Ken Way has watched the increasingly bitter fallout at Leicester City since Claudio Ranieri was sacked last Thursday with growing sadness.

He has watched as Leicester’s players have been labelled “ungrateful”, “spoiled” and “treacherous”; accused of carrying out a coup against their own manager. He has seen the club’s Thai owners charged with killing romance stone dead. Listened as the sporting world has debated the tragic ending to one of the greatest fairytales the game has known. He cannot help but be full of regret.

Way was, until the start of this season, the sports psychologist at Leicester City. Originally part of Nigel Pearson’s backroom staff, along with Craig Shakespeare and Steve Walsh, Way was kept on when Ranieri arrived in 2015. But after the miracle of 2015-16, the relationship came to an abrupt and troubling end.

Way realised he was being let go only when he asked the club’s kit men for his kit allocation ahead of the season opener, and they mumbled something about his not yet being ready. “They sort of fobbed me off,” he recalls, sadly. “Told me to come back later. At the time I didn’t think much of it but I realise now that they knew I wasn’t being kept on…”