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Midway through the first half, when Notts County supporters have accumulated enough belief that their pride won’t immediately follow a fall, a chant directed towards the away end starts up. It quickly fills three-and-a-half sides of Meadow Lane:

“Premier League, and you f****d it up.”

Ordinarily this would provoke a fevered response. This is a local derby on the opening weekend of a new league season; self-esteem should hang in the air like white smoke. The potential responses are cliched and a little dull – “S**t ground, no fans”, “My garden shed is bigger than this”, “Where were you when you were s**t?”- but you still want to hear them anyway.

From the Leicester City supporters in a sold-out away end, nothing. Even from afar, the reaction was obvious: several thousand people knew that they should retort but couldn’t stomach it. They broadly turned to one another, shrugged and said, “Yeah, fair cop”. They Premier League. And they f**k it up. And they’re sick of it.

The temptation with Leicester City (and it’s certainly forgivable for their own supporters) is to wind all the way back to 2016. The freak season. The one in a million, or at least 5,000-1. I get it; that title win was a touchstone moment for English football. But it’s not super helpful here because it was an exception.

But five years ago, Leicester City finished fifth in the Premier League and that wasn’t an exception because they finished fifth the season before. They also won the FA Cup. Five years ago, Notts County finished fifth in the National League and were eliminated from FA Cup qualifying having been unable to field a team against King Lynn Town. On Saturday they met as League One equals. They left as equals too, although Notts were comfortably the better side with the better chances.

Going to the King Power in the title-winning season smothered you with a sense of magic and destiny, sporting otherworldliness. It wasn’t like that in 2020-21. Instead, it was a club, manager and group of players who knew what they were doing, where they were going and how they were going to get there. Leicester City had everything they needed and every other club outside the financial elite wanted.

That is what provokes the most anger here. It’s not the gross wastage, the bad results or the cycling through managers, although all are symptoms and none represent anything good. It’s the chronic loss of identity on and off the pitch.

At least a dozen times over the last three years I’ve seen supporters going through the motions watching players barely even doing that. Think what this club has been through, both extraordinarily brilliant and awfully tragic, and reflect upon how hard it is to destroy that connection.

“The disengagement began long before the slip through the leagues,” says Chris Rice of Foxes Trust, the largest supporters’ group. “When a football club deprioritises its supporters, it’s an accident waiting to happen, regardless of results on the pitch at the time. We have slowly, bit-by-bit, lost our identity. Lost the essence of what Leicester City should be about.”

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Among the support at non-financially elite clubs that touch the sky and then fall, there is often a temptation to cry foul: the system is weighted against us, the cartel don’t want us, we were a nuisance and so they got rid of us.

Which…maybe. The privilege of established wealth comes not at its high ceiling but high floor. They come mob-handed with insurance. You can make a lot of mistakes and then use money to fix them very quickly. Yes, I’m talking about Tottenham Hotspur.

To the credit of Leicester fans, there is very little of that. Instead, they know the truth: bad decisions piled upon bad decisions, a churn of managers, signings and contract extensions that were unfit for purpose at half the price. It all left a club chasing its tail in a panic without the competence to do anything other than grind itself further into the dirt.

There is little need to detail the entire rogue’s gallery of wanton mismanagement and overspending; we have pointed fingers before at Top Srivaddhanaprabha and Jon Rudkin. Best now to just say that tail-chasing is sport’s most expensive pastime. Last week, Leicester were put up for sale for more than £200m (which means a sale could well happen for less). When you consider that the club has a £100m training centre, it offers a glimpse into the distressed nature of this asset. This is a complete mess.

It’s also worth saying: League One clubs don’t usually get sold for £200m. And they certainly don’t usually get sold for £200m when their latest accounts detail £103.6m in bank loans and Citigroup forecasts the club’s turnover for 2026 to be less than that. Fail to get promotion back to the Championship and…well, it doesn’t really bear thinking about.

More immediately, self-inflicted damage has left something deeply weird on the pitch. You have Alex McCarthy, Harry Souttar and Caleb Okoli trying to play Russell Martin football, which is a little like asking a panda to unicycle. You have a group of prodigious but raw academy babies who are now the best players. You have names who provoke the same reaction as looking through an ancient school yearbook: “Oh god yeah, do you remember Bobby Cordova-Reid and Oliver Skipp – were they mates?”.

And watching on: a sea of misery, disillusionment and righteous anger in the stands. The chants against the owner start in the first five minutes. During the second half, when Leicester are being pinned back by a newly-promoted team, the away end produces audible boos.

Booing has become a point of controversy. I’ve heard them under the stewardship of Maresca, Cifuentes, Rodgers, Cooper, Van Nistelrooy and Rowett, different types of coaches who produced different results. The accusation from outside the club is that supporters are guilty of entitlement.

I don’t buy that. These people are simply flummoxed and have no other way to express themselves. Their club normalised achievement and told them that a plan was in place for it to last. When things began to crumble, they were told that a plan was in place for recovery. Both times it was disproven. They had it all and now they have comparatively nothing. That’s pretty hard to process calmly when you have witnessed the whole gamut.

There is a cliché with coverage of Leicester City now that you may have heard in the wild: “Well, you would have taken the last 12 years, wouldn’t you?” And yes, winning the Premier League title, the FA Cup and playing in each European competition was sensational. But that’s not an answer because that’s not how football clubs have to work. Eventual failure wasn’t guaranteed here. It was driven by organisational ineptitude. That is why they boo.

Football clubs get things wrong all the time. Some of them get most things wrong for a long time and end up tumbling through divisions. You cannot pretend that this is part of a plan because football supporters aren’t stupid. The leadership of clubs is judged best during these sorry episodes and by how they act accordingly.

If there is one base expectation from a reasonable football fan, it is this: communicate with me; don’t take me for granted and don’t treat me like my disappointment is an inconvenience to you.

That’s where this gets messiest. At the end of last season, the Foxes Trust surveyed fans about the state of the club. The response was utterly devastating regarding Leicester City’s reputation amongst its own supporters. It should have been a time for immediate mea culpa and rebuilding work on the relationship. It wasn’t.

“We are at the lowest point in our history, after back-to-back relegations, and we felt hopeful after a meeting between the club and the full Foxes Trust board in April that things might start to change this summer, because they had to,” says Rice. “The reality of what we have experienced, however, is that things are worse.”

“There has been pretty much zero communication from any of the senior management since relegation and there has been little to no movement on any of our end-of-season survey calls to action. The club has simply carried on in the same manner as the one that has got us into this mess. Zero lessons learned, zero accountability and zero effort to even appear to be trying to get the fans back on board.”

New owners don’t solve every ill – there is too much lasting water damage. They can even come laced with danger: supporters question the motives of anyone prepared to take on this lumbering problem and begin to become expert detectors of bullshit and bluster.

But new owners must come, if only to end this sorry experience of how not to run a football club. A hard reset is needed: off the pitch, on the pitch, in the stands, in the relationships between stakeholders that are the fabric of football clubs and have become so badly frayed. The greatest fear of every Leicester City supporter I speak to: inaction as an implicit choice through the repeated failure to spot the next calamity coming over the hill.

Their club is very difficult to value accurately. Their club is very difficult to sell easily. The timescale for full recovery is impossible to gauge. The only thing anybody can say with any certainty is the mantra that drowns out everything else at Leicester City: if nothing changes, it can always get worse.