The hilarious bet Leicester City fan lost after Bristol City win - he’s lost his beard | OneFootball

Leicester City have had a torrid season in the Championship, but some of their fans have been trying to see the lighter side of it all.

Leicester City have had a terrible season upon their return to the Championship, but their recent win against Bristol City has allowed some of their fans to see the lighter side of the game.

If nothing else, the primary feeling experienced by Leicester City fans upon the final whistle blowing on Tuesday night will have been one of relief. The Foxes had just beaten Bristol City 2-0, their first league win since the 5th January. It was a winless run which had taken in ten games, or almost a quarter of their season.

The win lifted them out of the Championship relegation places for the first time since the start of February and offered an increasingly despondent fan base a degree of optimism that a second successive relegation might not yet be a foregone conclusion.

Beset by financial issues and having received a six-point deduction over breaches of PSR (which the club have appealed), it had been starting to look as though the tenth anniversary of the club's spectacular 2016 Premier League triumph could be overshadowed by dropping into the third tier for only the second time in their history, and the first since 2008. Set against such a backdrop, gallows humour has become the order of the day among the club's supporters.

Leicester fan loses beard because his team finally kept a clean sheet

For one Leicester City supporter, the Bristol City win marked the end of a run of his own. The BBC have reported that Foxes fan Eli Drury, "who had been growing his beard waiting for his beloved Foxes to keep a clean sheet has a clean-shaven chin once again."

Drury made the pledge as the result of "a stupid idea" by the couple's son, about a month after Leicester kept their last clean sheet with a 2-0 away win in the FA Cup Third Round to Cheltenham Town in January.

But on Thursday, with his team having failed to concede against Bristol City two days earlier, Drury went to the offices of BBC Radio Leicester to finally have the beard removed. After the shave was completed, he told the radio station that, "I feel a lot lighter now, I think I've probably lost a stone."

The story carries echoes of the Manchester United fan Frank Iles, who swore that he would not get a haircut until he saw his team win five matches in a row. More than 500 days on from that pledge, Iles still has his very striking bouffant, with United's 2-1 defeat at Newcastle resetting that clock yet again.

Leicester City have a terrible defensive record in the 2025-26 Championship

It's a good job for Eli Murphy that the conversation with his son came about as a result of matches in any competition, because while Leicester City may have kept a clean sheet against Cheltenham Town in the FA Cup, they haven't kept one in the Championship since their goalless draw with Coventry City on the 20th September.

The clean sheet that they kept against Bristol City was only the fourth that they have kept in the Championship all season. Ironically, at the time, that goalless draw against Coventry was their third in four games at the time, with the team already having also kept them in previous games against Charlton Athletic and Birmingham City.

Murphy won't be the only person enormously relieved by his team picking up this win. With one relegation place already occupied by Sheffield Wednesday, there remain five teams - Portsmouth, Blackburn Rovers, Leicester City, Oxford United and West Bromwich Albion - all fighting to avoid those other two positions, and this is a race which seems likely to go to the wire. Leicester have conceded the third-most goals in the entire division so far this season, with only Sheffield Wednesday and Queens Park Rangers having a worse defensive record.

At such times, supporters will often reach for dark humour to get themselves through the troubled times. But the Bristol City result - especially coming on top of a creditable 1-1 draw at Ipswich three days earlier - might just have suggested that a second successive relegation might not be the foregone conclusion that Leicester's previous run of form and defensive record had suggested it could be.