Nobody who has so much as heard of football will ever forget Leicester City’s heroic Premier League title success in 2016, yet just seven years on they are staring down the barrel of relegation to the Championship.
As turnarounds go it is one of the more dramatic, but the Foxes would be far from the speediest-declining English champions.
Here, The Sportsman runs through the title winners who quickly found themselves playing second-tier football.
7 YEARS BETWEEN TITLE AND RELEGATION
WEST BROMWICH ALBION (1920-1927), NEWCASTLE UNITED (1927-1934), SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY (1930-1937), LIVERPOOL (1947-1954), CHELSEA (1955-1962), MANCHESTER UNITED (1967-1974)
Leicester will share an unwanted tally with some of the biggest names in football if they’re relegated this weekend. Manchester United were memorably demoted on the back of a derby defeat to Manchester City in the most recent example, Denis Law’s back-heeled goal completing an incredible fall from grace for the 1968 European champions.
6 YEARS
WOLVERHAMPTON WANDERERS (1959-1965), ASTON VILLA (1981-1987)
Wolves’ 1959 title was their third championship success in six years yet the next half-a-dozen were punctuated by failure. More recently, Aston Villa won the league in ’81, the European Cup in ’82 and Division Two fodder in ’87-’88. Oh, how the mighty can fall.
5 YEARS
DERBY COUNTY (1975-1980)
The 1974-75 season began with Brian Clough telling his Leeds United players what to do with their pots and pans, and ended with his former Derby County side becoming champions again under Dave Mackay. But by 1980 the Rams were suffering relegation under Colin Addison, never to return to the very summit of the game.
4 YEARS
BLACKBURN ROVERS (1995-1999)
The Jack Walker-inspired title win of 1995 is the stuff of legend, but within four years Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was exacting his revenge, his side holding Rovers to the 0-0 draw which confirmed their 1999 demise under former United assistant boss Brian Kidd.
3 YEARS
LIVERPOOL (1901-1904)
Liverpool weren’t always the top-four mainstays (sorry, top-five mainstays) of the present day. Back in their early days they were a largely inconsistent side and if anything it was their maiden championship in 1901 that bucked the trend. Their 1904 relegation was the second of only three regressions in their entire history.
2 YEARS
EVERTON (1928-1930), IPSWICH TOWN (1962-1964)
Rumour has it that Dixie Dean scored 60 goals in 1927-28, although you’d be forgiven for never having heard that mentioned in the last 12 months. The lesser known fact is that he was a league champ that season too, but within 24 months he was a Second Division footballer with the Toffees. A few decades later, Alf Ramsey achieved the almost impossible in leading unfashionable Ipswich to the Second Division title in ’61 and then the First Division crown at the first attempt in ’62. But after Ramsey’s departure to take the England job in 1963, they were quickly relegated back down to the second tier. They were there for a good time, not for a long time.
1 YEAR
MANCHESTER CITY (1937-1938)
Manchester City won the English league title in 1937. That’s hardly big news, especially in these Abu Dhabi days. But what followed was unique in the history of the sport in this country. Having gone unbeaten for the entire second half of 1936-37 (again, not dissimilar to the present day), City somehow collapsed the next season to record just four wins in their final 17 fixtures and suffer relegation to the Second Division. FFP penalties aside, they would surely never manage to replicate this sort of ‘achievement’.
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