Dramatic Promotions & Near Misses: City End Their 10-Year Top-Flight Exile
There’s a film that plays out on the big screens at King Power Stadium before every home game.
It’s a singular mix of cinematic genres - action, adventure, thriller, drama and fantasy - that tells the story, from the early days to the very pinnacle of the Club’s existence, in just three spellbinding minutes.
The finale, of course, is the moment Claudio Ranieri and Wes Morgan lift the Premier League trophy into the clear-blue sky and the commentator hails 'the amazing Leicester City'.
The film has been a feature of matchdays for some time, but its impact is still as intense as the day it made its debut.
There are lumps form in throats, goosebumps raise on arms, and hearts pound through chests as a heartfelt wave of applause from 32,000 fans washes round the stadium at the close.
Even now, four years on, it could bring a tear to a glass eye. It’s fair to say that few pundits fancied the chances of the team that went on to claim the title in the 2015/16 season.
Why? Well, the Club certainly didn’t take the conventional route to glory. They hadn’t climbed steadily through the Premier League ranks, building on their progress year after year.
They hadn’t mounted a serious challenge for first place in the top flight since 1963.
According to Risk Analysts, there was a better chance of Elvis Presley being found alive than the Foxes lifting the Premier League trophy that year.
And that disregard was probably for a good reason. Just the year before, in their first season back in the top flight for a decade, Leicester City had made an extraordinary escape from the clutches of relegation.
Only seven years before that, the Club had endured a first-ever campaign in League 1.
To football fans around the world who were enthralled and delighted by one of the greatest stories in sport, City’s electrifying Premier League success seemingly came from nowhere.
But those in and around the Club knew the spirit of the team was unmatched. Of course, nobody could’ve predicted the triumph – but something special had been brewing for a while.
It would be impossible to pinpoint the exact moment Leicester started their incredible journey from League 1 obscurity to global headline-makers.
But it’s certain to have begun long before the 4-2 win over Sunderland on the opening day of the 2015/16 season and stretches back even further than the celebrated 'Great Escape' the previous May.
City’s ascent to the highest of highs stemmed from their taste of the lowest of lows. It was born, created and formed within the heartbreak of thousands of Foxes fans.
On 12 May, 2013, Leicester faced Watford at Vicarage Road.
It was the second leg of the play-off semi-finals, and Nigel Pearson’s men headed south to Hertfordshire with a slender lead from the home tie, courtesy of a David Nugent strike.
The Hornets took the lead 15 minutes in before Nugent netted again, to push the City ahead on aggregate.
They held past half-time, as City kept Watford at bay, until a second strike from Matej Vydra levelled things up. The clock ticked down well past the 90th-minute mark, but the scores remained level.
Just as the game seemed certain to end in extra-time, with the screen showing the 97th minute, there was a stunning twist in the tale.
Anthony Knockaert went down under pressure in the Watford area, and ref Michael Oliver pointed to the spot. It was a golden chance to book a place at Wembley.
Every City fan knows what happened next. Knockaert approached the spot and the away end froze in horror as his initial shot was stopped. Yellow shirts swarmed upfield on the counter attack.
Moments later, the back of the net bulged from Troy Deeney’s strike. He spiralled away in celebration, ripped his shirt off and launched himself into the euphoric Watford fans, who flooded the pitch at full-time.
The City team could only fall to their knees. Another season confined to the Championship, sealed in quite the cruellest circumstances.
In Hertfordshire, they call it 'Deeney Day'. For Watford fans and the neutrals alike, the sequence of events is regarded as one of the most breath-taking 18 seconds of football ever played.
For the players and fans of Leicester City, it was a horror that played out in slow-motion. A lesser team would have been crushed by such a dramatic conclusion to a season which promised so much.
But Pearson and his men were made of far sterner stuff.
Kasper Schmeichel recently revealed, speaking on That Peter Crouch Podcast, that the players had been 'stewing all summer' about what happened at Vicarage Road when they returned to pre-season training.
Pearson himself remained calm and collected. There were no big-money signings in the close season, no scapegoats in the squad, and no indications made that City were hurting.
Instead, the Nottingham-born tactician stressed the belief he had in his side and steadied the ship.
The very few signings he did bring to Belvoir Drive, such as Gary Taylor-Fletcher, Dean Hammond and Marcin Wasilewski, came either on a free or for a minimal fee.
Their arrival at King Power Stadium was a statement of adding experience and depth, rather than an upheaval of the personnel.
If the faces remained much the same in the team after the play-off defeat, there was a palpable difference in the mood.
The players that pulled on the shirts for the start of the new campaign on 3 August, 2013 had an added hunger, desire and belief to win, spurred from their determination to put things right.
The Foxes travelled to Middlesbrough hellbent on eradicating the ghost of the previous season.
An own goal from Sean St Ledger 10 minutes before the break briefly threatened to reopen the old wound, but second-half strikes from Danny Drinkwater and Jamie Vardy sealed victory.
City were off the mark, and the fans could breathe a sigh of relief. The month of August saw three league wins and a pack of promotion hopefuls convene at the top of the table.
Blackpool led with 13 points, followed closely behind by Queens Park Rangers, Burnley, Nottingham Forest and, finally, City.
It wasn’t an emphatic start to the season, but as the summer nights faded into the autumnal haze, the Foxes remained in the thick of it. The accumulation of three points became a regular occurrence.
Leicester's highlights reel had already stacked up some footage come the start of November.
A potentially traumatic trip back to Vicarage Road was about to provide some more special moments: this time, the Hornets were the ones being stung.
In bizarre circumstances, Chris Wood got the Foxes off the mark.
Manuel Almunia was unable to deal with a back pass and attempted a poor clearance - it could only go as far as the New Zealander’s face before it rebounded and hit the back of the net.
Wood, bewildered, but with his arms in the air, reeled off to celebrate in front of the Watford fans as the players joined him. It was an extraordinary start, but it wasn’t the entire story of the game.
Leicester dominated from start to finish. And if Wood had supplied the comedy, then Knockaert duly served up the emotion. His moment of redemption came in the 53rd minute.
Jeffrey Schlupp powered into the 12-yard box before cutting the ball back. This time, with no hesitation, Knockaert found the back of the net.
A Lloyd Dyer goal capped off a 3-0 victory on an afternoon that was almost as much a purification ceremony as a football match.
Everything was set up nicely for the clash that Foxes fans had scoured the fixture list for when they were first published that summer.
City hadn’t lost at home to East Midlands neighbours Nottingham Forest since 2005, but frittered away their chances in a bruising, vexing contest which ended 2-0 to the visitors.
The post-match headache was lifted by wins against Ipswich and Millwall - in which Nugent scored on his 100th appearance for the Club and Vardy notched his first, but certainly not his last, brace as a Fox.
Come the end of November, for the first time that season, Leicester City hit the top spot.
They say sitting at the top of the league at Christmas is a pretty good sign of things to come, but if the Club were to emerge as leaders into the New Year, they first had to survive a gruelling fixture list.
It doubled up as an endurance test: seven matches in 26 days, including a League Cup Quarter-Final against Premier League side Manchester City.
If ever there was a time not to take the foot off the pedal, it was now.
Two losses in the first two games in the cycle, away at Sheffield Wednesday and Brighton Hove Albion, looked to spoil the festivities.
But the Foxes bounced back, picking up three wins, including a telling 1-0 victory against promotion favourites QPR and an eight-goal thriller against Bolton that saw City fight back twice from behind to win 5-3.
City flew high in the concluding months of 2013, and, in truth, they never came back down to earth.
Pearson made two additions to the squad in January, looking to secure the City’s grip on the league.
First was an unknown, tricky winger from French side Le Havre going by the name of Riyad Mahrez, and - in direct contrast - the veteran striker Kevin Phillips, a player with multiple promotions under his belt.
There was a growing feeling of belief across the city and county beyond. Was this the year, finally, when the Club’s long exile from the top flight would come to an end?
The unbeaten run which began in mid-December stretched for five weeks into February, and took in a resounding 4-1 win over Derby County.
The Foxes were cruising toward the finish line, and nothing, it transpired, could stop them. It soon became a case of when, not if, they would seal their return.
That question was settled on Saturday 5 April, 2014. The evening before, City had extended their unbeaten run to a whopping 21 games with a nervy victory over Sheffield Wednesday.
It left the Club on the brink of promotion, and if results were to go their way, a return to the top flight would be secured without a City player even pulling on a blue shirt.
The 3pm kick-offs began. Foxes fans around the country tuned into their radios and TVs and furiously refreshed Twitter feeds: waiting, wondering, wishing...
And when the full-time whistles blew at opposite ends of the country, celebrations erupted in the East Midlands.
Third-place QPR had succumbed to Bournemouth and Derby County had lost at Middlesbrough: Leicester City were promoted, with an astounding six games to spare.
King Power Stadium was a churning sea of blue flags on the day the City were crowned champions.
A 1-0 victory over relegation-battling Doncaster Rovers saw the team smash the Club’s record to finish on 102 points.
The following Monday, 40,000 fans crammed into the streets of Leicester to salute the players and staff as they inched through the crowds towards Town Hall Square on an open-top bus.
After the decade they’d just endured, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was pretty much as good as life gets as a Leicester City fan. You’d be wrong.
The anguish and pain endured on that notorious day in May 2013 fired the starting pistol on the most stunning four years in the Club’s history.
From that devastating near miss, to a clinical promotion, to an outlandish great escape, to the most implausible plot twist in the story of football: “The amazing Leicester City”, champions of England.