CNN
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Leicester City’s Premier League triumph in 2015/16 remains one of the greatest achievements in the history of sport.
A 5000-1 underdog at the start of that season, the Foxes captured the hearts of soccer fans around the world with their improbable march to the title.
Now, just seven years on from that fairytale win, Leicester finds itself in serious danger of being relegated to the Championship, the second tier of English football.
With just one game left of the season, Leicester is in 18th place – the third and final relegation spot – on 31 points, two points adrift of Everton in 17th and safety.
In 20th place is already-relegated Southampton and in 19th is Leeds United, also on 31 points, as the battle to avoid relegation goes down to a nail-biting final day.
What makes matchday 38 all the more intriguing is that all three teams have a realistic chance of earning all three points.
Everton is at home to Bournemouth, Leeds hosts a beleaguered Tottenham and Leicester welcomes West Ham to the King Power Stadium.
It’s been a dramatic and sudden fall from grace for a Leicester team that won the FA Cup – England’s premier cup competition – as recently as 2021 and finished eighth in the league last season.
Former manager Brendan Rogers, who had been at the club since 2019, was sacked in April as Leicester made a last-ditch attempt to salvage its Premier League status by hiring Dean Smith.
This season, Leicester’s team has certainly been less than the sum of its parts; a group with several talented individuals that has so far failed to form a cohesive unit.
Should the club get relegated, it’s likely fans will see a mass exodus of stars who will have no shortage of interested clubs vying for their signatures.
England midfielder James Maddison is the pick of the bunch and will command a steep transfer fee from any team chasing his signature – though he does have just a year remaining on his contract – while Harvey Barnes, Kelechi Iheanacho and Youri Tielemans are all unlikely to play in the Championship, with the latter’s contract expiring in June.
Of the teams facing relegation, Leicester certainly looks best placed to make an immediate return to the Premier League with some talented players and a potentially massive transfer budget from the sale of its stars.
Everton, however, has been in decline for quite some time now.
After avoiding relegation last season, there was some optimism that then manager Frank Lampard could galvanize the club and push the team up the table.
However, a lack of direction from ownership and some wayward investment in the playing squad has resulted in a second successive relegation battle for a team that has never once in its history dropped down to the second tier of English football.
Understandably, there is growing unrest within the fan base and protests against the club’s board have now been taking place before every game at Goodison Park for a couple of months.
The relationship between supporters and Everton chairman Bill Kenwright appears beyond repair as fans have continually called for changes at the boardroom level this season.
Club majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri has spent hundreds of millions of pounds since purchasing a stake in the club in 2016, but that outlay has yielded little to no success.
After sacking Lampard in January, the club hired manager Sean Dyche – known for his pragmatic approach – to try and save the team from relegation.
Whether or not he succeeds, it’s hard to picture a future in which Everton finds success any time soon.
Similarly, Leeds United has struggled to find an identity since sacking Marcelo Bielsa in February 2022.
The Argentine became a beloved figure in the city after guiding the team back to the Premier League in 2020 for the first time in 16 years, doing so with his trademark high-tempo style of football.
However, the club parted ways with Bielsa as the team struggled in its second season back in the top division and opted to replace him with Jesse Marsch, who kept the team up despite starting the final day of last season in the relegation zone.
Results didn’t improve under Marsch this season as the team’s fragile defense could not find a way to stop conceding goals – Leeds has the worst defensive record in the league, conceding a remarkable 74 goals in 37 matches – and the American was sacked in February, less than a year after taking charge.
Javi Gracia lasted just 12 games in charge after replacing Marsch before Leeds made one final desperate move to try and preserve its Premier League status by hiring Sam Allardyce with just four games left of the season.
While Allardyce is known for his expertise in saving teams from relegation, his style of football could not be more different to Bielsa’s.
It’s no secret that Allardyce is merely a stopgap until the end of the season, but whether Leeds survives or is relegated the team is in need of a reset to determine the direction it takes next year.
All 10 matches in the final round of fixtures kick off at 11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday.
