Marc Albrighton Is Ready to Come Home. Leicester Just Haven’t Called.

There is something quietly heartbreaking about a club legend watching his former side unravel from the stands, powerless to intervene. That is precisely where Marc Albrighton finds himself right now, and he is not hiding the fact that it hurts.

The winger who played 313 games for Leicester City, who lifted the most improbable Premier League title in English football history alongside a group of players who became genuinely beloved by a city, wants to help. He has said as much. His old teammates feel the same way. And yet the phone has not rung.

Leicester are in a desperate place. A six-point deduction for breaching financial rules has pushed them deep into the danger zone of the Championship, and the prospect of football in the third tier, something that would have seemed almost fictional to supporters who watched Riyad Mahrez waltz through defences in 2016, is now being discussed in earnest. The King Power Stadium, once the noisiest and most joyful ground in the country, has taken on a different atmosphere entirely.

Albrighton was there recently for a 4-3 defeat to Southampton, a match in which Leicester surrendered a three-goal lead with a kind of passivity that baffled those watching. “I felt there was massive fear both on the pitch and in the crowd,” he told the Daily Mail. “When they were 3-0 up, I wanted them to enjoy themselves. I know it’s difficult and these are nervous times but I’ve noticed it in quite a few games. The word ‘fearless’ is part of the club’s identity and it’s important not to forget that.”

That word, fearless, is not an accident. It was the defining characteristic of the 2015-16 side that nobody saw coming and nobody who witnessed it will ever fully forget. Claudio Ranieri’s players ran at opponents without hesitation, defended with abandon, and believed in something that had no rational basis in statistics or squad value. It worked because they trusted each other completely and played without the weight of expectation. What Albrighton saw against Southampton was the opposite of all that.

“We’d all choose Leicester”

What makes this situation particularly poignant is that Albrighton is not alone in his desire to give something back. Several of his former title-winning teammates, he says, feel exactly the same way. These are players who did not grow up supporting Leicester, who arrived at the King Power without any particular attachment to the city, and who left as converted fans in the truest sense.

“We all say that if we could have a job at any of our former clubs, we’d choose Leicester,” he said. “We didn’t all grow up supporting Leicester but we are massive fans now and we just want to help as much as possible. For whatever reason, it hasn’t materialised.”

That phrase, for whatever reason, carries a certain diplomatic restraint. The reality is simpler and perhaps more frustrating: nobody at the club has picked up the phone. Andy King, another member of that famous squad, is currently on the coaching staff, which suggests there is at least some appetite for continuity with that era. But Albrighton feels there is space for more, not to tear everything down and start again, but to remind the current players what this club, at its best, actually looks and feels like.

“I’m not saying we’d go in and change the world, change everything that’s wrong with the club,” he was careful to add. “But people talk about Manchester United and former players at the club who know their DNA, and I feel like there’s something similar at Leicester. There was a culture there that I’d never seen anywhere else.”

Waiting, and watching

The comparison to Manchester United is a fair one. Clubs with genuine history tend to benefit from having people around who lived that history, who can speak to it honestly when a younger player needs to understand what the badge actually means. It costs very little to make that connection. It can matter enormously.

What stings Albrighton, though he is too gracious to say so directly, is the contrast with how his boyhood club handled his transition out of the game. “When I finished playing, Aston Villa got in touch with me. I’d played for them and grown up a Villa fan, so I was grateful for the opportunity to go and do some coaching. I probably did think ‘I wish Leicester had done that’, even though coaching perhaps isn’t for me. I’d love to be driving into Leicester every day and be in and around that.”

That last line says everything. This is not a man angling for a job title or a salary. He simply wants to be there, in and around the place, in the way that people who genuinely love a club tend to want. Leicester gave him a chapter of his career that no other club could have offered. He wants to return the favour.

Whether anyone in a position to make that happen is listening remains, for now, an open question.