Highest Premier League finish, manager of the year, prolific English striker who has stepped up the leagues, but now battling relegation. Leicester City? Correct. However, there’s another, less recognisable instance of this.
If Leicester fans need to hear how it feels to go from living the dream to potential nightmare, they should take a few words from Ipswich Town.
Leicester’s 3-0 Premier League defeat at Southampton on Sunday equalled a 54-year record for the worst reigning champions at this point in the season.
Sitting 15th in the table, with just five victories and 21 points, Leicester are in the company of Ipswich, who plumbed the depths in the 1962/63 season — if you calculate their performance based on three points for a victory.
But it is more recent events which stick in the minds and hearts of Ipswich, who suffered a spectacular fall from grace 15 years ago during a season which has uncanny similarities to the experiences of Leicester during their rise to title winners and then defenders of the league crown.
In the 2000/01 season Ipswich finished fifth in the Premier League a year after promotion from the Championship. No mean feat, especially when their net spend was a mere £2.85 million (Dh13.1m).
Masterminded by manager George Burley, a former long-serving player who was in the side which lifted the FA Cup in 1978 and went on to manage Scotland, the club gained admiration and support from around the country with the kind of “underdogs” tag associated with Leicester last season.
Highlights included a 3-2 victory at Manchester City, a 1-0 win at Liverpool and a 3-0 pasting of Tottenham Hotspur at Portman Road.
If finishing fifth in the league — 14 points behind champions Manchester United, and four behind second-placed Arsenal — and qualifying for what was then the Uefa Cup wasn’t enough, they also reached the semi-final of the League Cup where they where beaten in extra time by Birmingham City.
It was a season built on the momentum of their promotion, as Burley tweaked rather than overhauled the promotion-winning squad. Lanky defender Hermann Hreidarsson was the only substantial signing at £4m from Wimbledon. Unsung heroes John McGreal and Mark Venus, who had spent their playing time in the lower leagues, hit the pinnacle of their careers, helping to bed-in the raw but imposing Titus Bramble. Goalkeeper Richard Wright won his second England cap.
In midfield, Matt Holland showed he could handle not only English football’s best, but also the world stage as he went on to score for the Republic of Ireland at the 2002 World Cup Finals in South Korea and Japan.
It was in the striking department where Ipswich gained most of the headlines thanks to the form of Marcus Stewart, whose 19 goals placed him behind only Chelsea’s Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, and ahead of the likes of Thierry Henry and Michael Owen in the scoring charts.
Like many of the Town squad, Stewart, in his late 20s at the time, was a Premier League rookie having previously played for Bristol Rovers and Huddersfield Town where the goals flowed with regularity.
Stewart’s success that season, and his rise through the divisions, is of course comparable to that of Leicester’s Jamie Vardy, who was pipped to the golden boot last season by a single Harry Kane goal.
Jamie Vardy has found goals harder to come by this season. Adrian Dennis / AFP
Where Stewart was Town’s Vardy, Holland was the equivalent of Danny Drinkwater, and Dutchman Martijn Reuser produced moments of Riyad Mahrez-esque quality, albeit in less quantity.
A summer of optimism followed with the return of European football for the 2001/02 campaign evoking memories of the early 1980s when Town won the Uefa Cup and were regarded among the continent’s finest under Bobby Robson.
It didn’t take long the for the season’s promise to unravel.
Goalkeeper Wright was sold to Arsenal as a replacement for David Seaman and to boost his own England credentials. His departure would have a destabilising effect as dramatic as that of N’Golo Kante’s exit to Chelsea last summer. In Wright’s place came Italian Matteo Sereni, a £4.5m Italian who preferred to punch rather than catch and was eventually replaced as first choice by Andy Marshall, a free signing from rivals Norwich City.
Nigerian Finidi George came with a big reputation and a hefty pay packet, and Marcus Bent cost £3m in November with Stewart nursing a broken jaw. By this time the team spirit was gone, a dressing room divided.
Ulrich Le Pen, a French winger, cost £1.4m and made one substitute appearance in which he was stretchered off and never played for the club again. Leicester similarly tried to strengthen with foreign signings — Ahmed Musa for £16m, Nampalys Mendy for £13m, Islam Slimani for £28m among others. Are they now a better team?
“We brought in three or four foreign players to try to improve what we had and I think that was fatal,” Burley said in 2005.
“To try to improve on fifth, we had no chance. We should have said: ‘We finished fifth but next season we’re going to finish 14th.”
Just one victory was recorded in the final 13 games of the season, and the team’s demise was summed up by the last day 5-0 defeat at Liverpool. It was a classic case of second season syndrome. Stewart’s goals dried up, and so have Vardy’s this season.
"After that successful year Ipswich wanted to carry on to be more successful," Reuser told local media in an interview 2012. "It was a little bit too quick in my opinion and some players had to make way for new players. That unsettled us too much and the team spirit went missing. It was a shame because from my point of few it was unnecessary to change those players."
They did at least have some joy in Europe, just as Leicester are in the Uefa Champions League.
Torpedo Moscow and Helsingborg were dispatched before Inter Milan were beaten at home. They were knocked out after a 4-1 defeat at the San Siro.
It was a cataclysmic campaign for Burley. From manager of the year to unemployed by October 2002, and the club fell into administration in 2003.
Leicester manager Claudio Ranieri still has a Champions League last-16 tie against Sevilla to look out for. But it is not unthinkable that Leicester could be playing Championship rather than Champions League football next season and the downfall of Ipswich is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the dust settles on a club that has punched above its weight.
Should they need a more extreme example of a fall from grace than Ipswich Town, they can always look to Manchester City — title winners in 1936/37, relegated in 1937/38.
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