Next month marks 10 years since Newcastle United’s second relegation under the ownership of Mike Ashley, which coincided with the astonishing Premier League title triumph of Leicester City.
I (Simon Ritter) was at St James’ Park for the final game of the 2015/16 season, when nearly every home supporter spent the afternoon chanting: “Rafa Benitez, we want you to stay.”
On the Megabus back to London, I saw M1 gantry signs warning of severe delays in Leicester city centre caused by the trophy parade. “I wonder what would happen in Newcastle if we ever won something special,” was my thought.
Now we know, thanks to Eddie Howe and his League Cup winners. March 2025 proved the potential of Newcastle United is almost limitless.
We also know the task of undermining the so-called Big Six Premier League clubs has never been more difficult, even though Tottenham Hotspur seem hell-bent on offering a helping hand.
The rollercoaster life of most football supporters has more downs than ups. Over this past decade, fans of the Foxes have seen it all, so I asked Mark Bailey (Silver Fox), a dedicated follower since the 1960s, for his thoughts and those of two other long-suffering fans: where Leicester City got it right, where they got it wrong, badly wrong.
For those Newcastle United fans desperate for change, Mark’s account offers some interesting lessons. Over to the Silver Fox.
The story really begins when King Power bought a bog-standard club from Milan Mandaric in 2010. We were newly promoted from the third tier and the chairman, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, set about sorting things out. He brought back Nigel Pearson, who had managed a couple of years earlier, and by 2014 Leicester City had returned to the top flight.
After a decent start, including the mother of all comebacks to thrash Man Utd at the KP, that first season went belly-up. By Christmas we were bottom of the league . . . and we all know what happens to clubs who are bottom at Christmas!
Yet Leicester managed to extricate themselves, through sheer grit and determination. With nine games left we had an outside chance of staying up. We then, gloriously, won seven of those nine games to finish 14th. It was one of the most amazing achievements in PL history and will forever be known by Foxes fans as The Great Escape.
This feat is crucial to understanding how one of the least-fancied clubs, initially 5,000-1 against to win the Premier League, then went on to do exactly that. Led by a manager whose recent history had been, well, pretty unimpressive.
Claudio Ranieri was brought in after Pearson had fallen out with the chairman over the antics of Pearson’s son on a trip to Thailand. In truth, we didn’t have great expectations of the Italian. After all, he’d recently been managing the Greek national team, whose defeat at the hands of the mighty Faroe Islands had prompted his inevitable demise.
However, Ranieri did manage to handle the media far better than the ever-aggressive Pearson and quickly endeared himself to fans.
Magically, everything started to go right. Ranieri’s mantra of “40 points” took hold, With his clear belief that you don’t mess with a winning formula and the sheer determination of the Great Escape squad – now bolstered by some key arrivals – we made a promising start.
Space won’t permit a season-long review but there were some personal highlights as we easily passed Ranieri’s 40 points and marched up the league.
Only three losses all season; Robert Huth’s power header against Man City (the best header I’ve ever seen); Vardy’s wonder goal against Liverpool and his PL record of scoring 11 goals in successive league matches; winning the league by 10 points and watching Spurs (our biggest rivals that season) drop to third in a two-horse race when they were walloped at St James’ Park on the final day of the season.
The trophy presentation on the KP stadium pitch with opera star Andrea Boccelli belting out Nessun Dorma in a Leicester City shirt is a shivers-down-the-spine memory that will last a lifetime.
At that point, while none of us believed this was sustainable, we hoped we had turned a corner. In many respects, we had.
The following season not only did we find ourselves in the Champions League but in the top group, thus avoiding some of the biggest clubs. And, though our league performance failed to match the heights of the previous season, reaching the CL quarter-finals more than made up for an unimpressive domestic campaign.
Management turmoil then threatened to derail everything. Having sacked Ranieri after poor league results in the 2016/17 season, the appointment of Craig Shakespeare (Pearson’s assistant and co-architect of tactics that contributed so much to the way the team played) was seen as a positive step by fans and broadly welcomed.
Another new manager, Claude Puel, then came in and an eighth-place finish seemed OK. In truth, we felt it was probably the best we could reasonably hope for at the time, although we didn’t like Puel-ball, which seemed very dull compared with what we were used to.
By now the club had been forced to adopt a strategy of selling a top player each summer. Not popular with fans, though we accepted it made financial sense and helped comply with the evil PSR. In truth many of these players were lured by the bright lights of more glamorous clubs and we made big profits on the likes of Riyad Mahrez and Harry Maguire, Wesley Fofana and Danny Drinkwater.
Then tragedy struck. On October 27, 2018, the helicopter carrying the club chairman and four others crashed close to the stadium, killing everyone on board. The outpouring of grief from fans for a hugely popular chairman was something I had never seen before and never expect to see again. Tributes arrived from football fans all over the world.
The exterior of the KP stadium was swamped with flowers, shirts, scarves, flags and other memorabilia. This was about more than football. This was a community grieving for someone who had made a real difference to their lives. Not just on Saturday afternoons but through his donations to, and involvement in, the wider community. You didn’t have to be a Fox to like and respect Vichai.
Although on the pitch the team enjoyed continued success under new manager Brendan Rodgers, the club didn’t ever get over the loss of Vichai. His strength and determination, allied to the respect both team and supporters had for him, were the major drivers in our achievements.
His legacy continues under his son Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, our current chairman. But there is a strong belief among fans that he lacks his father’s ruthlessness. While the next few seasons under Rodgers delivered two top-six finishes and the Holy Grail of the FA Cup, when things started to go south in the 22/23 season many of us felt a more decisive chairman would have replaced the manager quicker, probably avoiding the relegation that followed.
The club also got itself into a proper financial mess. Seemingly, Rodgers had persuaded the chairman not to sell any valuable players in summer 2022. This backfired badly. Players such as Youri Tielemans wanted to leave and would have commanded a good fee but were kept on. The outcome was a lack of team spirit, complacency towards the threat of relegation and a manager who had clearly lost the plot.
We went down with a very high wage bill and players with no relegation clause in their contracts. We made a huge loss, far exceeding PSR rules and we have never truly recovered. Tielemans left on a free and other players moved on for knock-down fees.
The club did get one thing right, though. It took a gamble on appointing Enzo Maresca – a largely unknown quantity at the time – who soon won many of us back to the cause. We were steamrollering the Championship and, while there were a couple of scares, we never really doubted we would end up back with the big boys. Fan confidence was high, although we recognised that we perhaps didn’t have the in-depth strength needed to achieve much more than survival.
However, high wages contributed to another huge financial loss. Unwanted players couldn’t be sold because other clubs wouldn’t, or couldn’t, match their wages. Some appeared content to run down their contracts and count the money without caring whether they played.
We won the Championship but then we lost Maresca to Chelsea and things went downhill fast. Some creative legal shenanigans meant we had avoided a potential Fair Play points deduction but our need to strengthen the squad had been stymied. And we were found out.
Managers came and went: Steve Cooper couldn’t raise hopes, then a clueless Ruud van Nistelrooy ensured they were truly dashed and we found ourselves back in the Championship. The yo-yo had hit the ground hard.
Yet another new manager, Marti Cifuentes, said all the right things about an abundance of young talent and having a positive outlook. Performances on the pitch spoke a different story. His cut-and-paste post-match comments on sorting out acknowledged problems started to ring hollow as the season went on and results failed to improve. By late January he’d gone and, after a brief sojourn under popular ex-player Andy King, came the emergency appointment of Gary Rowett. It was now desperate.
And that’s about it. Last night Leicester City were relegated to the third tier for only the second time in our history. This time there is an air of gloom and little belief that we’ll get back to a higher level soon.
We currently have the highest salary bill in the Championship. We have a board that seems to have lost both interest and plot. We’ve had a succession of managers trying to fight infernos with Super Soakers and players who mostly seem to be looking for an exit.
If the 5,000-1 team is ever to scale the heights of 2015/16 again, it’s going to take one almighty effort. I believe optimistic fans are up for the battle.
Sadly, I’m unsure the current hierarchy shares my optimism.