Ruud van Nistelrooy is no longer the head coach of Leicester City. The club confirmed his departure following a season that ended in disappointment for Foxes fans. The former Dutch forward and Manchester United star was hired last November to try and steer the team away from relegation. He couldn’t. What followed was a string of bad results and a stretch of home games so painful that they’ll be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
The club called it a mutual decision. With relegation to the Championship now a fact, Leicester’s board is already making moves to rebuild the soccer project. Sean Dyche, who has managed Everton and Burnley, is currently the leading candidate to take over.
Van Nistelrooy only managed five wins in 27 matches. He took charge when Leicester were in 16th place. By the end, they had fallen to 18th and were relegated with games to spare. The final blow came on April 20 with a 1–0 home loss to Liverpool. It was their ninth straight defeat at home, and they hadn’t scored a single goal in any of those matches. That set a new and unwanted record in the history of England’s top division. Leicester’s 2025 squad now joins one of the darkest chapters in English soccer history. And while Van Nistelrooy’s departure wasn’t a surprise, it brought a rough and unproductive coaching stretch to a close.
A forgettable season with numbers that speak for themselves
Leicester’s season quickly turned into one they’ll want to erase from memory. Even after a coaching change in November, the direction never really changed. Van Nistelrooy came in after Steve Cooper was fired, and the team was still outside the relegation zone at that point. But under new management, the results got worse.
In his 27 matches in charge, Leicester won just five times, drew four and lost eighteen. For most of the second half of the season, the club stayed stuck in the bottom three. His debut win over West Ham gave supporters some early hope, but the momentum disappeared fast.
From January through May, Leicester managed only one more victory, a tight result over Tottenham. The rest of the campaign was full of disappointing losses, flat performances and an attack that just couldn’t find the net. At home, it was even worse. The team failed to score in each of its final nine games in front of the home crowd. Nine straight matches without a goal. Nine straight defeats.
A long fall with nothing to hold on to
Even with a few bright spots in the squad, Van Nistelrooy’s Leicester never looked like a team ready to fight for survival. The poor results were obvious, but the overall context made it feel heavier. Leicester ended the season thirteen points behind the first team outside the relegation zone. It wasn’t close. It wasn’t bad luck. They were clearly out of their depth.
The gap was large, and the team’s final record placed them among the worst performers in the league. They were knocked out of cup competitions early and couldn’t win the head-to-head battles with direct rivals. All of that added up. By the time it was over, it wasn’t just that they had gone down. It was how far and how fast they had fallen.