Category Sports News

Triumph, tragedy and turmoil.

The past decade at Leicester City has had it all.

It started with a season that delivered the most unlikely – and previously unfathomable – Premier League title to King Power Stadium in 2016.

Two years later, the stadium was also the site of the club’s most shocking tragedy, as owner and chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha died alongside four other people in a helicopter crash outside the ground.

Now, in a season where Leicester will mark the 10-year anniversary of their greatest sporting moment – which Vichai was instrumental in creating – the club finds itself back in England’s second tier after a second relegation from the Premier League in three years.

And this time they have dropped into the Championship under a cloud of uncertainty, the threat of a points penalty hanging over the club for allegedly breaching spending rules when they were promoted from the division as title winners just over a year ago.

“It’s been an emotional rollercoaster”, said lifelong Foxes fan Kate Blakemore, a regular Leicester contributor for BBC Sport.

“We’ve had tragedy thrown in there with the passing of Vichai, and winning the FA Cup is not something I thought I’d see in my lifetime, let alone the Premier League.

” We have had some amazing highs this past decade and yet here we are feeling rather glum that we have been relegated for the second time in three seasons and things seem a little bit unsettled at the club.

“We are rounding out the decade with a very different feeling to how we started it, and it’s quite tough to take for the fans really”.

The years that were bookended by Championship football in 2014 and 2023 are the greatest in the club’s history.

It started with the Foxes returning to the Premier League after a 10-year absence, included a relegation ‘ great escape ‘ under Nigel Pearson, a Premier League title masterminded by Claudio Ranieri, a Champions League quarter-final, then winning the FA Cup and Community Shield during Brendan Rodgers ‘ reign as boss.

Leicester even reached the semi-final of a European competition for the first time in 2022, losing to Italian side Roma in the Europa Conference League, a year before they became the most expensive and highest-paid squad to suffer Premier League relegation.

“You can’t predict anything with Leicester City and you can’t assume you are on any kind of trajectory, positive or negative, because they always scupper your expectations”, Blakemore said.

“Going from winning the Championship title to the Premier League title two years later, to the era of Champions League quarter-finals and getting our best, most sought-after manager in Rodgers, you could only think we were looking odds-on to be a constant top-eight kind of team.

Attempting to keep the books balanced is undoubtedly top of the list.

In his final season in charge at the King Power, Rodgers bemoaned Leicester was not the club” it was a couple of years ago “after a frustrating summer transfer window.

It was the first sign of the difficulties the club was having trying to comply with spending rules.

Flipping talent for huge profits – be it Harry Maguire’s £80m move to Manchester United in 2019 or Riyad Mahrez’s transfer to Manchester City for £60m a year before that – had helped the club establish itself as a top-10 Premier League side.

Big-money exits of recent years, however, have been timed to help their case off the field, having twice been charged with alleged breaches of profit and sustainability rules (PSR).

A club-record loss of £92.5m was made in 2021-22, followed by an £89.7m deficit a season later to take their losses over three years to £215m.

Mike Stowell was Leicester’s goalkeeper coach for 16 years from 2007 to 2023, in which time they went from winning the League One title to conquering the Premier League and reaching the knockout stages of Europe’s biggest competitions.

To Stowell, Leicester City are” family”. One with which he experienced” amazing times “but freely admits it was” never a smooth ride”.

He left the club following relegation two years ago, and says dropping out of the top-fight twice in three seasons is the main factor behind Leicester’s lack of investment.

But he also adds that is nothing new.

It is among the reasons that relegation very nearly followed their Premier League title win, and what contributed to Ranieri losing his job just nine months after the club’s crowning achievement.

” Look at Liverpool’s investment this pre-season, it’s over £200m, and they have just won the league, “Stowell said.

” And if you look back at when we won the league, our investment was very minimal.

“The Champions League was a fantastic journey, but we were turning the same team out for Premier League and Champions League games and the reality was that we weren’t big enough and strong enough to be in that pool and to sustain it.

” We managed to stay up, but we were behind again and trying to play catch-up.

It is little wonder Blakemore described being out of the Premier League even for one year as an “eternity”, with the East Midlands club quickly left behind as the level of spending by top-flight sides continues to reach new highs.

And here the Foxes are, back in the Championship, having finished 13 points adrift of safety last season only a year after clinching the second-tier title with 97 points under Enzo Maresca.

“With PSR they couldn’t invest, they gave big contracts to those players who got them back up to the Championship, but took them down from the Premier League”, Stowell said.

“Realistically they hadn’t learned from their mistake, and the team that went down and took them back up, took them back down again.

Marti Cifuentes is the manager Leicester have turned to as they attempt to again ‘ yo-yo ‘ their way back up.

The former Queens Park Rangers head coach is seen as a boss in the mould of Maresca – the manager who got the Foxes promoted last time, before leaving for Chelsea where he has since lifted the Club World Cup and Europa Conference League – with a desire to see his side press high and dominate possession.

Cifuentes ‘ arrival, the awkwardly long wait it took the Foxes to sack predecessor Ruud van Nistelrooy and the uncertainty around the club’s ability to spend also has echoes of the chaotic nature in which Ranieri came into the job 10 years ago.

Predecessor Pearson had been sacked despite overseeing seven wins and one draw in their final 10 games to achieve Premier League survival.

Ranieri picked up the pieces – and with a shrewd summer recruitment drive that brought in influential players such as N’Golo Kante, Shinji Okazaki and Robert Huth – transformed Leicester from a relegation escape-act into 5, 000-1 heroes.

Cifuentes is now picking up the pieces of a relegated side, and has so far only manged to sign free-agent goalkeeper Asmir Begovic.

The void left by former England striker and Foxes great Vardy remains unfilled, and while Cifuentes has remained coy about what he can and cannot spend, he explained to BBC Radio Leicester he is well aware of what he has signed up for.

” The fact that 10 years ago this club managed to achieve what I would say is one of the most amazing achievements in the last years of any sport, says a lot about a lot of people that are here, “he said.

Cifuentes says having Andy King, a member of the Premier League-winning team, on his coaching staff, and a number of academy graduates around the squad is vital in keeping the Foxes tethered to past glories and the identity it helped the club forge.

Homegrown defender Ben Nelson knows the Foxes ‘ pedigree more than anyone, having been a ball boy during that memorable season.

He was stood on the pitch when world-renowned Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli sang in front of a packed King Power Stadium on the iconic day they lifted the Premier League trophy.

” Being around the centre circle when Bocelli was singing and all those big moments are ones that stick with you forever, “said 21-year-old Nelson, whose only first-team appearances for Leicester came when they were last in the Championship.

” I would have been 10 or 11, ball-boying week in, week out in the Premier League, watching all the stars play, dreaming and hoping one day I’d be on that pitch and able to recreate some of those moments.

After revealing his plans to compete in the Glasgow Marathon the following summer, Josh Kerr declares that he will attend a “very special” Commonwealth Games.

The Edinburgh-born Olympic silver medalist and current world champion revealed he is targeting the home event after coasting to victory in the 5, 000-meter race at the UK Athletics Championships.

11 years after the city’s last official hosting of the Games, last week marked the one year since the event’s return to Scotland.

The Commonwealths are obviously in my plans and my thoughts for the upcoming year, Kerr said.

“It would be a big deal for me to race for Team Scotland, and I consider it very fortunate that the Commonwealth Games are once more taking place in the UK. Glasgow will be where it will take place, which is very unusual.

I’ve got a lot of time on my calendar for 2026, and I’m excited about it. A few weeks later, the Europeans arrive in Birmingham.

The 28-year-old is currently getting ready for his 1500-meter title defense at the World Championships in September.

And Kerr, who won over the weekend in Birmingham, claims he wants to present a more accurate picture of himself at the next edition of the Games.

The Scot finished 12th overall in the 1500m, saying, “Last time, here in Birmingham, it wasn’t a fantastic experience or effort from me – there were lots of reasons for that in the summer of 2022.

In November, Chris Eubank Jr. and Conor Benn will square off in a much-anticipated rematch at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

In a thrilling middleweight match held there in April, Eubank defeated Benn by unanimous decision.

The bitter rivals’ fight 35 years after their fathers, Chris Eubank Sr. and Nigel Benn, first fought, attracted a lot of attention despite the lack of a title.

A rematch was also desired by fans and promoted by promoters after Eubank was declared the winner on all three judges’ scorecards, which was placed at 116-112.

Due to concerns that Eubank wouldn’t be ready, a second fight had been scheduled for September 20.

The rematch will take place on November 15th, according to Ring Magazine, which Turki Alalshikh owns.

Eddie Hearn, Matchroom Boxing’s chairman and promoter, also shared the same day on Instagram.

Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr.’s rivalry was revealed at the end of June on September 20th.

However, by July 17 Team Benn was concerned that Eubank wasn’t interested in fighting. Eddie Hearn, Benn’s promoter, declared the rematch “dead” three days later.

The fight is now back on for the 15 November deadline, less than a month away.

Turki Alalshikh, who had the initial idea for the September bout completely off guard, was the driving force behind the announcement of a new date.

Eubank has not made any public comments on that announcement as of yet. Perhaps the fact that he didn’t want that date or wanted to revisit the terms of the initial fight, which included a fight-day rehydration clause, helped him in June.

Their initial confrontation was similar to a bottle-in-a-bottle lightning strike. A carefully planned event that didn’t actually have any business going on. Additionally, it was entertaining to watch.

Can organizers reclaim the same power? We are aware that Eubank can provide the weight. Chris Eubank Jr.’s incredible arrival on fight night was in the WWE style. For a comfortable points win, we watched a weight-drained Eubank fend off the smaller Benn.

There’s a good chance you hadn’t heard the name Sarah Calvert before the weekend.

The 24-year-old post-graduate student has a slim chance of disappearing now, though. Everything has been altered by her spectacular entry into the British middle-distance scene.

The Livingston native herself won the 1500-meter title after beating Laura Muir, who won it at the Olympics, in Birmingham. She now holds the title of Scotland’s new champion.

Calvert remarked, “It feels incredible.” I didn’t anticipate this ever happening, especially given how busy I was studying for exams in May, which made things a little stressful.

I knew it was crazy as soon as I crossed the line. I was aware that this was my life’s pivotal moment. I had my first anti-doping test afterward, which was another positive experience.

“I’ve received so many messages since then from my parents’ friends, all my friends, and from people from school.” It gives the impression that everything is very special.

Calvert is now pursuing fast races in Europe to compete in the British team for the upcoming World Championships.

Due to her newly discovered fame, both her family and her social standing have fallen for her.

When she takes a break from her studies at Edinburgh University, she told BBC Scotland at Edinburgh’s Meadowbank stadium, one of her regular training venues, that her father texted to say that she had a Wikipedia page.

It’s just a little crazy, I guess. I didn’t really anticipate it to explode in this manner.

That kind of accomplishment will be reflected in your profile if you win one of the top UK events.

She is now working with an agent who wants to see if she can break her personal best by six seconds and join the GB team for Tokyo at the World Championships.

And Calvert still has her life grounded in reality despite the chaos at the moment, even though she is prepared to give it her best shot. She has tried to balance excelling at both being a doctor and an athlete.

She admitted to attending the World Championships, “I would have said I had no chance” before the weekend. “I need to run a big personal best, so it still seems a little off.” I believe I must make the effort.

When I’m at university, “I definitely feel busy, day to day.” training in the morning, cycling to the hospital for my internship, and then once more training in the evening. But both of them are enjoyable.

I frequently worry that my running for medicine will lead to the other choice, but I believe I must accept that I both want to be doctors at some point in my life.

Given that the top 1500m runners in the country struggled to contain their late surge in Birmingham, including her idol Muir, who also managed to balance her vet studies with a wildly successful athletics career.

Being a British champion and having already won a silver medal at the most recent World University Games opens up new opportunities for Calvert. Sponsors are contacting them about endorsements, which will increase her visibility and marketability even further if she qualifies for the World Championships.

If Tokyo is too far, she will have a significant event on home soil in the summer of 2026.

She has already qualified for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games’ 800-meter qualifying race. She now wants to run 1500 meters to increase her chances.

The 24-year-old admitted that she has always had big dreams of competing in major championships, but she’s not sure if she ever truly believed they were possible.

I now think this might be possible if I continue to train consistently. These goals might be something I could try to accomplish next year, so I feel inspired to write them down.

“All of my family and friends could come and watch me,” said I, “because the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow would be fantastic.” I don’t want to miss out on it, in my opinion.

It would mean a lot to me, I thought. I can’t stop giggling to watch Lynsey Sharp compete in the 800m when she won the gold medal at Glasgow 2014, which is exactly how I remember it. This was my first experience with what it could be like and what I could accomplish as an adult at Livingston Athletics Club.

Anyone who watched Premier League football between 2008 and 2012 will remember Rory Delap’s long throws for Stoke City.

The potency of the ‘Delap special’ – when he hurled the ball into the penalty area from the sidelines – filled opposing defences with dread.

However, bar that brief spell when Delap defined an era for Stoke, throw-ins have been one of football’s untapped resources.

Delap showed what was possible. But there must be more tactical possibilities for a set-piece that operates outside both the offside and handball laws.

About 35 times every match an outfield player is allowed to throw the ball on to the pitch, often from a position only approximately close to where it went out of play. Oh, and – inexplicably – there are no offsides.

Perhaps their basic absurdity explains why throw-ins have slipped by almost unnoticed and untouched over the past century. It’s as if they are such a bizarre outlier we don’t quite register them as being part of football but rather adjacent to it, an awkward interlude before the real thing gets back under way.

Whatever the reason, it’s noteworthy that the law around throw-ins hasn’t changed since the 19th century, and neither – unlike pretty everything else in football, be it tactical or technical – has the look and feel of a throw-in scenario.

Delap’s arrow-like long throws were iconic – and terrifying.

Defences struggled to cope with the speed and flat trajectory of his deliveries, so much so that Hull City goalkeeper Boaz Myhill once opted to kick the ball out for a corner to avoid conceding a throw-in.

Stoke scored 25 goals from Delap throw-ins in four years. It’s a weapon every team could do with, and yet nobody has managed to replicate his throwing style.

Why not?

While Delap was a javelin thrower in his youth, which helped his unique delivery, there must be scope to train players to get close to the length and speed he was able to achieve with his throws.

It’s time to end the snobbery. Thanks to Delap’s role for Tony Pulis’ Stoke, long throws are exclusively associated with direct, ugly, and defensive football.

We ought to question the logic of that. First of all, Arsenal are bringing set-piece reliance back into fashion (Mikel Arteta has previously taken comparisons to Pulis’ Stoke as a “compliment”) and set-piece coaches are all the rage right now.

More importantly, a long throw-in is no different from sending a corner straight into the box. Why are long corners seen as acceptable and long throws somehow regressive?

Again it comes back to the basic weirdness of throw-ins, their status as an after-thought. To maximise them is almost seen as bending the rules, or at least breaking the spirit of the law.

Set-piece coaches have turned modern corners and free-kicks into American football-style set plays. Why not throw-ins?

There are countless corner strategies and counter-strategies out there, and yet so far this hasn’t changed throw-in tactics, which remain oddly static and improvised.

Again, the lack of innovation is staggering compared with how much has changed in other departments.

And innovation isn’t difficult to achieve – remove the snobbery, establish long throws as the norm (and the new corners), and set-piece plays can be transferred wholesale.

This comes with an added bonus. When opponents adapt and pack the box, short throw-ins will become like short corners, producing two-on-ones and a crossing situation.

So far, we’ve only focused on finessing the long-throw technique.

But with the Delap-style trajectory, there is so much more that can be achieved beyond hurling the ball towards the goal.

The offside law is the bedrock of football. Without it, you could just hoof the ball up to the goal hangers.

The spaces would be so big that tactics would become redundant… which is more or less the case at every throw-in.

It’s incredible that the offside law does not apply at goal kicks or throw-ins – even more so that clubs don’t use this to their advantage.

Why not from throw-ins? With one player hanging offside or several at once, teams could either force the opposition defensive line to drop much deeper (thus creating space in front) or simply go through on goal.

What’s noteworthy about the above image is the way Luis Diaz makes a ‘normal’ run down the wing, as if it hasn’t occurred to him he can’t be offside.

These kinds of situations repeat again and again, yet nobody thinks to goal hang.

Those offside-trap-beating throw-ins can open our minds to visualising new ways to think outside the box – for a set-piece so often associated with being boxed in.

Throw-ins in your own third, or even on the halfway line, are often awkward. If the opposition chooses to get tight to the team in possession then the throw-in taker tends to launch a looping one down the line and hope for the best.

That’s partly because throw-ins require a strange technique that, as we’ve covered, is under-practised.

It’s also partly because nobody wants to take risks. Yet in an age of high-risk passing out from the back – a tactical trend specifically designed to lure the opponent forward, then break the press – it is surely time to change that.

Teams could practise cross-field long throws and line-splitting diagonals to break out, as we show in the following examples – all taken from Arsenal’s 0-0 draw with Everton in December in which Arteta’s side struggled to play with enough speed to work through the visitors.

Later in the half, with Everton sitting comfortably in their shape, Jurrien Timber stands for 13 seconds, unsure of what to do, before Declan Rice finally comes short.

Why are these almost never seen? Throw-in technique is one reason, but another is a lack of imagination.

If this idea was to take off, the logical next step would be fully-fledged throw-in routines from anywhere on the pitch, complete with runs and decoy runs designed to pull opponents around.

We seem a long way off that in 2025. In 99% of cases the throw-in taker chucks it up the line or goes safe to a player a few yards away, who is then immediately boxed in.

The best case scenario, in an attacking situation, is a looping ball landing between the edge of the box and the penalty spot.

This surely cannot be the end point of the throw-in.

The odds were stacked against Louis Rees-Zammit as he aimed to establish himself in the NFL.

And, after spending 18 months chasing his NFL dream, the Welsh star decided last week that the time was right to return to rugby.

The 24-year-old is the latest ‘crossover athlete’ unable to make the transition from another sport, most of them from rugby.

Any NFL players who have come through the North American education system have grown up with American football and had years to grasp the intricacies and nuances of the sport.

Osi Umenyiora and Efe Obada are two of those who have been born overseas and proved it is possible to pick up the game late and still succeed, but you must be able to understand a playbook.

Christian Scotland-Williamson played rugby union either side of a two-year stint on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ practice squad and has since become a barrister.

During a video call with BBC Sport, the 32-year-old held up two law books – each more than an inch thick – and said: “Learning both of these was easier than learning an NFL playbook, which is absolutely absurd.

“Doing all that [legal training], I still wasn’t working as hard as I had to when I went to the NFL. It recalibrates what you think is hard.”

Speaking to the BBC after beginning his NFL journey in 2018, Christian Wade held his hands several inches apart and said “the playbook’s like this”.

“It is quite intimidating but there’s a method to it,” he added. “You have to learn the terminology and how to dissect it so that you can retain the information, then in a few hours put that into practice. Then do the same in the afternoon and the next day.”

Even if you can process a playbook, two-time Super Bowl winner Umenyiora points to something called the ‘planet theory’ as a major obstacle for NFL hopefuls like Rees-Zammit.

Espoused by late New York Giants general manager George Young and their legendary head coach Bill Parcells, the theory states there are only a few humans on the planet who have the ideal size and athleticism to succeed as offensive and defensive linemen, thereby making them more valuable.

The opposite is true at running back and wide receiver, which along with quarterback and tight end are considered American football’s ‘skill positions’.

They are the positions Rees-Zammit tried his hand at and, after last week’s decision, he mentioned how so many similar players were competing for a spot on the active roster.

“I think Rees-Zammit is a fantastic athlete, but in terms of pace and athleticism, there’s maybe 500 of those guys in Florida alone, so it’s usually a lot more difficult for players like that,” said Umenyiora.

“You have to be unparalleled. You have to be superior athletically to be able to learn the game and then break through.”

Rees-Zammit is one of the fastest players in world rugby, he registered 4.43 seconds for the 40-yard dash but that put him just joint-27th among the players eligible for last year’s NFL Draft.

But even if he was the quickest, players new to the NFL need time to catch up on the “football IQ” their rivals have already developed, says pundit Phoebe Schecter.

“The key factor is the ability to take what’s learned in the classroom and apply it at elite speed on the field because players can overthink it, there can be paralysis by analysis,” she added.

Umenyiora and Obada were both defensive linemen, while Jordan Mailata is an offensive lineman who is 6ft 8in and weighs 365lbs (26st).

The former rugby league player had not played American football when he was drafted in 2018 by the Philadelphia Eagles, who no doubt had ‘planet theory’ in mind having already seen that he has athleticism to go with his size.

“There’s just not that many people on the planet like him,” said Umenyiora.

“It’s all supply and demand really. The supply of that type of athlete is very low and the demand very high, so [NFL teams] give them every chance to succeed.

“When you get a guy like that, people tend to give him more specialised attention [than players like Rees-Zammit] because he’s playing a premium position in the NFL.”

As a left tackle, Mailata is responsible for protecting the quarterback’s blind side – if they are right-handed – but it was not an immediate transition.

After learning the basics through the NFL’s International Player Pathway, he spent two seasons on the Eagles’ practice squad before playing his first game in 2020.

And British coach Aden Durde, who started the IPP programme with Umenyiora and is now the Seattle Seahawks’ defensive coordinator, stressed that Mailata’s success is not just down to his genes.

“He has a set of skills, is very resilient and very smart,” said Durde. “He learned how to develop in the sport and what he’s good at – the ability to pass protect.

The Buffalo Bills hope that Travis Clayton develops the same way after making the 6ft 7in former rugby union player the second IPP athlete to be drafted last year, while there are an increasing number of Australian and Irish kickers and punters in the NFL.

Having grown up playing Australian rules and Gaelic football, they have already honed their kicking skills, and as they only take the field in kicking scenarios, the gap in game knowledge is much easier for them to bridge.