Why I’m a Leicester City fan

Welcome to the refreshed Fosse Posse! To celebrate the new look and feel of our sports communities, we’re sharing stories of how and why we became fans of our favorite teams. If you’d like to share your story, head over to the FanPosts [link here] to write your own post. Each FanPost will be entered into a drawing to win a $500 Fanatics gift card. We’re collecting all of the stories here and featuring the best ones across our network as well. Come Fan With Us!

Being a fan of Leicester City Football Club has been a long, arduous road for this 31-year-old. It’s culminated in recent times with this fantastic blog that you are currently visiting.

In honor of the contest above, I’d like to bring things full circle to the first post that I ever wrote that explain a lot of why I, Shane Evans, am a fan (aka am in love with) Leicester City Football Club. A native of the beautiful city of Leicester is the obvious reason, below is the deeper meaning. Enjoy, and as always, thanks for reading!

May 6, 2007 was a sunny day at the then-named Walkers Stadium.

A 19th-placed Leicester City side captained by Australian journeyman Danny Tiatto was handed a 4-1 drubbing from local foe Wolverhampton Wanderers to close out the 2006-07 season.

Despite winning only two of its final 11 matches, the Foxes' grip on life in the Championship, the second tier of English football, remained. Another unimpressive season in the East Midlands had come to an end and the good people of Leicester could refocus their attention on rugby and the city's vastly superior Tigers, who were days away from yet another cup final.

Life was as it should be.

I was in the stands that day. Leicester were a dreadful, uninspired shambles. As their league finish will tell you, the entirety of that season wasn't much better. Two days shy of a year later, for the first time in the 124-year history of the club, they were relegated from the Championship to the third division. The town's folly had reached new depths.

This (as painfully pictured here) was seven years and 11 months ago.

Photo by Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images

You could have asked each of the 30,282 people on hand that day with me to watch the Wolves hammering where they thought the club would be in April of 2016...and not one of them would have suggested top of the Premier League, at least not seriously. The feeling of the stadium, the fans, the staff, anyone in blue, was not of enthusiasm and reasons to be excited but of acceptance that more of the same was to come. This was Leicester the football town at that time.

That sentiment felt within the country's most central city (and proud of it) was not a unique one however. Old-world British pragmatism limits many a jaded football supporter and his childish dreams of promotion and titles and Brazilian attacking midfielders. Leicester City, a team of little consequence to the silverware-laden aristocracy of English football, was pleased to have a cup run every few years while hoping for a promotion push to play with the big boys again when the time, maybe, could be right.

And as that British pragmatism won't allow for unrealistic dreaming, it also strictly forbids the abandonment of one's club. Through all the struggles and disappointment (Leicester holds the record for most FA Cup Finals defeats without a victory with four), the support has never wavered.

Even the times welcoming the likes of Swindon and Huddersfield Town (two proud clubs in their own right) during the League One season, Foxes supporters showed up in their droves. Perpetually wrestling the attention away from the stuffy rugby folk, City fans are a passionate, stubbornly loyal, hard-working bunch. They know it's not always going to be pretty...and that's exactly what makes it required viewing.

So far this campaign, those supporters have routinely had to check their eyewear for faults. Used to driving down the shops in the trusty rusted Volvo, the reckless implausibility of what has unfolded this year has parked a Jaguar E-Type convertible in their front garden immediately as the rain stopped and the sun broke through the clouds. The breathtaking, unmatched beauty of what is being done has caused full-grown men to break down and cry live on the radio. It has made people rich. It has changed the landscape of English football to an extent that it may never go back to the boring predictability of how it once was.

Fosse Posse, as this website will come to be known, hopes to represent the aforementioned club and its devoted fanatics fairly and tell the incredible tale of a *fingers crossed* continued rise. Named for the street that gave the club its original title back in the 1880s (Leicester Fosse in those days), this site will detail everything that makes Leicester City and its city great.

This season has changed everything. Everything. That day in 2007 is but a distant memory in the minds of anyone calls themselves a Fox. The club has earned its place in the clouds because much like the bitterly-loyal citizens of Lestah, it has worked its proverbial socks off to get there. And that will not change. Not the rest of the season. Not next season or any season after that.

Welcome to the Fosse Posse, a place for Leicester and its fabulous Foxes.

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