In Praise of Leicester City, the Unlikeliest of Champions
Leicester City are not supposed to be champions. Let’s get that out of the way. The Darwinian model of European soccer, where money is king and rests with a select few who use it to buy the best and brightest talent, means smaller teams can only get lucky here and there. If the EPL is a pride of lions feasting on a carcass, the likes of Leicester City might be allowed to nibble on a gelatinous ear lobe or bulging hemorrhoid. Instead, they just ran away with the filet mignon.
Yesterday, after nearest rivals Tottenham Hotspur lost to Chelsea, Leicester were confirmed champions of England.
How unlikely was it for Leicester City to win the Premier League? Well, let’s forget the fact that the odds at the beginning of the season were 5000-1. Let’s take a closer look at the rag tag bunch of Davids that just left a huge pile of dead Goliaths stacked yonder:
There’s striker Jamie Vardy, who until 2012 was playing for Fleetwood Town — a club slugging their trade a grim three divisions down from Leicester in the inner gassy bowels of English soccer. This year he was the top scorer in the league. On whatever leafy moonlit crossroads Vardy sold his soul to the devil — well, the devil is a-comin’ for his side of the bargain.
Then there’s Riyad Mahrez, a man plucked from obscurity in lower division French football and who spent this past season elevating himself onto the same pedestal that the likes of Mesut Ozil and Eden Hazard regularly sit upon nonchalantly. Goals, assists, sublime balletic skills — you name it. Mahrez, also unheralded until this year thought that Leicester City were a rugby club when they first made contact about a trade. Mahrez won the Player of the Year Award this year.
There are other players that need mentioning of course. N’Golo Kante was the defensive beast who allowed the the likes of Vardy and Mahrez to flourish. There’s Robert Huth and Wes Morgan who kept out some of the best attacking players in the world on a weekly basis. And then there’s Claudio Ranieri.
If Leicester City are a fairytale then Ranieri was the unwitting fairy godmother of this outfit. Ranieri, a genial and charming older Italian gentleman who had never previously won a league title in his long and not-so-storied career just did it with the unlikeliest of teams.
When he was hired at the beginning of the season to replace Nigel Pearson, a manager whose son (also a Leicester player) had been embroiled  in a sex scandal involving prostitutes in Bangkok (Leicester City are owned by a Thai billionaire, you can’t make this up) few were excited. The last that English fans had seen of Ranieri was in the early 2000s when Roman Abramovich threw his billions at Chelsea and Ranieri had failed to win the title, only for Jose Mourinho to replace him and show him how it’s done.
Well, who cares now ey? Because without the petro-dollars of the Chelseas and Man Citys of this world, Ranieri was able to muster win after win with a gaggle of misfits, a liberal dash of smart thinking, superior tactics and the promise of free pizza after each win.
They only lost three times.
CHAMPIONS!!!! pic.twitter.com/pFtvo5XUNx
— Christian Fuchs (@FuchsOfficial) May 2, 2016
Next season, with Champions League football now coming to Leicester City and expectations that much higher, things may start to unravel. How can you maintain the highs of a dream year when at any point you might wake up and realize how hard it all really should be? But who knows what next year will bring. For now, Ranieri, Vardy, Mahrez et al lived the dream and made a whole bunch of dreams come true for the people of this small-ish town in rural green England. Bring on next season.
