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Burnley completed the signing of Jamie Vardy on Sunday, removing the former Leicester City striker from the free-agent market after his stint in Italy with Cremonese.

The Clarets need Vardy to provide an immediate boost. A few months on from relegation out of the Premier League, Burnley are rooted to the bottom of the Championship and are still without a win after five matches. Things are hardly any better for Leicester in the division beneath them.

Vardy and Leicester scaled the summit together when they won the Premier League in 2015/16. The Foxes were playing in the Premier League as recently as 2024/25, but their sharp decline shows little sign of easing.

In August last year, FourFourTwo went to the King Power Stadium for Leicester's first match back in the Championship and their first since Vardy had left. His presence still seemed to loom over everything.

Leicester's opponents that day were Sheffield Wednesday, then widely seen as the textbook example of a club in crisis. Early in the match, the away fans gathered in the concourse as part of a protest against the club's owner.

Leicester dropping into League One alongside them was never part of the expected storyline. Wednesday are now top of the third tier. Leicester, by contrast, have won only one match and are 17th in the still-developing league table.

This is a football club marked by tragedy. The deaths of chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, Kaveporn Punpare, Nusara Suknamai, Eric Swaffer and Izabela Lechowicz nine years ago have inevitably left a lasting impact on the former Premier League champions. In Vichai's case, that direct effect over time has to be recognised.

Leicester's spending in the years since has been questionable, both in terms of volume and quality. Last season, with the Foxes heading towards relegation for a second straight campaign, chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha accepted responsibility and blamed himself.

Over the long term, a lack of sustainability and flirtations with the edges of financial regulations usually catch up with clubs. Those who continue to deliver on the pitch can sometimes ride it out. Those whose off-field choices are matched by footballing disaster are likely to end up in serious trouble.

Responsibility for Leicester's decline leads back to the boardroom, but it is the more ordinary and more immediate decisions that turn theory into reality on a Saturday afternoon.

Leicester's shortcomings in recent years have been so many that it is necessary to reach your own judgement on where this road began, the road that has now taken them to the lower reaches of League One.

Leicester won promotion to the Premier League in 2023/24 by winning the Championship. Enzo Maresca was the manager then, and Vardy scored 20 goals in all competitions.

Maresca left for Chelsea that June, and Leicester have since gone through five permanent managers: Steve Cooper, a hero at rivals Nottingham Forest; Ruud van Nistelrooy, rejected by Coventry City; Marti Cifuentes, who lasted six months in the Championship; Gary Rowett, who did not even last that long and also managed relegated Oxford United; and Russell Martin, a remarkable gamble considering his recent track record.

Martin is the man charged with putting Leicester back on course, at least in footballing terms, but the same familiar pattern is unfolding again.

Leicester have won only once this season. Before that, Martin's previous league win came with Rangers. The one before that came with Southampton. At the same time, Leicester have by far the highest possession figures in League One, and only two teams need more shots to score a goal.

In Saturday's 4-0 home defeat to Oxford United, Leicester had 63 percent possession yet managed fewer shots on target than their opponents. Their expected goals, xG, only just crept above one.

The Foxes have reached another crucial moment. Unless they get things right on the pitch, the wider problems will begin to hurt more severely than ever. Decisions made above the manager matter even more when the manager and players are not capable of finding their own way out of trouble.

According to reports over the weekend, Srivaddhanaprabha has two familiar calls to make. The first now appears impossible to avoid. The second could determine the future of the football club.