Having won both the Premier League and the FA Cup for the first time since Farhad Moshiri took control of Everton, Leicester City have often been heralded as an example to the Blues of how to challenge the ‘Big Six’ but so far this season the Foxes have fallen away dramatically - so just what’s gone wrong at the King Power Stadium? Leicester City’s stunning 5,000/1 title triumph in 2016 was arguably the biggest upset in English top flight history and they received the trophy after a 3-1 victory over an Everton side whose manager Roberto Martinez was just one more game and defeat (3-0 at Sam Allardyce’s Sunderland) away from becoming the first Blues boss to be sacked by new owner Moshiri.
Since then, the Monaco-based businessman gone through six managers in as many years at Goodison Park and despite a record-breaking spending spree on transfers, Everton have gone backwards in the Premier League and almost suffered what would have been their first relegation in 71 years last season when they recorded their joint lowest equivalent points haul. Leicester City in contrast having dropped below ninth over the past five campaigns and enjoyed back-to-back top five finishes in 2020 and 2021, also lifting the FA Cup at Wembley in the latter.
However, the East Midlanders head to Merseyside tomorrow in the relegation zone, a position they have occupied since the end of August and while they’ve long been hailed as an exemplar when it comes to going head to head with the division’s moneyed elite, the Leicester Mercury’s Leicester City correspondent Jordan Blackwell explains, there is little margin for error when operating in such circumstances. He told the ECHO: “To be able to compete against the ‘Big Six’ when you don’t have their financial power, everything you do has to be perfect. You can’t afford to have any misses in the transfer market whereas if you’re Manchester United or Chelsea and you buy a player for £30million and it goes wrong, it’s not really a problem, you just buy another one the next summer, how many times have we seen Chelsea buy a striker who doesn’t work and it just doesn’t matter?
