.

The pressure is increasing on Marti Cifuentes with every passing week (Photo: Getty)

Beyond losing too many games, Cifuentes’s crime appears to be replicating the frustrating elements that caused Brendan Rodgers’s eventual decline: nothing much good really happening. Leicester rank fifth in the Championship for possession and first for short passes, but 12th for touches in the opposition box and 16th for expected goals. There is an accented two-word phrase you hear at multiple East Midlands stadiums: “Gerrit forward”.

Were we being generous, this is a cautionary tale of an ambitious club that achieves a miracle and then repeats it to lesser degrees – Premier League, Europe, FA Cup – before English football’s hardwired hierarchy bites back. Perhaps that would be easier to stomach for supporters. Beware how the machine grinds you down in the end. Look out, provincial clubs, the giants are stomping their feet again.

There’s certainly an argument there: the spending to maintain fifth-placed finishes and the Champions League dream; the overspend on wages to retain key players and keep a manager happy. What chance did Leicester have when they had already done what nobody else could nor likely will again?

But really, the blame lies squarely at their own feet. There were chances to write a different story, when they sold Harry Maguire, Wesley Fofana, Ben Chilwell, Harvey Barnes and James Maddison for almost £300m. There were more opportunities to rebuild rather than hanging onto Wes Morgan, Jamie Vardy, Shinji Okazaki, Ayoze Perez, Caglar Soyuncu, Jonny Evans, Christian Fuchs and Youri Tielemans, all mentioned because they left the King Power on free transfers.

And there was a chance to make do in summer 2024, when Leicester must have known that they were sailing close to the wind. They spent £80m on new players, most of whom barely featured positively in the Premier League and most of whom are still contracted because their value has dropped so significantly. Add in the profitability and sustainability rules issues and probable points deduction and you have no firm platform to go again.

Look at Ipswich and Southampton for the contrast, who also bungled Premier League seasons and who hardly started brightly back in the Championship (although are quickly improving now). They sold players for a combined £185m in the summer and spent £100m on their rebuilds. Leicester made around £45m and signed three loanees and a 38-year-old free transfer. They are caught in the trap that they set for themselves.

Three days after the Stoke win, Leicester lost 3-0 at Southampton. It was nothing new – since the aforementioned 3 December 2024, when they beat West Ham at home in the top-flight, Leicester have conceded twice or more in a league game 24 times in less than a year. That’s why there was no joy on Saturday: there’s always a fist waiting just around the corner to punch you in the gut.

Three-and-a-half years ago Leicester were drawing at home to Roma in a European semi-final, now they’re here. That has become the weight around their neck because it provokes repeated optimism from those in charge about the steps to recovery, even when they look unrealistic. For too long, the reasonable complaint from supporters was a lack of communication that warped from symptom of the disease to one of its causes.

All the while, everything became more difficult as Leicester proved themselves incapable of addressing the malaise quickly or emphatically enough. Promotion back to the Premier League wasn’t an escape – it was a journey onto a stage where their systemic flaws would be further exposed. The second time down was always going to be doubly difficult.

You can debate the minutiae all night, individual players, transfers, managers, signings, employees who simply aren’t doing or did not do enough. But from a wider angle, Leicester’s problem is the need to keep looking further and further back, and higher and higher up the food chain, to find the nucleus. Mistakes get piled upon mistakes. A club chases its tail. Recent history shapes your short-term future and that becomes a repeated cycle.

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