Leicester to hit reset button after painful relegation

Just seven years after the happiest day in their history, Leicester have suffered one of their worst modern times.

Despite last summer’s turmoil, relegation should have been unthinkable for the Premier League’s seventh-highest-paid side, coached by a tried and tested top-flight boss in Brendan Rodgers.

Yet a series of mistakes from the boardroom down contributed to this debacle.

Leicester will conduct a review of what went wrong, but expectations must be reset immediately. The club that won the title seven years ago and the FA Cup two years ago is no more.

A complete reset is in order and everyone at the club needs to change their mindset.

There’s no point in James Maddison and Harvey Barnes showing up at the start of pre-season when everyone knows they want to leave and Leicester need to sell them.

This will cloud the waters for a new manager trying to build a team to win immediate promotion and affect his attempts to forge a strong team spirit within a new group of players.

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Although transfer negotiations are rarely straightforward, both players have suitors and yearnings for Premier League football. Now is the time to establish the nature of the market, have pragmatic discussions and strike a deal.

Leicester are unlikely to receive the same fee they would have received had Barnes and Maddison been sold last summer. But those are the bets clubs have to take and this time Leicester have lost.

They are now a championship team and will be treated as such. Second-tier clubs are very rarely involved in £50million transfers and the sooner the Foxes figure that out the better.