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Claudio Ranieri fired just nine months after Leicester City's miracle Premier League crown

Claudio Ranieri
Ranieri is out at Leicester. (AP Photo)

So much for the goodwill of winning the world’s most prestigious soccer league with a team favored for relegation.

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A mere nine months after veteran Italian manager Claudio Ranieri engineered one of the greatest upsets in sports history by winning the Premier League with a Leicester City team that most thought was as likely to be relegated as to survive, he was fired on Thursday.

The Daily Mail reported on Thursday afternoon that Ranieri had been “sensationally sacked” in a “brutal decision.”

The club confirmed the news soon thereafter.

“Claudio, appointed City manager in July 2015, led the Foxes to the greatest triumph in the club’s 133-year history last season, as we were crowned champions of England for the first time. His status as the most successful Leicester City manager of all time is without question,” the club wrote in a statement. “However, domestic results in the current campaign have placed the club’s Premier League status under threat and the board reluctantly feels that a change of leadership, while admittedly painful, is necessary in the club’s greatest interest.”

“We are duty-bound to put the club’s long-term interests above all sense of personal sentiment,” Vice Chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha said in the statement, “no matter how strong that might be. We will forever be grateful to him for what he has helped us to achieve.”

The firing comes less than two months after Ranieri was named the Best FIFA Men’s Coach of 2016 as the world’s best manager of the last year.
The drop-off in Leicester’s form from last season has been stark, with the club sinking to 17th place in the Premier League – just one point and one spot above the dreaded relegation stripe. And things weren’t getting any better, in spite of the club’s very emphatic and public vote of confidence for Ranieri just two weeks ago. Myriad reports suggested the manager had lost the confidence of his players – largely the same team as last year, minus midfield metronome N’Golo Kante, but with much added depth.

Meanwhile, the Foxes had lost their last five Premier League games in a row. They had not scored in any of their six league games so far in 2017.

The one saving grace was the club’s inaugural Champions League campaign, in which it cruised into the round of 16. On Wednesday, the team was resoundingly outplayed by Sevilla in its first leg of the knockout stage, but it was able to limit the damage to a workable 2-1 defeat that left hope alive for the return game in Leicester.

Yet Leicester plainly had an agonizing decision to make. Would it stick with the man who had lifted the club to unimaginable highs at the peril of being relegated from the Premier League, a potentially ruinous setback? Would loyalty, sentimentalism and gratitude prevail over pragmatism and the plain truth that relegation would be disastrous, even if, in the eyes of many, it would be doing right by the 65-year-old journeyman?

That equation was complicated somewhat by Ranieri’s vow when he took the job ahead of last season. Even though many believed him to be an unimaginative and even doomed pick, he had promised to remain at the club even if it was relegated last season. Now that the club threatens to be relegated this year, after an unfathomable league title, it has, instead, dumped him.

Yet to blame Ranieri for Leicester’s regression to the mean is simplistic. Plenty of his key players have gone from performing far above their natural ability and historic average for an entire season, to something much closer to what they were prior to the 2015-16 season. Others have gotten worse. And of the expensive new signings bought with the spoils from the title, none have lived up to their price tags. Meanwhile, the league juggernauts that stumbled in perfect and uncanny unison last year have all pretty much righted themselves.

This is a conflation of issues that’s hard to separate, of course. In a downward spiral, there’s no picking out the exact amount of blame belonging to each of the suspects. Ranieri, ultimately, got caught up in a sweep of negative momentum. While his team is sinking, one-time relegation favorites like Swansea City and Hull City are on the rise. Just a single round of games could now drop the Foxes into last place. Leicester’s board will pin hopes on the power of a fresh face, even if it’s a short-term placebo effect.

“It was never our expectation that the extraordinary feats of last season should be replicated this season,” Srivaddhanaprabha said in the statement. “Indeed, survival in the Premier League was our first and only target at the start of the campaign. But we are now faced with a fight to reach that objective and feel a change is necessary to maximize the opportunity presented by the final 13 games.”

It remains simpler to fire a manager than to replace an entire team, especially with the transfer window closed. Even if that manager will forever remain a club icon for heroics still very fresh in the memory, there is no room for maudlin sentiment in soccer. Not for teams who want to survive relegation, anyway.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.