Relegated or Selling Out?

[Dan+]

On 4/19/2017 at 5:03 PM, Stan said:

Relegated, sometimes even twice because it worked out for us alright so far  

 

Seriously though, relegation for some clubs, in some instances, can be the best thing for the club. It can be a blessing in disguise because a club can become stale, ineffective and almost useless just floating around above relegation spots for a few seasons. Things just stop working and energy and spirit of the club gets sapped. Sometimes you need to take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward. Obviously it doesn't all work out rosy but there's a few examples where it has worked. I'll use us as an example because it's the best one I can think of and the best one I know about for obvious reasons.

We were pretty much in the doldrums in the mid 00s. To call us mediocre at these times would be generous. We were lacking so much fight and desire and just all round talent across so many areas of the club. The new stadium was dull and grey and hadn't been given the attention a brand new shiny stadium would crave. Players were average at best. Investment in to the club by Mandaric didn't work. The desire and ambition was to get us out of the Championship. It worked. Just that we went in the wrong direction . I think we were 1 of only 10 clubs who had never been out of the top 2 tiers of English football. We'd managed 124 seasons of that and at the time, when we ended the season in 22nd to be forced down to League One, it was embarrassing. What had our club become? Barely 10 years earlier we were at the highest point the club had probably ever been, making regular Wembley appearances, playing in Europe, achieving top-half Premier League finishes. Now, in 2008, we were a laughing stock. A shame brought on to the legacy of football in the East Midlands considering achievements of our tree-like rivals. 

But, as said, relegation turned out to be the best thing about the club. We shipped a lot of deadwood out and managed to gain that winning feeling, that momentum and positive energy back in to Leicester City Football Club. Yes, it was at a lower division and at the lowest point we had been, but we had players and staff alike (Nigel Pearson started his Leicester career at that level) and he helped build the foundations of what would lead us on to some miraculous times. It gave us a chance to regroup, take stock of where we had found ourselves and almost start afresh. It was important to come straight back up to The Championship, though. Staying in League One as clubs like Sheffield Utd, Leeds & Forest have done recently, can set you back too far. Luckily, we strolled the division and could now compete back in The Championship. 

Thankfully, Milan Mandaric opted to sell the club and a small bit of credit must go to him for choosing what has turned out to be the best investors for the club. And what Leicester fans including myself are even more grateful for, are the fact that the Thai owners we have now didn't come in and change the identity of the club or rip out its soul and make Leicester unrecognisable. They kept the core values of the club at heart and kept the fans satisfied by not changing club colours from blue to red (like Vincent Tan at Cardiff for example). For most football fans, they may make some left-field decisions. Most Leicester fans, though, know that they always have the club's best interests at heart.

Shan't dwell on that too much as it'll go off topic, but the point being that relegation, in the short-term sense, is a terrible thing to experience as a fan, anyway. Long-term, it can turn out to be the thing the club needed the most at that moment in time. 

I do think King Power want our second colour to be gold. See the ribbons on the trophy and see our kits in the past couple of years, more gold on them than white. But by and large they haven't been too bad in this area.

It really does amaze me any of our fans can slag Pearson off. We could very conceivably still be in the third tier if it wasn't for him. Look at the state he took us over (both times) and the state he left us in (both times) and I think it makes very good reading for him as a manager.

Relegation was probably what we needed really. Just ideal in the timing that Southampton let Pearson go. It was Southampton's win under him on the final day that sent us down after all.

[Guest]

Easy question for an Universitario fan. Selling out. We're already the biggest club in the country and considering we are 200 million dollars in debt, I'd prefer getting sold out any day of the week just so we can clear that unpayable debt. Not sure it would improve the football of the country but it would rid of that issue we have that's been around forever.