The Ranieri Quandary: Should Leicester City stick with its failing magician?

The reigning World Manager of the Year might be fired a month after he was so named.

On January 9, Claudio Ranieri won Best FIFA Men’s Coach 2016 at the awkwardly rebranded The Best FIFA Football Awards for his miraculous work turning relegation contenders Leicester City into Premier League champions in his first year at the club.

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On February 8, Leicester needed extra time to creep its way past second-tier Derby County in a fourth round FA Cup replay with a 3-1 win that flattered the hosts. The Foxes were largely listless against the eighth-placed team in a lower division – albeit with a glorified reserve team.

The labored win won’t do much to ease pressure on the embattled Ranieri.

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Leicester was already out of the EFL Cup and has lost four Premier League games in a row. The Foxes haven’t won – or scored! – in five and have been victorious just once in nine games, twice in 15 and three times in 19. They sit just a point above the relegation zone, and two points separate them from last place. More worryingly still, the two teams standing between the champions and relegation, Swansea City and Hull City, are resurgent under new managers.

Leicester’s is the worst title defense in the Premier League era by far. And it could yet become only the second team ever to go down as champions. The only other team to do it was Manchester City in the 1937-38 season – which was a tough feat to pull off because there were 22 teams in the division then and only two were relegated. To underscore how long ago this was, Arsenal won the league title that year.

The only redeeming aspect of this season, in which Leicester has already lost 13 league games – to last season’s total of three – is that it cruised through the group stage of its first Champions League campaign.

Ranieri has gone from throwing his team motivational pizza parties to a bit of a pity party, scowling and frowning on the sidelines as his team has crashed violently back to earth. And Leicester has a vexing predicament on its hands.

Can you possibly fire the architect of the club’s first and surely only Premier League title just eight months later? When things are bad but hardly hopeless? When the players are largely unchanged – with the enormous exception of N’Golo Kante, who now runs ruts into the midfield grass at Chelsea – and all that luck that befell the Foxes a year ago has been used up?

The lightning has escaped from the bottle and will not be caught a second time. So what now? Dump Ranieri, a man who has established so persuasively that he can get the best out of these players but just, well, kind of doesn’t anymore?

The club has given him the dreaded vote of confidence. Albeit in much more forceful fashion than is typical – a few weeks before a manager is usually fired anyway.

“In light of recent speculation, Leicester City Football Club would like to make absolutely clear its unwavering support for its first team manager, Claudio Ranieri,” it wrote. “While there is a collective appreciation from everyone at the club that recent form needs to improve, the unprecedented success achieved in recent seasons has been based firmly on stability, togetherness and determination to overcome even the greatest of challenges. The entire club is and will remain united behind its manager and behind its players, collectively and firmly focused on the challenges ahead.”

You could read something into the club finding five different ways of claiming harmony – “collective appreciation,” “togetherness,” “the entire club,” “united behind its manager” and “collectively” – in the wake of reports that Ranieri may have lost his locker room and possibly even his staff. Or you could choose not to.

But either way, that would be missing the point. The broader question concerns Leicester’s laudable or maybe foolhardy commitment to stability.

At big clubs, the results of sticking by a manager when times are tough have swung both ways. Late in his 26-year tenure, Sir Alex Ferguson credited his longevity at Manchester United as a large part of his continued success there, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy – by which he meant that he’d been around so long that no crisis could stump him or his staff. Yet Arsenal fans would argue that the club has spent more than a decade in a kind of competent but unsatisfying and largely trophy-free stasis under Arsene Wenger, now in charge for two decades and change.

There’s a theory among some Dutch managers that you should never stay at a club longer than three years. That, they argue, is the amount of time you can demand things from the same people every day before they get sick of you and the results begin to suffer.

Under the right manager, constancy can pay off. But can you know with any certainty whether your manager can handle a relegation fight as well as he can a title race in his second year in charge? It’s quite possible that Claudio Ranieri, who has coached huge clubs almost without interruption since leaving Cagliari for Napoli in 1991, is simply unequipped for life at the bottom of the table. Which is to say, he may have been the right manager in a season where absolutely everything worked out in the Foxes’ favor, while now being the wrong one in a season when the breaks are all going against them.

Stability is well and good when you’re a big club and have the luxury of inconsequential failure. If a bad season merely means missing out on the continental competitions the next year, the penalty for sticking with a manager for too long is considerable, but not devastating. When you’re a smaller club and overextended loyalty can result in relegation, however, the stakes stack up higher – especially when you’ve built up a Premier League payroll not easily shed before embarking on a much more Spartan life in the Championship.

Leicester supporting its manager through his continued struggles is to behave like a big club. The sort that wins titles – which Leicester has – but also can afford a bad season – which Leicester can’t.

In order to solve its Ranieri quandary, Leicester has to decide what kind of club it is. And how much it’s willing to lose.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.