Leicester City has officially been relegated to League One, the third tier of English football. In reality, there is still a glimmer of hope, as WBA – currently 18th in the standings, 10 points above the Foxes – could face penalties for financial violations, just like Leicester did, but we will have to wait for the outcome of the ongoing proceedings. Meanwhile, the club that won the Premier League ten years ago, and that narrowly missed the Conference League final four years ago, finds itself in the third division for the second time in its history. This happened once before in 2008, and back then the move to League One lasted only one season, but today the situation is very different. First of all, because a year ago, around this time, the Foxes were in the Premier League. And then because, let’s reiterate, we are talking about the team that won the Premier League ten years ago and the year after reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League. In short: aside from the crisis of the club and also of the city, it was really hard to imagine such a vertical collapse.
The truth, however, is that another English club has experienced the exact same trajectory. And no, we don’t have to go back to the 1920s, 30s, or 40s of the last century, to an era set in the prehistoric times of football: Blackburn Rovers also won the Premier League – not the English championship in an absolute sense: the modern version of the Premier League, which was born after the split in 1992 – in the 1994/95 season and then fell to the third division. Blackburn won the title in the 1994/95 season, then in 1999 came the first relegation to the First Division (the old nomenclature of the Championship). In 2001, the Rovers returned to the Premier and stayed there until 2012, when they again ended up in the lower tier; finally, 2017 was the year of relegation to League One, the first in the history of a prestigious club, one of the founders of the Football League in 1888.
The interesting part is that Blackburn also risks joining Leicester in the third division: currently, the Rovers occupy the 21st place in the standings, the last safe spot, and have a five-point lead over Oxford United, who are third from bottom. It’s a fairly reassuring margin, considering there are two matchdays left in the season and that the last match will be against the already relegated Leicester – pending, of course, the final verdict on WBA. In any case, it should also be noted that Leicester and Blackburn share this negative record with two other clubs that have won one of the top leagues in Europe in the last thirty years: Kaiserslautern and Deportivo La Coruña, both of whom ended up in the third division after winning the title in Germany (in 1998) and in Spain (in 2000). So, as they say: it’s understandable to be shocked, but nothing so absurd has happened; football has always been like this.