Leicester City have been relegated to League One. Let that sit for a moment. The club that won the Premier League in 2016 — one of the most extraordinary sporting achievements of the modern era — will play third-tier football in 2026/27. A 2-2 draw with Hull City at the King Power on April 21 confirmed their fate, and with it, completed one of the most spectacular descents in English football history.
This is not just a sad story about a club going through a rough patch. This is a decade-long collapse told in stages, each one more difficult to watch than the last.
Where it all began: 2016
Claudio Ranieri. Jamie Vardy. Riyad Mahrez. N’Golo Kanté. 5000-to-1. You know the story, because the whole world watched it. Leicester City won the Premier League title in the 2015/16 season in circumstances so improbable that it briefly made people question whether football had been fundamentally altered. The fairytale was real.
At the time, it felt like the beginning of something. A club built on smart recruitment, collective spirit and tactical clarity had beaten every superclub in England. The obvious question was: what next?
The answer, as it turned out, was a gradual unravelling that no one quite foresaw at the time.
The slide begins
Kanté left for Chelsea. Mahrez followed to Manchester City. Vardy stayed loyal but aged. Manager after manager tried to replicate what Ranieri had built, but the formula was never reproducible. The culture that had made 2016 possible — the humility, the cohesion, the tactical discipline — slowly eroded as the club chased bigger budgets and bigger signings.
They had European football. They reached the Champions League quarter-finals in 2017. There were good seasons and bad ones. But the club never found a sustainable identity after the title win, and eventually the financial strain of trying to compete with clubs they simply could not match caught up with them.
Relegation from the Premier League came in 2023. That was painful enough. Many clubs have gone down and bounced straight back. Leicester were expected to be one of them.
‘Straight Back Up’ — and then straight back down
In 2024, Leicester did exactly that. They won the Championship title under Enzo Maresca, paraded the trophy through the streets of Leicester, and returned to the Premier League to chants of “Straight Back Up.” The parade images were joyful. The confidence was understandable.
What followed was another immediate relegation, their second in three seasons, and this time the drop landed them not back in the Championship but into the third tier of English football. Something went very wrong very fast — in terms of both the squad assembled and the football played — and the club found themselves in freefall before they could arrest it.
The numbers are brutal
This will be only the second time in the club’s history that they have played in the third tier. The first was decades ago, when Leicester were a very different club operating in a very different era of English football. This time, they arrive in League One as former Premier League champions, with the memory of European nights and Wembley trips still relatively fresh.
The financial consequences will be severe. Premier League parachute payments expire. Contracts become difficult to honour. The squad that exists now is not built for League One football, which creates its own set of problems. Some players will leave. Others will have to adapt to a level they have never experienced.
What happens now?
Leicester will need to rebuild from the ground up, which is something they have done before and done well. The infrastructure at the club — the training facilities, the stadium, the fan base — remains strong. King Power is still one of the best grounds in the East Midlands regardless of which division it hosts.
But the road back to the Premier League from League One is not a short one. Nottingham Forest spent years in the third tier before their own remarkable resurrection. Derby County know the journey all too well. It requires patience, smart decision-making, and a clarity of purpose that Leicester have frankly lacked for several years now.
There will be a rebuild. There will be a new chapter. Leicester City’s history is too rich for this to be the end of anything meaningful. But right now, in April 2026, the club that changed football in 2016 is heading to League One. And that is genuinely hard to process.
Sources: Sky Sports
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