These are the traces of a silent protest. Flags of pale blue and dirty white fabric, carelessly tucked between the seats of the King Power Stadium. They were placed there so that regular visitors to those seats would wave them – when the players of Leicester City FC arrived, or when a goal was scored. But on this weekday evening in mid-March, they remain untouched, just like the chairs themselves.
Even in the sections with the most fanatical supporters, in the corner of the south and east stands, the holes are unmistakable. There are regularly four or five unfilled seats in a row. Elsewhere in the stadium the emptiness is even more apparent, with sometimes only two or three spectators sitting in a row. The letters are still legible there, which were written with contrasting colored seats in the stands.
Ten years ago that would have been unthinkable. Back then, Leicester City’s stadium was sold out almost every home game. In the British provincial town, about an hour’s drive east of Birmingham, everyone wanted to see the football miracle that was taking place at the time: a modest club, with a limited budget, that defeated all the top clubs and won the Premier League. While Leicester City escaped relegation a year earlier.
How unlikely that was was evident from the estimates of British betting houses. The chance that Leicester would win the English league title that year was considered to be as great as the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, or that singer Elvis Presley, who died in 1977, was still alive. Leicester City FC was a fairytale that gave every club in Europe a reason to dream. Because if it was possible in the money-dominated Premier League, why not in Italy, Germany or the Netherlands?
Leicester City FC was a fairy tale that gave every club in Europe a reason to dream.
A decade later, little is left of that hopeful feeling at the King Power Stadium. Leicester City no longer plays in the Premier League, after the club finished eighteenth last season and was relegated. Threatening this season The Foxes to slide even further, to League One, the third level in England. The club is second to last, seven rounds before the end. The bottom three teams are relegated.
The frustration among fans is enormous, sees Rob Tanner. The journalist from The Athleticthe sports branch of The New York Timeshas been following Leicester City for seventeen years and speaks of “a really gloomy atmosphere in the King Power”. The main source of irritation: how the club is run by the Thai owners, who bought Leicester City in 2010. Before the home match against Norwich City at the end of January, hundreds of fans gathered around the stadium, holding banners to demand the sale of their club.
“There are many season ticket holders who say: we will not come again until the owners sell the club,” says Tanner. But they don’t resell their tickets either: the deliberately left empty seats are intended to underline their message. They do not stand out in the official visitor numbers, because Leicester City calculates the number of tickets sold, not the number of tickets scanned at the entrance. But anyone sitting in the stadium sees the consequences of the boycott immediately, says Tanner. “I have never seen so many empty seats since I started doing this.”
New sub topper
Of course, they immediately realized in Leicester that the national title would be the big exception, says Iain Wright. He has been a fanatic supporter for over 36 years and calls from his car this Tuesday evening in March, on the way to the midweek match against Bristol City FC. The 2015/16 season was the anomaly, the year in which everything went well. “We had a manager and twelve to thirteen players who had the best season of their careers. And we were fortunate that all other teams were slightly worse than normal.”
Yet Leicester City continues to surprise in the years that follow. The season after the national title, the club reached the quarter-finals in the Champions League, followed by two fifth places in the competition in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons. In that last year, Leicester City also won the FA Cup, against Chelsea. Another season later the club reached the semi-finals of the European Conference League.
In short, it seemed as if Leicester City managed to permanently join the national sub-top, that was the feeling. “We were able to compete with bigger teams in Europe, the club was in good health,” says Wright. “But after that it is as if every decision has gone wrong, as if they suddenly couldn’t do anything right anymore. And then you suddenly find yourself in a new reality.”
Then-manager Claudio Ranieri and Danish goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel celebrate the only Premier League title that Leicester City ever won, in 2016.
AP
A turning point is undeniably the evening of October 27, 2018. Earlier that afternoon, Leicester played a home match against West Ham United, where owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was in the stands. The Thai businessman, owner of the family business King Power, an operator of duty-free shops at airports, was loved by almost everyone, according to club follower Tanner. He regularly entered the dressing room before matches to inspire his selection.
After the meeting with West Ham, Vichai boarded his helicopter for a short flight to London’s Luton Airport. Things went wrong right from the start: the aircraft became uncontrollable due to technical problems and crashed the owner died. Both the family business and the football club thus fell into the hands of his then 32-year-old son, Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha. At a time when both organizations were just before a major change.
Until then, Leicester City was mainly a club that relied on smart investments, says Tanner. For little money, whole hordes of interesting young players were attracted, some of whom stuck around and grew into top footballers. Examples include Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kanté, who were later sold to Manchester City and Chelsea for tens of millions of euros. Or Jamie Vardy, the former factory employee, who fell just short of becoming a top scorer in the championship year.
But with the new ambitions, Leicester City could no longer afford such an exodus of top talent, the thinking went. Instead of making money on transfers, the Foxes started spending more money every year to keep the best players and strengthen the selection. Belgian talent Youri Tielemans was attracted for many tens of millions, as were center forward Ayoze Pérez and defender Wesley Fofana.
Due to this new approach, salary expenditure also increased rapidly: in the three seasons after the national title, it doubled to 150 million pounds (173 million euros). It was a spending pattern that could only be maintained through sporting successes and the money that came in. That went wrong in the season when wage costs peaked at over £200 million. With the sixth highest budget in the Premier League, Leicester City finished 18th in 2022/23 and was relegated to the ‘Championship’, the English first division.
There is still hope among fans that this setback will be a one-off, if Leicester City is immediately promoted again the following season. But the annual reports already state that the investments are no longer “in line with results on the field”. The club has been making heavy losses for several years now, and the financial rules of the English Football Association are forcing the management to significantly reduce expenditure, and thus also its ambitions. After a year in the Premier League, the club is relegated again.
According to club follower Tanner, the story of Leicester City is very similar to the flight of Icarus, the Greek mythological figure with his wax wings. He too had been warned in advance about overconfidence, but flew too close to the sun, after which his wings melted and Icarus fell to the ground. Tanner saw the same hubris at Leicester City. “They approached it too ambitiously, in the pursuit of big dreams.”
Keeping zero
How fragile self-confidence is now becomes apparent on this chilly, rainy Tuesday in March. Leicester City is eighteenth, partly because the club was deducted six points this winter, a punishment for long-term violations of the financial rules of the English Football Association FA. The selection is still among the top in the Championship, both in terms of value and wage costs. Only: the results are not up to par.
Moreover, there are few signs that point to a good outcome, Tanner believes. “To avoid relegation, you as a team have to be able to keep a clean sheet. That’s what it is [in de competitie] failed for thirty games in a row. In addition, they don’t really have a scoring striker, and they are regularly defeated on fighting spirit. If all that is missing, it will be very difficult for a trainer.”
The match against Bristol City could be a new low, adds Iain Wright from his car. Leicester City is performing even weaker in its own stadium this season than when visiting opponents. The match against Bristol could be the fifth home game in a row that is lost. According to Wright, that has not happened to Leicester City, at least in the Championship, for a hundred years.
Although Bristol is also having a weak run, the atmosphere has already left before kick-off. Before the players enter, an animated video is shown in the dark stadium, showing a cheeky fox with glittering eyes, walking from one video to the next of Leicester City’s sporting successes. Only a short clip of a goal by Vardy, in the year the club became champion, causes brief cheering. For the rest it remains almost silent.
Even if it turns out a little later that Leicester City is clearly better, the gloom is never far away. Even before half-time, the home team is 2-0 ahead, but until deep into the second half, despondency immediately takes over with every loss of ball, as if an inaccurate pass eighty meters from their own goal would immediately herald a new defeat. Wrongly, because Leicester City wins 2-0. But due to weak results in the two matches that follow, the club is making little progress in the rankings.
It sometimes feels, says Wright earlier in the afternoon, as if he is watching a completely different club than ten years ago. In his more than thirty-five years as a loyal supporter, he has seen all the highs and lows. He sometimes tries to imagine what it must be like for his daughter, who is also coming to the stadium this Tuesday. “She is now eleven. When we first took her to primary school, Leicester was a club that could seriously compete in Europe. Now we are on the brink of League One.”
