Alisha Lehmann and Vardy return talk follow Leicester's League One drop
alisha lehmann is named in the wider Leicester story as Paul Dickov weighed a possible Jamie Vardy return after the club dropped into League One. The former striker said Leicester need something after back-to-back relegations, a slide that has taken a 2016 Premier League winner into the third tier.
Dickov on Vardy
“They do need something, whether it's Jamie or not,” Dickov said to GOAL in an exclusive interview. He added: “I'm gutted for everybody involved with the club.”
Vardy left last summer with 200 goals from 500 appearances, and he is now 39 years old after one season at Cremonese in Italy. Leicester’s former forward is the cleanest available reference point in a season when Gary Rowett’s side slipped through the top-flight trapdoor again in 2025.
Leicester's fall to League One
Leicester won the Premier League in 2016, then added the FA Cup and Community Shield in 2021. The club still ended this term in the Championship drop zone even after a six-point deduction for breaches of financial regulations, and demotion into the third tier has already been confirmed.
“To look at that squad that they've got, the players that they've got, the experience they've got, to be one of the favourites to get promoted again and then to be relegated with a couple of games to go is shambolic really,” Dickov said. That is the scale of the failure: a club with recent silverware, a proven manager in Rowett and a full set of experienced players still fell out of the Championship.
King Power and the gap
Dickov said the crowd told its own story when he saw “the amount of empty seats” at the King Power Stadium. He remembered Leicester as a place where “There was a siege mentality about the place that really drove us on as players,” and where “There was a real connection between what was going on on the pitch and off the pitch in the stands with the fans.”
“That connection seems to have gone, which is really sad,” he said, then added: “I'd love to see them getting that back as quickly as possible.” If Leicester want Vardy to become more than a nostalgia move, the club first has to rebuild the edge that once turned the King Power into a pressure cooker.
