{"id":411530,"date":"2026-02-06T18:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T18:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/411530\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T18:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T18:06:08","slug":"leicester-city-how-did-we-get-here-and-what-does-points-deduction-mean-for-championship-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/411530\/","title":{"rendered":"Leicester City: How did we get here and what does points deduction mean for Championship club?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leicester spent just over \u00a3100m to sign six players across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 campaigns.<\/p>\n

It was not just the transfer fees which were to cause issues, it was the salaries and the contracts.<\/p>\n

The club’s wage bill ballooned to \u00a3206m. <\/p>\n

“Everybody assumed that they would be a top-eight club,” Football finance expert Kieran Maguire told BBC Sport. <\/p>\n

“They effectively budgeted for that and didn’t take into consideration the potential downside.”<\/p>\n

Maguire said Leicester became “a little bit complacent” with contracts. <\/p>\n

Premier League player contracts would usually have clauses which would reduce a salary by between 30% or 50% upon relegation.<\/p>\n

It is widely reported that, at the time, Leicester did not insert any.<\/p>\n

“They had one bad season and they had no comeback in terms of relegation clauses and relegation avoidance clauses,” added Maguire.<\/p>\n

“It does seem that these contracts were awarded in such a way that they ignored the existential risk of relegation.”<\/p>\n

In the 2022-23 relegation season the club were spending 116% of their income on salaries.<\/p>\n

It was then 102% in the 2023-24 season, and Maguire said the \u00a3107m wage bill was “unprecedented for a second-tier football club”.<\/p>\n

Leicester may have won the Championship title in 2024, but it came at a cost. A huge cost.<\/p>\n

The wage bill of the two other relegated teams was \u00a384m for Leeds<\/a> and \u00a380m for Southampton. The Championship median average was \u00a329m, said Maguire.<\/p>\n

Wyeth said the Trust felt the budgets were “incredibly risky”.<\/p>\n

“There weren’t enough safeguards in there for thinking what could go wrong,” added Wyeth. <\/p>\n

“We were all saying, what if we get relegated?<\/p>\n

“The fans could see them walking into it.”<\/p>\n

After promotion in 2024 the club still had to face up to financial issues.<\/p>\n

Trouble had already been signposted by a Profit and Sustainability rule (PSR) charge brought by the Premier League in March 2024. The club successfully appealed against that on a technicality over jurisdiction. <\/p>\n

Then the spending in the Championship was the catalyst for a breach of the PSR threshold by \u00a320.8m, which led to the points deduction.<\/p>\n

But there would be no stay in the Premier League to ease their plight as the Foxes went straight back down to the Championship last season, finishing 13 points adrift.<\/p>\n

“They’ve relied on player sales to dig them out of a really messy situation,” said Maguire. “But if you keep selling your best players then that catches up with you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leicester spent just over \u00a3100m to sign six players across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 campaigns. It was not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-411530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}