Ten years ago, Leicester City were flying high after being crowned champions of the English Premier League. It was a triumph which will forever remain as one of the greatest stories ever told in British sport.From Claudio Ranieri’s famous dilly-ding dilly-dong catchphrase, defying the odds at 5,000-1, to a night of epic celebration at Jamie Vardy’s house, to Andrea Bocelli belting out a stunning rendition of Nessun dorma, it was a glorious time.Leicester went into the following season in August 2016 with the feelgood factor still very much in full swing as they looked forward to the prospect of Champions League football.In the here and now, the club is mired down the bottom end of League One after suffering back-to-back relegations in each of the past two seasons.Without a win from either of their opening two matches at the start of the new season in the third tier, some fans are already fearful the club face another scrap to avoid a third straight relegation.Leicester’s Thai owners also recently announced that the club was being put up for sale, throwing another layer of uncertainty into the mix. Russell Martin has suffered a poor start to his reign at LeicesterQuite simply, it’s a mess. If the relegation last season was supposed to signal rock bottom, it hasn’t worked out that way.The club are in freefall and, as things stand, there’s no telling just how far down the leagues they might tumble.The man tasked with turning things around is Russell Martin, who was appointed as Leicester’s new manager on a three-year deal back in the summer.Tuning in to some of Martin’s interviews and press conferences over recent weeks, as well as watching some of what Leicester have produced on the pitch, it feels like watching a re-run of his time in charge of Rangers.It was at exactly this point 12 months ago, following a 9-1 aggregate hammering against Club Brugge in the Champions League qualifiers, that he really ought to have been sacked.That Rangers still persisted with him for another couple of months, sitting eighth in the league with only one win from Martin’s first seven matches before they finally pulled the plug, was a woeful error of judgment.You can hardly blame Leicester fans for fearing they have now made the very same mistake. They drew 1-1 away at Notts County before losing 2-1 at home to Burton Albion last weekend.On both occasions, the soundbites from Martin were all too familiar. He spoke of his team not being hungry enough, not having the right energy, not being psychologically prepared.After being 2-0 down against Burton midway through the first half, he said post-match: ‘We have to make sure that is our worst 25 minutes of the season.’ Martin’s Leicester have yet to win a league game this seasonAfter the annihilation in Brugge 12 months ago, Martin said of his Rangers team: ‘It’s humiliating and it’s really painful. We’re not strong enough as a group yet.’I don’t think we’ll get beat 6-0 again. We have to feel this pain. I don’t think we will feel this level of pain again in future.’What he is saying now at Leicester is almost word-for-word what he was saying this time last year during the omnishambles of his time in charge at Rangers.Which begs an obvious question. Why do football clubs continue to fall for the likes of Martin? Managers who look the part and talk a good game, yet produce performances that would shame a Sunday league team.This is what happens when clubs order the Temu version of Pep Guardiola. A football idealist whose teams lack any sort of substance or quality.When Martin got the Leicester job, some English journalists were falling over themselves to state what a brilliant appointment it would be. It showed an astonishing level of ignorance given what happened at Ibrox.Rangers fans were trapped inside the Russell Martin experience at the start of last season. A year down the line, Leicester fans are stuck inside the same nightmare.Right from the outset, many Rangers fans never bought the appointment, whilst Leicester fans viewed it as a risky gamble for a club looking to rebuild after two successive relegations.In both instances, that early scepticism has been fully justified. Martin made a terrible start at Ibrox and never recovered. At Leicester, it already looks to be heading the same way.The soundtrack has been almost identical, with the manager citing a lack of hunger and energy, stressing the rebuild will take time but that the worst is already behind them.At Rangers, the rebuild ran out of road after just 123 days. In the end, Martin left Ibrox as the worst – and shortest-serving – Rangers manager in history. Bar none.At Leicester the clock has barely started, yet the atmosphere around the club already carries the same tension and anger. Martin’s 17-game reign at Rangers was an unmitigated disasterIn the home defeat to Burton last weekend, many fans were streaming towards the exit long before full-time.Martin is not without a degree of self-awareness. In an interview over the summer, he admitted that Rangers ‘probably wasn’t the right fit for them or me’.He spoke of learning from the failure. Yet, damningly, the early weeks at Leicester suggest those lessons maybe didn’t quite hit home.There is something almost tragic in the repetition. Not only in terms of Martin and his methods, but of clubs continuing to be fooled into thinking it is going to be different this time.Rangers supporters lived through this particular nightmare and emerged on the other side, scarred but relieved when the experiment ended.Leicester fans are only at the beginning of theirs. If the feeling was that the only way was up after dropping into League One, the Russell Martin horror show is unlikely to stop the slide.