The Italian was sacked by the Premier League club on Thursday less than 24 hours after his team battled to a creditable 2-1 defeat in the first leg of a Champions League last 16 knockout game against European specialists Sevilla.
Leicester and the Champions League in the same sentence is not something fans of the Midlands club would ever have thought about before last year, let alone a brilliant group stage campaign they swept through as winners with a game to spare.
The club are three points, three places and millions of pounds better off than they were at this stage of the Premier League campaign two years ago.
There is also the little matter of writing one of the most amazing stories in the history of world sport as they defied odds of 5,000-1 to win the title and enter the lexicon of the English language as people now talk of “doing a Leicester.”
So, of course, having had such amazing success after a century of mediocrity, at the first sign of trouble, the manager had to go.
“After all that Claudio Ranieri has done for Leicester City, to sack him now is inexplicable, unforgivable and gut-wrenchingly sad,” the club’s former striker-turned pundit Gary Lineker said in comments echoed across social media.
