From champions to commiserations: behind the scenes at the King Power Stadium

If you were to go behind the scenes at the King Power Stadium, what would you want to see?

Would you just marvel at the 30,000 seat stadium that sits on the River Soar and is the heartbeat of the City. Or perhaps to gaze at the place where so much has been won and lost; trophies, hearts, love, passion. 

To put it simply, the home of Leicester City is more than just a stadium. It’s a place of worship in a city that already has plenty of them. It is a religion where thousands gather around every week to watch their team. 

The aura of the King Power simply cannot be lost on anyone. The ones who are able to see the club for what it has been in the past compared to what it is today.

Funnily enough the Leicester City of today isn’t mentioned much by our tour guide Richard Mellor, probably because they are a shell of what they once were as the thought of back-to-back relegations haunt the Foxes. 

Even in their modern day shell however, there is still the memories of past greatness and of course that famous 2015/16 Premier League title win. Each piece of memorabilia hung behind glass windows in the main entrance as a symbol of pride and fortune that this historic club has. 

As we went round and up and down the stadium, it really hit home how big the fall off for one of the biggest clubs in the Midlands has truly been. From the TV studios and the press box where we started our tour, it’s difficult to get the prestige that it once carried. 

Instead it felt like a graveyard, a place to remember rather than see. Even with the remnants of the Buddhist monks' blessings that club receives before every season, it can’t overturn the fortunes and feelings that Leicester City are going through right now. 

The tour then progressed to the place where any Leicester fan could only imagine being in. The dressing room. Where every matchday can be summed up with either the ecstatic or the dismal feelings that football brings. 

The blue shirts lined up in numerical order, a place of kings and legends that can determine not only the outcomes on the pitch, but the moods of countless fans across the world. 

Yet, if you were to ask the Leicester fanbase about players like Jordan Ayew and Caleb Okoli, they wouldn’t be called kings. They would be scathed and cussed out and that was the inescapable feeling that haunted the dressing room. 

These players must walk onto the pitch every matchday and come out to countless eyes on them with enormous pressure. The walkout to the pitch perfectly encapsulates that feeling. 

The size of the stadium and the amount of fans that filter into their seats increases to unimaginable levels. Even in an empty stadium, that feeling still hits like a truck as the tour guide’s words filtered out and the silence became deafening. 

And as the tour ended in the famous press conference room it became clear what Leicester really was upon reflection. People who aren’t fans of the club don’t know them because of what they are now, they know because of what they were. 

Yet, the question still remains of their league position. If they are to go down to League one at the end of the season will they still be remembered, or will they lose the grandeur that they spent so long building up?