Worst ever top flight Leicester City team?

[MC Prussian]

Cup trophies? I don't know, Wigan won the FA Cup just a couple of years ago, Hull got to the Final a year later. 

 

I appreciate your points, but I'd question your idea of 'established'. If it's achieving success in a league for years on end then we were established, if it's being in no question of your Premier League status and present in the top flight for more years than you're not, regardless of consecutive finishes etc. then there would only be about six or seven established Premier League clubs in total (what? Liverpool, Everton, Spurs, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea... even Manchester City and Villa would be debatable by that measure, and we couldn't call Southampton, Newcastle, West Ham or even Stoke established right now); and by the same logic you couldn't even say we were established in the top flight in the late 1960s, because we hadn't been in the top flight for the bulk of our history then,either. I'd dispute that, but really we're debating the definition of 'established'.

 

But if we take 'being established' as spending more than two or three seasons in the division, and performing respectably, then we've done it before and plenty of others - over half of the division - have done it since. And it doesn't change the fact that most newly promoted sides do a great deal better than we're doing right now. However you look at it, it's a very poor reflection of Pearson.

 

That said, while I'm currently of the view that he might not be our best long-term manager, I'm not for a second saying that he's been a bad manager for us. To the contrary, he's been very good for us on balance, and at the back end of an era in which we've not done well for managers. He may yet learn those vital lessons, get better, do a Curbishley and come back brighter; though he would have to be a rare exception to the rule if that were to happen. And, of course, as lost and bewildered as he seems right now, there's nothing I'd love more than for a guy who's already earned our affection to pull it off. Preferably sooner rather than later!

 

There's a strong argument still for him to stay, but I still feel that argument is undermined by claiming that he's doing well, taking us forward, or at very least performing more or less in line with what you'd expect, or what we should expect of him. Our ambitions should remain lofty, so long as they're realistic, and they shouldn't be adapted to accommodate a manager who looks like he can't achieve them.

As for the FA Cup, you know just as well as me that Wigan's triumph was just another fluke - when you look at the FA Cup winners from the past 22 years (here's to me pulling some stats), only two "smaller" team have won it: Wigan and Portsmouth. All other finals came up with established, bigger sides finishing on top: Arsenal (6x), Manchester United (4x), Everton (once), Liverpool (twice), Chelsea (6x), Manchester City (once). So out of 22 winners, roughly 90% were won by big clubs. Hardly an incentive or great stat to look at for teams like Leicester, is it? Doesn't appear too realistic to me for any team outside the Big Five/Six to ever get to the final, let alone winning the trophy.

 

Also, for the majority of my posts on here, I was always referring to establishing oneself in the Premier League - I'm not taking our Division One statuses into account here. But even in pre-PL history, the club did spend most time of its existence outside of the top flight, albeit the percentages are less obvious - there's not many years a difference there before 1992/93.

 

Establishing oneself in the Premier League does mean spending more time in arguably the best football league in the world than just two, three seasons before getting relegated again. Yes, you can only apply that label to a small portion of clubs - I've never argued that in the first place. Clubs like West Ham, Southampton, Swansea, Stoke or Newcastle are simply happy to play along, without getting into potential relegation troubles. The league is not as balanced as the Championship for instance. It's more and more turning into a bore fest, because you can pretty much predict final winners and losers regularly with ease.