Leicester City: Rebuilding After Relegation
Leicester City know all about history. They just don’t want to be chained to it.
A decade on from that 5,000-1 title miracle and three years removed from lifting the FA Cup, the former Premier League champions are staring at life in League One after back-to-back relegations. Into that wreckage walks Russell Martin, a manager trying to rebuild a club and, in many ways, himself.
“History” is the word that keeps being thrown at him. He’s having none of it.
“We have to find our own way and then be judged on that,” he told BBC Radio Leicester, making it clear he does not intend to manage in the shadow of Claudio Ranieri’s statue-in-waiting. “Hopefully I'll be judged on the job I do here and not on my previous job and all that stuff.”
For Leicester, this is only the second time in 142 years they have dropped into the third tier. For Martin, it is another sharp turn in a career that has already veered from the high of guiding Southampton back to the Premier League to the bruising 123-day spell at Rangers that left his reputation dented and his next move critical.
He has chosen the hard road.
A club stripped back
The Leicester Martin inherits is a far cry from the one that stunned the world. The decline has been slow, then sudden, and brutally expensive.
The summer has been about cutting, not building. Cutting wages, cutting expectations, cutting away remnants of a squad that slid from Europe to League One in two years.
Jannik Vestergaard, once a high-earning symbol of Leicester’s Premier League ambition, has gone after his contract was terminated by mutual consent. Harry Winks, signed as a midfield stabiliser, has been moved on to Cagliari. Abdul Fatawu’s impressive loan turned into a £20m sale to Ipswich Town.
The clear-out ran deep. Ten out-of-contract players left at the end of the season. When the dust settled, Leicester didn’t have a senior striker on their books. Patson Daka had gone. Jordan Ayew too. A club that once boasted Jamie Vardy in full flight now faced a new campaign without a recognised centre-forward.
Financial reality has bitten hard. Leicester’s battle to comply with spending rules, which brought a points deduction last season for historical breaches, has forced some painful decisions. The most telling came with 17-year-old Jeremy Monga, one of the brightest prospects in the academy, sold to Manchester City before he had the chance to become a symbol of any new era.
This is not a rebuild from a position of strength. It is reconstruction from the rubble.
New power lines at King Power
Martin’s arrival also marks the first big call of a reshaped hierarchy at King Power Stadium.
James McCarron, installed as sporting director last season, sits beneath chief football officer Jon Rudkin, a figure who, along with owner and chairman Khun Aiyawatt ‘Top’ Srivaddhanaprabha, has taken heavy criticism from supporters as the club slid backwards.
If there were tensions or evasions in those early meetings, Martin is not letting them show.
“There was real honesty about what's gone on, but now there's real honesty and openness and willingness to move forward,” he said.
He has been careful not to throw anyone under the bus. “I can't judge anything that has gone on before because I've not been here,” he added. He knows the anger outside. He has watched it from a distance. But inside the building, he insists, the mood has been different: “I've been really open to being surprised since I got here and people have been great.”
The message is clear. Leicester’s past – glorious and chaotic – will not be his excuse.
Promotion or bust
The expectations, even in League One, remain blunt.
The target? Martin doesn’t bother dressing it up.
“It's to get promoted, first and foremost,” he said. That is the line in the sand. No talk of transition seasons. No gentle easing into the division. Straight back up.
But he wants more than a grind through 46 games. He wants identity.
He talks about “a way that everyone understands and believes in, feels connected to and makes the fans proud”. Style matters to him. It always has. His Southampton side passed their way out of the Championship. The challenge now is to do something similar with a squad still being assembled and a budget under scrutiny.
At the moment, the squad looks thin where it matters most.
A squad without teeth
So far, just two players have come through the door since relegation. One of them, Conor Chaplin, arrives with memories Leicester supporters will happily cling to: he top scored for Ipswich Town when they climbed out of League One four seasons ago.
Chaplin knows this division, knows the grind, knows what it takes to turn big-club-in-trouble into big-club-on-the-march. But he cannot carry the attack alone. Martin knows that better than anyone.
“Ideally, we'd have two or three strikers,” he said. Not just bodies. Different profiles. Different threats. “We don't just want one of the same, and it's the same with wingers.”
The recruitment brief is sharp: players who fit the football and the fight.
“Whatever we are looking at, whatever profile it is, it has to be right for us. They need to be desperate to come here and play, they need to be desperate to help us to be successful.”
Desperation is not a word usually associated with Leicester City. Not in the years of Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and that wild title charge. Not when Youri Tielemans was stroking in FA Cup winners at Wembley. But this is where they are now: needing hungry players, not headline names, to drag them out of a division that does not care who you used to be.
Martin, too, carries his own urgency. He has already tasted promotion and pressure. He has already felt the heat when a job turns sour quickly. Leicester offers him a stage and a risk in equal measure.
The club that once tore up the script now has a new one in his hands. The question is no longer whether Leicester can repeat the miracle of 2016.
It’s whether they can prove they still know how to climb at all.
