Leicester’s present dangers made Claudio Ranieri’s past glories irrelevant | Paul Wilson

There is no doubt the Premier League lost one of the good guys when Claudio Ranieri was sacked and, as José Mourinho rightly says, the Italian’s towering achievement last season will never be forgotten, though the key element in that sentiment is “last season”.

Last season is history, last season counts for nothing in football, the game is all about the present. Mourinho knows that better than most and if Ranieri did not see what was coming he is not quite as sharp as he is portrayed.

So the guy who won the league last year lost his job the following season. Well, so did the manager who won the title the season before (Mourinho), so did a predecessor at Chelsea (Carlo Ancelotti), and so did Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini at Manchester City, even if the latter was allowed to stay on until Pep Guardiola was free of commitments.

Less than a year ago Manchester United won the FA Cup and sacked their manager. Fortunately Louis van Gaal had the foresight to make use of the few hours available to obtain a photograph of himself holding the Cup with Sir Alex Ferguson.

Most of those teams were nowhere near the relegation positions apart from Mourinho’s Chelsea, who were clearly robust enough all along to play perfectly well for a different manager, whereas Leicester have been performing so poorly Ranieri’s future has been a matter of debate for the past few months.

If Leicester had been this close to the drop last season, instead of surprising everyone by leading the way, his departure would have met with little outcry. Because of the sheer improbability of what happened instead, enough to awaken the romance in even the hardest of hearts, it was only fair the most successful manager in Leicester’s history should be rewarded with a certain amount of leeway when things began to go awry; but all that came and went weeks, if not months, ago.

How much time could Ranieri realistically expect when his team have not scored a league goal since the turn of the year?

Anyone who imagined the Leicester board’s offer of “unwavering support” a couple of weeks ago amounted to a pledge that the manager’s services would be retained even if the club ended up in the Championship must be delusional to the point of actually believing in fairytales. Where would be the sense in that?

A manager unable to prevent his side sliding out of a division is unlikely to be the best choice to lead them back into it. Leicester have no chance of keeping their present squad together if they are relegated, and trying to keep the same manager in those circumstances through some misplaced sense of loyalty is a recipe for an even messier exit than the one we have just seen.

Regrettable as it may be, the idea of retaining a manager through thick and thin just does not work in the Premier League any more, at least not outside Burnley. Everyone else has too much invested in the team and the predictable income to even contemplate the notion of going down without exploring every possible avenue that might lead to survival. If Leicester’s owners deemed Ranieri incapable of keeping the team up their only sensible option was to remove him and give someone else a chance before it became too late.

That is precisely what Hull and Swansea did, and the early signs indicate that it might have worked. The upswing in mood and results at those two clubs brought about by managerial change is exactly what made Leicester’s position more acute.

In another season Ranieri might have been able to rely on three even worse sides staying in the bottom three and acting as a safety net, but once improvement at Hull and Swansea left Leicester looking exposed it became inevitable the club would consider the same course of action. Unpleasant decisions have to be made, it is what happens around this time of year at the foot of the table.

Ranieri does deserve some loyalty, mainly from his players, but with 13 games left it was not unreasonable of the owners to decide that it did not appear to be forthcoming and act accordingly. While there are dozens of reasons why Ranieri might deserve sympathy, even he would have to accept that he has not been fulfilling the basic managerial requirement of bringing the best out of his squad.

Last season he did that to a degree that was almost frightening; this time the only scary aspect has been the speed with which Ranieri turned into the impotent, dithering figure Gary Lineker feared the club had brought in two years ago.

Lineker was not the only one, to be fair, though it is worth remembering those initial reservations now the Match of the Day presenter and former Leicester player has deemed the club’s decision to sack Ranieri “inexplicable and unforgivable”.

To give credit where it is due, Lineker also admitted he shed a tear when he heard the news, and that very human reaction will have been replicated all over the country, even in areas with no Leicester affiliation. We have all been privileged to witness an extraordinary story and though it is tempting to resent the Leicester board for imposing the most hackneyed of endings, the fact of the matter may simply be that the author ran out of ideas and left them no choice. What were Leicester supposed to do, wait for another miracle?

As Mourinho has just observed, the game today is not like it was 20 years ago, perhaps not even 10 years ago, and it is all to do with the amounts of money involved. True enough, but you know what? At no point since the abolition of the maximum wage has the game ever been like it was 10 or 20 years ago, and in any era Leicester’s results this season would have been bad.

Yes, what has happened to Ranieri is sad. Undeserved, quite possibly, but hardly inexplicable or unforgivable. Just football.