Leicester City had Chelsea transfer revenge after N’Golo Kante | OneFootball

Leicester City have some of their best players cherry-picked by Chelsea since their 2016 Premier League win, but not all of these signings worked out.

Leicester City have been repeatedly cherry-picked by Chelsea for their best players over the years since their 2016 Premier League triumph, but not all of them worked out.

As Leicester City fans prepare for the final run-in for the 2025-26 season, they could be forgiven wondering where it all went wrong. The club are fighting to avoid a second successive relegation, which would put them in the third tier for only the second time in their history, but it's only been ten years since they were the masters of all they surveyed.

Leicester's 2015-16 Premier League title win was so seismic that it can feel as though the full implications of it haven't been fully absorbed. They'd only been promoted back to the top flight two seasons earlier, and their return had seen them occupy a relegation place for much of the 2014-15 season before a late run of seven wins from their last nine games lifted them to 14th place in the table.

They started the following season as favourites to be relegated, but the 2015-16 season turned out to be a historic one, not just for the club for English football in a broader sense. The Foxes ended up winning the Premier League by ten points, creating arguably the biggest shock in the entire history of the game in this country.

N'Golo Kante only played one season at Leicester, but what a season it was

One of their star performers throughout the 2015-16 season was defensive midfielder N'Golo Kante, whose consistent, assured performances helped to keep their defence tight. Kante had only been signed the previous summer from the French club Caen for a reported £5.6 milion, but the quality of his performances turned the head of more glamorous rivals.

In July 2016, he left the club after just one season, but what a season it was. To the disbelief of almost all watching on, the pre-season relegation favourites ended 2015-16 as the champions of England, ten points clear of second-placed Arsenal. Having also played a starring role in the France team which reached the final of that summer's European Championships, Chelsea stepped in with a bid of around £30 million for him, and the player left for Stamford Bridge.

Kante would go on to play for Chelsea for seven years. Despite recurrent injury issues, he made almost 200 Premier League appearances for the club, and won the Premier League, the FA Cup, the Champions League, the Europa League, the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA World Club Cup before leaving for Saudi Arabia in 2021.

While Kante's departure from The King Power Stadium was the highest-profile from that title-winning team, he hasn't been the only Leicester City player to leave the club for Stamford Bridge in recent years, and none of the others have been the success at Chelsea that he was.

Danny Drinkwater left Leicester for Stamford Bridge at the end of the summer 2017 transfer window for £30 million, but he had issues with both discipline and injury at Chelsea and ended up only making 12 Premier League appearances for them over the next five years, with loan spells at Burnley, Aston Villa, the Turkish club Kasımpaşa and Reading being no more successful. Drinkwater retired from the game in 2023, after having been without a club for more than a year.

Left-back Ben Chilwell fared a little better. He signed for Chelsea from Leicester for £45 million in September 2020, and would make 70 Premier League appearances for the London club before joining RC Strasbourg in the summer of 2025.

By this time, Leicester were well into their second successful spell, finishing fifth in the Premier League in 2020 and 2021, and winning both the FA Cup and the Community Shield in 2021. Centre-back Wesley Fofana was a key component of that side and then left for Chelsea at the end of the summer 2022 transfer window in a deal worth £75 million including add-ons.

But although Fofana remains at Stamford Bridge - he signed a seven-year contract with Chelsea - it would be a stretch to say that his time there has been successful. Over almost five years, he's only made 48 Premier League appearances for them, with an ACL injury keeping him out for the whole of the 2023-24 season.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was arguably the most successful of this quartet, having won the Europa League and FIFA Club World Cup for them in 2025 following a £30 million move to Stamford Bridge in the summer of 2024. But he only made 13 appearances in the Premier League, and it was only a year before they sold him on to Everton.

In total, then, Chelsea spent just over £200 million on these five players in transfer fees alone, but only one of them really worked out. The loss of N'Golo Kante was a massive one for Leicester fans to have to swallow, but there's a crumb of comfort for them to be found in the fact that the other four all turned out to be duds, to a lesser or greater extent.

With Leicester's financial position having taken a considerable turn for the worse since the pandemic, the club are now fighting for their lives in order to prevent a calamitous second successive relegation. With 2025-26 having been a miserable season for Foxes fans, though, it may be worth reflecting on how much worse things might have been had Chelsea not repeatedly plundered them for players who ended up not working out.