Phthursday Musings: Relegated

In 2014, not for any very specific reason I can place, I decided it was time to adopt an English Premier League team. Maybe it had something to do with a baby in the house, on some level it involved my growing displeasure with the NFL, probably it had a lot to do with the World Cup having just played out, and then somewhere in the recesses of my mind it may have involved being a latent Anglophile.

So I did what a person did in 2014: I asked people on Facebook which team I should adopt. I did not want to pick the likes of Manchester United, as I didn’t want to just jump on a bandwagon, and didn’t want to just be about the big teams; I wanted to pick a team that might be the equivalent of an Englishman adopting, I don’t know, the Minnesota Twins or Pittsburgh Pirates as a baseball team.

I was only minimally aware of how there were many tiered leagues with a promotion / relegation system. I didn’t really understand the whole Champions League / Europa League thing. But I was intrigued by how it was all different. I wanted to invest myself, in at least some small way, in that something different.

I also didn’t really understand the pecking order and the nature of competitiveness in the league. American sports fans will understand how, depending on the sport, the potential for different teams to cycle through and compete for championships can vary wildly. The Kansas City Royals can win a World Series. The Kansas City Chiefs can win a Super Bowl. But no college football team from Kansas or Missouri is going to sniff championship contention but once every 120 years or so. Picking a random team to support might leave you with Alabama, but is more likely to leave you with the likes of Rutgers. And as it so happens, the Premier League’s pecking order works a little bit more like college football than like professional football. But I didn’t totally understand that then.

In the end, I made a choice for a very simple reason: Exactly one person actually in England - that’s you, Hannah - gave me feedback on the Facebook post, and was therefore best able to make a convincing argument, for an exciting young team, just promoted after winning the Championship, from a mid-sized city in the middle of the country, plus the place in question cannot possibly be pronounced in English the way that it is, except that it is England, which should not be a compelling reason but for me very much is.

This is how I became a devoted partisan of Leicester City FC.

For those of you unfamiliar with a promotion and relegation system, it is probably easiest for me to explain it in terms of men’s college basketball.

Imagine that the Big Ten is the Premier League, and that the Missouri Valley Conference is the Championship. The last place team in the Big Ten would get relegated to the Valley, and the champions of the Valley would get promoted to the Big Ten. So if we did that, this year, Minnesota would have dropped to the Valley, and Bradley would have risen to the Big Ten. Would Bradley be able to complete in the Big Ten? Absolutely they would, they have had an excellent team for multiple years. Would they be likely to win the Big Ten? Absolutely not, because although they have an excellent team, they’re not able to recruit the most elite players like Michigan State or Indiana might. Conversely, would Minnesota dominate the Valley? Probably not; they were pretty bad this year, and a lot of the Valley teams were pretty good. But would they be a decent bet to win the Valley anyway? Yeah, though maybe not in the first year.

What I describe above is a lot like how it works in England. Burnley is an example of a team which seems to, every two years, get relegated back to the Championship, and then turn around and win that and get promoted back to the Premier League.

There are 20 teams in the Premier League, and each year, 3 of them are relegated. There are 24 teams in the Championship, and each year, 3 of them are promoted… and another 3 are relegated to the next level down, which is League One.

Promotion is a huge deal. It comes with a lot of money, largely because of the television rights. Relegation is a huge deal in reverse. Relegated teams lose a whole lot of revenue, so it impacts not just the quality of the team on the field, but also means that even workers at the stadiums can earn less money.

Promotion and relegation will never catch on in American sports because the culture is different; here the culture is, I just spent $1,000,000,000 to buy this team, and you’re not sending me to go play the equivalents of Northern Iowa and Missouri State next year. But it’s a deeply ingrained part of the culture in European soccer, and it absolutely makes for more thrilling outcomes that can involve numerous more teams and communities from all over the respective countries.

In 2009, Leicester won League One, earning promotion to the Championship. In 2010, the club was purchased by a consortium led by Thai billionaire Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha. 2014 is when they finally won the Championship and got back into the Premier League for the first time since 2004.

This is when I started following them. At first much of it was just based on following scores on the ESPN app, and that first year back, there wasn’t a whole lot to follow. After a decent start that included a stirring 5-3 win over Manchester United, the Foxes were mostly awful for most of the 2014-15 season. In April 2015, they were mired in last place, and were odds-on favorites for relegation. I’d seemingly picked a dud.

But then they picked up a win, and then another. And then another. Suddenly they seemed unstoppable. They emerged from the bottom of the standings with room to spare. Because, get this, if you just keep winning, it’s a big big deal.

Unlike in most sports, where you either win or you lose, the way that standings work in international soccer is that a win is worth 3 points, a draw is worth 1 point, and a loss is worth 0 points. So if you win twice and lose twice, that’s good for 6 points. But if you draw all four times, that’s only good for 4 points. This isn’t the NFL where a tie is essentially worth one-half win.

In their first 29 matches that year, Leicester only amassed 19 points. In their final 9 matches, they won 7 times, plus a draw, for 22 points. It was heralded at the time as “The Great Escape”. Young goalscorers seemed to be coming into their own at the end of the season, and gave hope that going into the following year, the team would be even more competitive, maybe with a real chance at finishing in the top half of the table (in other words, as one of the 10 best teams out of 20.)

The 2015-16 season started curiously. The manager got fired for weird reasons, and they hired in an Italian dude with an iffy track record named Claudio Ranieri. Early on, it seemed the Foxes had a knack for falling behind in matches and then coming back to draw, which was fine but, guys, how about if you just score first?

Finally one week against Aston Villa, they were behind 1-0, tied it up, fell behind 2-1, tied it up, and then won 3-2. And from that point forward they were utterly dynamic.

They ascended to the top of the table, and only Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur looked to be providing any real challenge by the middle of the year. Traditional powers Manchester United and Manchester City were having relative off years, and defending champions Chelsea were weirdly awful. Well, Arsenal faded a little, and with about two months to go, it was down to Leicester and Spurs, and… we knew we were going to win. We knew it. The seas has parted. It was actually happening.

Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016.

If it seems weird that I explained more about the year that the Foxes pulled out the stops to avoid relegation than I did about the year they won the damn league… what I want you to get out of that is how the relegation scrap of the previous season was so key in pulling me further in to the narrative of the team. I was a newbie, not really understanding the nuances of the schedule, really not understanding much of anything, that first year, but eager to learn, and completely pulled in by the craziness at the end of the season.

Unwittingly, I had stumbled into the weirdest fandom, having adopted a team that absolutely nobody anywhere around me in the U.S. would have adopted, only for them to win the Premier League two years later. It would be just a bit like if the Englishman sifting for a random baseball team in 2014 just arbitrarily chose the Cubs without any real cognizance of their history, and then when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016 thought, this is cool, without ever having gone through any of the decades of suffering.

The Cubs are an interesting parallel, because that 2016 World Series winning team was so good that people thought they could win multiple titles, that it represented a complete turnaround of the franchise’s fortunes. They had billionaire owners willing to spend, the most beloved stadium in the country if not the entire world… the sky was the limit for the franchise. And, well, that’s not quite how it’s turned out.

But, see, the Cubs always should have been competitive. Leicester? Leicester “should” have been one of the strugglers, hanging out in the bottom half of the Premier League. Maybe the real best equivalent to them is the Philadelphia Phillies, an original National League franchise which for decades was the second-best team in their own city, almost never got to the World Series, but finally got there and won it in 1980. And since then the Phillies haven’t always been good, but they’ve won another World Series and they’ve in general tended to be a pretty good team, with a super-devoted fanbase.

And, by virtue of winning the Premier League, Leicester would get to participate in the Champions League the following year, playing against the best other sides from all of Europe, which meant a lot more money to sign even more great players. They were young, still hungry, and maybe a real threat to break through the “Big Six” teams of the Premier League and be a force for many years to come.

NBC and its affiliate channels started showing Premier League matches on Saturday and Sunday mornings right around the time I started closely following. As a result, when the Foxes went on their rampage in 2015-16, I was able to watch the majority of the matches. And like so many other legendary teams, they had numerous legendary players, an incredible cast of characters.

The goal scorer, the center of attention, was an absolute rogue of a guy named Jamie Vardy. Leicester signed him away from a fifth-tier team. If you just look at the guy, you immediately know, man, this guy is some kind of jackass, isn’t he? But when he reached his peak he was as awesome a goal scorer as you could imagine, and his antics were perfectly suited to draw in the passions of a city in the Midlands. I have seen him score goals which I simply do not believe anyone else would have scored.

The creative mind, the guy who would suddenly turn nothing into something amazing, was a young Algerian-Frenchman named Riyad Mahrez. He was inconsistent, but when he was on, he was breathtaking, doing little things out of a dribble, taking free kicks, you name it.

Look at what these two men were able to do together:

The workhorse, and if we’re being honest, the best player in the entire league that year, was French midfielder N’Golo Kante. The man was everywhere. Technically a holding midfielder, observers said he was like having two elite players in the middle of the field. The man brought zero attention to himself off the field, but on the field, I’ve never seen anybody be so damn active, maybe in any sport.

The goalkeeper, the man barking orders from the back, was a seemingly perpetually pissed off Dane named Kasper Schmeichel. In front of him were the imposing center backs, a German straight off of the Brute Squad named Robert Huth, and the team captain, the marvelous Englishman by way of Jamaica, Wes Morgan. They formed a terrific bend-but-not-break combination at the back.

And so many others. The incredibly steady Marc Albrighton. The constantly cheery Shinji Okazaki. The delightfully named Danny Drinkwater. All of them were vital to the team’s success. And then there was Claudio Ranieri, rewarding the lads for keeping a clean sheet against Crystal Palace by… taking them to make pizza:

If there was a recent American equivalent to this cast of characters, it would be something inbetween the 2004 Red Sox - the famed “bunch of idiots” - and those 2014-15 Royals teams which should have been too young and unheralded to be anywhere near a title. But there is something about soccer - football to y’all over the pond - which seems to make for even wilder possibilities.

So many of the key matches in 2015 seemed to end 1-0, the lone goal coming on some kind of absurd or unbelievable play, like Robert Huth being left unmarked against Spurs, or this out of nowhere bicycle kick that Shinji Okazaki put away against Newcastle:

Teams like this don’t just happen, except, they can only just happen. I’ve seen a lot of great teams over time, but the only other combination of greatness and mad characters which I ever followed so closely was the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers. And, well, I was five, and most of those memories are reconstructions from seeing photos of crazy hairy dudes.

Expectations are high for defending champions, and so Leicester promptly went out in the first match of the 2016-17 season and lost to just-promoted Hull City. They scuffled through the early schedule, doing well in Champions League matches where they’d gotten a favorable draw, but not looking very good at all in the Premier League.

The Foxes made it out of the Champions League group stage and earned a knockout round home-and-away with Spanish side Sevilla. They lost 2-1 in Spain, and there was even serious talk that they were in danger of relegation, and so ownership did the unthinkable… and sacked Claudio Ranieri. The team responded by defeating Sevilla at home to advance to the Champions League quarterfinals while pulling their domestic form together. They would ultimately lose to Atletico Madrid, but as it so happened, they were the last English team standing, and had acquitted themselves very well in European competition. It was thought that they’d be able to rebound the following year and get back into competing for berths in Europe.

Well, they sacked the new manager. And a couple years later sacked the next guy. Along the way they’d lost a lot of their important players. Kante went to Chelsea. Mahrez went to Manchester City. Huth essentially retired due to injuries. Morgan retired.

But they got it right a couple years ago when they hired Brendan Rodgers in to manage. Rodgers steadied the ship. Leicester finished fifth in the league twice - just missing out on Champions League but good enough to qualify for Europa League. And for the first time ever, they won the FA Cup, which I could perhaps best describe as the NCAA basketball tournament if it took place slowly over the course of the regular season instead of being held all in March. Leicester had fully positioned itself as an enduring force to be reckoned with.

There were warning signs, though. Some players were not at the level they once had been - even including more recent additions. As was the case with many other teams, the Foxes were hit hard by Covid-era financial losses, but they were perhaps less equipped than others to absorb the losses. Rodgers insisted he needed to refresh the roster, but it didn’t happen.

Leicester finished eighth in the league in 2022. There was plenty of reason for optimism, especially given the presence of young stars like James Maddison (I call him The Fedd) and Harvey Barnes. But then there were the warning signs…

And from early on this season, things did not look good. Schmeichel was allowed to leave. Vardy and Albrighton were the last two standing from 2016, and Albrighton was substantially out of the rotation, and Vardy was a 35 year old striker who relied on running past people - that couldn’t last forever.

And the losses started piling up. By the time of the World Cup break in the fall, Leicester looked awful, and it wasn’t very clear what they could do. But ownership stuck with Rodgers. And then they did make a couple of signings in January. And at times they kind of looked like the Leicester of old.

And then they didn’t. They slowly tumbled into the relegation zone. Matches they needed to win against fellow strugglers like Leeds and Everton, they came away with only draws. It was like a slow-approaching train wreck where you kind of knew what was happening but couldn’t exactly believe it. Rodgers - who I believe to be an excellent manager - nevertheless seemed defeated, and finally got sacked, but much too late in the season. The team’s body language was often awful. They could score goals but still gave up way, way too many.

Even with all this, their fate was not sealed until the final Sunday of the season. With a win, and just one other result going their way, Leicester would stay up, they would avoid the drop, they would dodge the ignominy of being relegated only seven years after being champions. And they held up their end of the bargain, posting a hard-fought 2-1 win over West Ham. But results further north doomed them.

Leicester City will spend the 2023-24 season in the Championship.

Relegated.

Some of you of course knew most if not all of this. But I wanted to explain all of this history to get to what it feels like for your team to be relegated.

Up front, to be clear, I don’t bleed blue like lifelong fans in Leicester. I am not remotely trying to explain what it feels like for them.

What I can say is that this is different from your team making it all the way to a championship game and losing there. It’s different from flaming out early on in the playoffs. It’s different from suffering a brutal upset.

It’s also different from being a fan of a perpetually awful team. If your favorite team in the whole wide world is the Minnesota Timberwolves, well, goodness. If your favorite team in the whole wide world is the Pittsburgh Pirates, and you’ve had almost no reason for hope for 30 years, well, it’s a deflated feeling to be sure. If your absolute favorite team in the whole damn world is the Detroit Lions, my god, what can I possibly say. But even the year the Lions went 0-16, they weren’t relegated. I’m not saying relegation is worse than going 0-16, but… it’s different.

Relegation, see, is punishment for being awful. Instead of relying on ignominy to suffice as punishment, actual punishment is applied, not just to the team, not just to the players, but also to the fans. It may strike some as bizarre to think about, but in a very real sense, the fans are relegated too.

The flipside of this is that relegation at least conceptually carries with it a semblance of opportunity. If the team performs so badly that it gets relegated, then it’s not really in a position to challenge for a Premier League title anyway, right? But it could regroup and win the Championship. In that manner it could bring glory and a trophy back to the fans. Or, at least conceptually, that’s how it goes.

For Leicester, it’s probably more appropriate to think of this as - hopefully - a hiccup. An aberration. Something that really shouldn’t have happened, something contrary to the order that should be in place. That’s the hope we have to hold out for, isn’t it?

There are so many ways I can imagine having adopted a different team. If I had listened more closely to Darren Hayman’s Essex Arms, I very easily might have wound up a West Ham partisan. If I had decided to rely solely on genealogical research, I might have wound up rooting for Bournemouth or Southampton. If I’d watched that Pulp documentary just a little earlier, maybe I’d be rooting for Sheffield Wednesday.

Instead, I stumbled into what is arguably the greatest underdog story in 21st century professional sports.

And now, I guess I’ll be watching matches against the likes of Coventry and Stoke City and Preston North End. Most of the team will probably turn over - when teams get relegated they tend to sell their best players - but, well, it seems like the roster turns over every four years or so in most every sport these days. Whoever exactly the Foxes field this fall, I’ll be watching.

I don’t know that I necessarily expected that I’d have my kid playing soccer. I don’t know that it was ever exactly talked through in the house. But the way it all played out, I got into the game just in time to be that guy. I didn’t think I’d be a coach - and look, I can handle sending subs in as well as anyone, but I’m definitely not much for teaching skills to these kids - but here I am, now four years in to coaching. I take this goofball to Chicago Red Stars matches, to Chicago Fire matches, and I’ll talk to him to anything else I can find to take him to as well. If I can get this into this sport from my late 30s forward, who knows what his level of interest might ultimately be?

What I really hope though is that at some point in the next couple of years there comes the opportunity to head across the pond and actually go to a match at the King Power. If it’s a Championship match, if it’s a cup match, it’s all good. One way or another, I want us to be there and experience it in person.

So, yes, relegation sucks. The path to relegation was painful as a fan, and I can only imagine how incensed and despondent the most hardcore of fans have felt. But the overall ride has been thrilling. And even at this low point, even with the uncertainty about whether things might actually turn around… I’m forever hooked, wherever this mad ride might take me next.