Ten years on from the most unlikely title win English football has ever seen, Leicester City woke up on Friday morning seventeenth in League One, still absorbing a chastening 4-0 home defeat to Oxford United that has left manager Russell Martin facing the first serious test of his short reign.
Wednesday night’s result, Leicester’s second defeat in five League One matches, was as one sided as the scoreline suggests. Fans inside the King Power Stadium turned on the team well before full time, and the mood afterwards was bleak even by the standards of a club now three divisions removed from the Premier League it won so memorably in 2016.
Martin, appointed in June on a three year contract, did not shy away from the scale of the problem. “The learning is the team was too young, and too inexperienced at the end,” he said afterwards. “We were naive and a bit too soft.” Looking ahead to Saturday’s trip to Stockport County, he added: “It has been a punch in the nose today, but we have to be really brave and stand up. I said it wasn’t going to be easy with the amount of youth we have, but we have to find a balance.”
From Title Winners to the Third Tier
The context makes Leicester’s current struggles harder to process rather than easier. This is a club that won the Premier League at odds of 5,000 to 1 in May 2016, celebrated with an outpouring of goodwill rarely seen in English football. A decade on, as Sky Sports charted in a review of the club’s decline, that same club has become only the second in more than a century to fall from the top flight into the third tier this quickly, and the first in its own history to suffer back to back relegations.
The route down has been unusually cruel. Leicester won the Championship title in 2023/24 with 97 points under Enzo Maresca, only for their promotion winning manager to leave for Chelsea within weeks. Back in the Premier League, results collapsed under Steve Cooper and then Ruud van Nistelrooy, with Leicester winning just once in sixteen league matches between mid December 2024 and early April 2025. Relegation was confirmed with five games still to play.
Worse followed. In April 2025, Leicester were docked six points for breaching the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules during that 2023/24 promotion season, the first such punishment in the club’s history. Fighting to beat the drop in the Championship with that deduction upheld on appeal, Leicester’s fate was sealed on 21 April 2026, when Hull City’s Oli McBurnie struck a 63rd minute equaliser in a 2-2 draw that confirmed the drop to League One.
A Manager Learning on the Job
Russell Martin arrived in June with a reputation built on Swansea City’s possession based football and a difficult, ultimately unsuccessful spell at Southampton. Leicester’s project was always going to be a rebuilding job rather than an instant promotion push, and the club’s transfer business over the summer leaned heavily towards developing younger players rather than recruiting League One experience.
Five games into the season, the results have been erratic rather than disastrous on paper: a draw away at Notts County, a home defeat to Stockport County, a goalless draw at Peterborough United, victory over Plymouth Argyle, and then Wednesday’s heavy loss to Oxford. Leicester sit seventeenth with five points, comfortably clear of relegation trouble for now, but Saturday brings an early chance to settle a score: a trip to Stockport County, the side that beat them at the King Power Stadium three weeks ago.
What Saturday Needs to Answer
For a manager still finding his feet with a young squad, the response at Stockport matters more than the level of League One football might usually warrant. Martin has been open about the inexperience in his side and about the scale of the rebuilding job he inherited, but a third defeat in five matches, following a result as chastening as Wednesday’s, would raise the volume around his position further still.
None of this changes the wider picture. Leicester’s ownership backed Martin with a three year contract precisely because this was never going to be a quick fix, and one bad night against Oxford does not undo that logic. But supporters who watched their club lift the Premier League trophy a decade ago have understandably little patience left for performances like Wednesday’s, and Stockport on Saturday offers the first real chance to show it was an aberration rather than a pattern.
If you enjoyed this look at Leicester’s fall and Russell Martin’s early test, the best way to keep up with everything else happening across the game is to subscribe to It Was Always… Football.