Unnecessary failure: How Leicester City left me with a lingering sadness
Nearly two weeks on from Leicester City’s relegation from the Premier League, Elliott Butlin assesses his mood and finds one overriding emotion.
Ever since Leicester City’s relegation from the Premier League, every fan of the club have gone through a range of emotions. Anger, despair, depression being common.
For me, the overwhelming feeling I get is of sadness. It is sadness not just for the relegation but for the overall situation that has played out over recent months. Anger left the building a while back, the abject capitulations at Fulham and at home to Liverpool saw to that.
So sadness is all I am left with.
An opportunity shattered
Sadness is formed due to how unnecessary and how avoidable this whole situation has been. The problems have been there, clear for all to see, for several months now. Even with just basic competency of running a football club, Leicester City would still be a Premier League football club. And yet here we are, a Championship club again.
Sadness comes from blowing the greatest opportunity the club will ever have to change its own profile. At the point of winning the FA Cup in 2021, Leicester were presented with the best chance they will ever have to turn themselves into a club that, whilst not fully guaranteed to always be a Premier League, but one that could look upwards more than looking over their shoulder.
It was an opportunity that the club had fully earned too, it had not been handed on a plate to us. Neither had the club bought their success. Instead it had been achieved via a route that many had believed no longer possible, as it was through continued good decision making, strong recruitment and clever thinking that had allowed Leicester to box clever and give a black eye to the big boys.
Yet here we sit now, that opportunity lies shattered in front of us all as through collective mismanagement from that day onwards, Leicester have been relegated. It is a collapse so dramatic, it is almost an achievement to have made such a mess of it, and the sadness returns again.
It is not an overstatement to say that we have lived through the greatest period that Leicester City have ever had. It is also not implausible to state that what we have seen from 2013 onwards, was the greatest run of success the club will ever have.
What has been achieved by the club has been extraordinary, but now the party is over and we are left with one hell of a hangover. It is not unlike a lottery winner being told they have spent all their winnings and have to go back to their normal job again on Monday. The ride was incredible, but now it is over and reality sucks.
From extraordinary to erosion
It is that reality that makes me sad. What has been achieved, what we as fans have lived through and experienced has been beyond all of our wildest dreams, and yet this really is as good as it gets.
Certainly it will be a long time before we are in another FA Cup final. European away days feel a distant dream again and finishing in the top 6 feels laughable, given finishing top 6 in the championship right now feels a challenge.
Don’t get me started on becoming Champions of England again – it was beyond comprehension when we first did it in 2016, let alone now as I look back over the mistakes of the last 18 months.
That feeling at Wembley in 2021 was incredible, as we watched a Leicester side parade around with the famous trophy that was finally ours. We were all full to the brim with pride with how we had won it. We had a side full of young, hungry and talented players that we could identify with.
Indeed ever since Nigel Pearson’s promotion team in 2014, there has been an extraordinary togetherness and bond between the players and the supporters, that has made the ride even more enjoyable.
The sadness for me over the last few months has been the erosion of that partnership, as one by one, the players have downed tools, not muster the fight required for the challenge but instead put in such apathetic performances it almost defied belief.
I feel like I have been conned by this group of players and by this club – I thought they were unlike the traditional perception of Premier League players, I thought they did actually care about the project they were a part of and had not love for the club, but a pride of pulling on the shirt.
But as we have all discovered, they are just as selfish and arrogant as all the others that have been seen before. We have become that cliché of being too big for our boots, and now we have not just tripped but well and truly fallen over, faceplanting the floor and making a right mess of ourselves.
Do we need a super-billionaire?
What has become clear to me is that how we have achieved our success feels impossible to replicate. In our 9 years in the Premier League, the landscape has completely changed. How the league looks now as we exit it, is completely different to the one we entered in 2014.
To have similar levels of success that we have achieved, requires serious money. We have a billionaire owner, but to have success, you need a Super-Billionaire Owner. One that is not just wealthy but MEGA wealthy. There has been many things thrown at Top in recent weeks, some of it justified, some of it not.
However I still do believe he cares for the club, and wants it to do well. Mistakes have been made, there can be no doubt, and he needs to front up and answer those questions, but I still do believe his heart is in the right place.
Our next owner will no doubt need to be a Mega-Billionaire. I just can’t believe it will be like what we have had with Khun Top and his father before him. And that makes me sad again.
Eventually we ourselves will have to join forces with an anonymous or faceless American tycoon, consortium or Hedge Fund owner. Or even worse, we sell our souls out completely like the Newcastle fans have done and we really do dance with the devil and team up with a State Investment fund from the Middle-East.
At that point, for me any nobility in following Leicester City would end and I would find it very hard to keep coming back to follow the team. Certainly we may have success again, but I just can’t imagine it will feel the same like it did in 2016 or in 2021, and that overriding emotion of sadness kicks in again.
There is a great line from the Oasis documentary, Supersonic, where Liam Gallagher describes the success of the band. He says “we didn’t just kiss the sky, we gave it a love bite”.
That is how I feel about Leicester’s last 9 years; didn’t just have a play at it, we tore the arse out of it. We lived the dream that every other club of our stature wanted, yet now it is over.
In time, I will be able to look back at this period with fondness, but it is still too soon, too raw for now. For now, it is sadness at what we had and what we lost, and that is all I am left with as we prepare for life back in the Championship.
