From 5,000-1 to League One: Leicester City's Long Fall and the Manager Tasked With Catching Them
Leicester City have started life in League One — English football's third tier — with a draw at Notts County and a 2-1 home defeat to Burton Albion, and the early signs under Russell Martin are already uneasy (BBC Sport).
One win in eleven league matches. That is the full record since Martin took charge. It is a startling return for a manager who signed a three-year contract and arrived at a club that, on paper, should be among the strongest in the division. BBC Sport had even made Leicester favourites for promotion back in mid-August (BBC Sport). Two matches in, that optimism already looks thin.
Leicester's presence in League One is the result of consecutive relegations. They finished last season 23rd in the Championship — the second tier — five points adrift of safety, and dropped into the third tier for the first time in years. The broader context is grimmer still: the club lost nearly £100m in both 2021-22 and 2022-23, which led to a six-point deduction for breaching profit and sustainability rules — the financial guardrails that English football uses to stop clubs spending beyond their means.
The timing of Martin's appointment carries its own odd poetry. He was named manager sixteen days after King Power Stadium hosted a 10-year anniversary celebration of the 2015-16 Premier League title win — the famous 5,000-1 triumph that remains one of sport's most improbable stories. The commemorative match, billed as the "5,000-1 celebration," finished 0-0 between a former Leicester squad and an All Star XI managed by Tony Pulis. Then the present caught up with the past.
Martin's broader record does little to settle nerves. Since leading Southampton to promotion through the play-offs in May 2024, he has won just two league games across spells at Southampton and Rangers — and his time at Rangers lasted only 123 days. He has managed more than 250 matches in his career, so there is a body of work to assess, but the recent sample is hard to ignore.
Off the pitch, the club's Thai owners, King Power, are seeking a sale after 16 years in charge. An eight-page sales booklet has been circulated to attract potential buyers, though no official announcement has come from the Srivaddhanaprabha family. The ownership question now hangs over a club that has gone from the top of English football to its third tier in under a decade.
Bookmakers have priced Leicester at 33-1 to suffer a third consecutive relegation, into League Two. Those are long odds, but the fact that the market is offering them at all tells you how far the mood has drifted from the Vardy and Drinkwater years. Martin's pre-season ended with a 1-0 win over Genoa at King Power Stadium, and his coaching staff includes Hourihada as assistant manager. The structure is in place. The results are not.
For a club whose greatest moment once defied every odd in the book, the challenge now is far more ordinary: win football matches, climb out of a division nobody expected to see them in, and find a way to make the stands feel like home again.
