Forget Steph Curry’s injury and the Tom Brady “Deflategate” clusterfuck, the biggest story in sports right now is the one about the small soccer club from the Midlands of England that is about to pull off the most unexpected upset in the game’s history.
Everyone loves a good underdog story. It’s what drives us through the day-to-day monotony of life, and what drove the ’90s movie industry. In real life, though, underdog tales are few and far between: Bank CEOs make more money; Superman keeps making bad movies; Duke wins.
It’s been the same way in the English Premier League for years. Money talks, history talks, and no one wins except for Manchester United, Manchester City, and Chelsea. Nobody else even comes close.
That is, until this year. Out of nowhere, slowly but surely, an incredible, unbelievable upset has been happening. With just three games remaining in the season, 5000-1 outsiders Leicester City are still at the top of the Premier League. They’ve created enough separation from second-place Tottenham that a win versus Manchester United this Sunday will clinch the title. This is astounding and unprecedented. (To put their 5000-1 odds in context, the Philadelphia 76ers—who were Vegas’s pick to finish dead last in the NBA this year—were still only 350-1 outsiders. And in 2013, bookmakers thought Bono had a 1000-1 chance of being the next Pope.) Without exaggeration, Leicester’s season spent leading the league is one of the unlikeliest, most shocking events in the history of sports. So let’s take a look at what this team is and who they consist of, before this ridiculous nine-month-long Cinderella story gets bastardized into a feel-good movie starring Frankie Muniz and Shia LaBeouf.
How do you pronounce this crazy team’s name?
You just say it like “Lester”—forget all those other weird letters. Lester City.
Talk about the Premier League some more.
I’d love to! The Premier League (or “EPL,” as Americans insist on calling it) is just like any other sports league you know and love. The only difference is there are no playoffs at the end. Every team plays each other once at home and once away, and whichever of the 20 teams is at the top of the table after 38 games wins it all. This means a team can potentially win weeks before the end of the season, if they’ve been good enough.
Without exaggeration, it’s already one of the unlikeliest, most shocking events in the history of sports.
Sounds boring.
It’s not. There are all kinds of added mini-battles going on within the league. For instance, the top four teams automatically qualify for the Champions League, where they can compete in a tournament with Europe’s most elite clubs, like Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Real Madrid. There’s also relegation, which sees the three worst teams in the league suffer the ultimate humiliation and get sent down to the second tier (like baseball’s Triple A) of English football. Which is confusingly and ironically called the “Championship.”
So no Premier League season features the same 20 teams?
Exactly.
Okay, so what’s up with this season? What makes it so ~iNsAnE~?
The best way to describe it is to list the winners of the past 20 years of the Premier League:
Manchester United
Manchester United
Arsenal
Manchester United
Manchester United
Manchester United
Arsenal
Manchester United
Arsenal
Chelsea
Chelsea
Manchester United
Manchester United
Manchester United
Chelsea
Manchester United
Manchester City
Manchester United
Manchester City
Chelsea
So there you have it: four winners in the past two decades, and only three in the past twelve years. Not a lot of variety. It’s common wisdom that, should a team ever grow to compete with the Premier League elite, it would take a huge cash injection, a high international profile, and years (yes, years) of constructing a team that can perform alongside the mainstays.
Except, it didn’t.
You mean to tell me no one saw this coming?
It’s important to understand that Leicester wasn’t one of the teams directly below the top four, threatening to break out at any minute. In fact, up until around a year ago, they were, in a word: shit. They were coming to the end of their first season back in the Premier League and looked a sure bet for relegation. They survived by the skin of their teeth, but as the 2015–16 season began, many assumed they still didn’t have the pace and depth of squad to compete. Worse still, Claudio Ranieri, their new manager (their old one left after several extremely, extremely, extremely bad and bizarre circumstances), was the managerial equivalent of a B-grade journeyman who’d hopped from club to club for decades. His last job as coach of the Greek national team was cut short when they lost at home to the Faroe Islands. (Population 49,000.)
That’s not good.
No. Leicester’s only dream was to survive in the league another year, and nothing more. This is common in the Premier League: A team makes the jump from the Championship and can’t match the grueling pace and ability, and they go right back down again. It happens. It’s always happened, and it was happening to Leicester.
Then they started to win.
It began with an away game at West Ham, a team that, while inconsistent, had a good chance at dismissing The Foxes quite easily. They didn’t. Leicester went on to win 2-1, and it was the first time in nearly 20 years they’d won their first two games of a Premier League season. Then the wins kept coming. Soon they were 3-0, then 6-0. But even in the coming weeks, Leicester’s form was written off as a blip by almost everyone. Including their coach, Ranieri. In late December 2014, Leicester City had been at the very bottom of the table. By December 2015, they were sitting in the top place. (A first.) Still, Ranieri was quoted as telling a room of reporters, “We are doing well, but we don’t [sic] achieve nothing.”
How did they do it?
No one knows! But there are some good theories. The collapse of holding champions Chelsea certainly didn’t hurt, in the way it opened up the league to new title challengers far earlier than anyone expected. It’s also been a weird season for everyone, with every elite team struggling. By their standards, Arsenal and the Manchesters have had pretty gloomy seasons themselves.
Then there’s a more curious take: that Leicester were always good, always had it in them, and just started playing the right kind of football at the right time. For years, the EPL has been dominated by teams who like to play possession football—i.e., holding on to the ball for long periods of time, frustrating opponents with lots of intricate passing until they make a mistake and space opens up that they can exploit. This year (and last), Leicester played to their strengths, allowing their rivals all the possession they wanted, defending deeply and sturdily, then breaking away at blistering pace and scoring as soon as they got the ball. In the same way Steph Curry has turned the NBA upside down with his freakish talent for sinking three-pointer after three-pointer, Leicester have broken the EPL open with Jamie Vardy’s ability to sprint onto pin-point through balls.
Tell me more about this Jamie Vardy fellow?
Describing his playing style does it a disservice, but to put it simply: He just never stops running. He’s rapid and boundless and somehow able to latch onto balls that seem impossible to catch up with. Leicester City still would have done very well if their only game plan were to simply whack the ball as far as possible up the pitch so Vardy could collect it and score.
It’s been seen time and time again this season, and this winter he broke the record for goals scored in consecutive Premier League games. Most miraculous, however, is the fact that he was plucked from obscurity and has been shaped almost overnight into the real deal. Stocksbridge Park Steels F.C., where Vardy began his career earning a reported £30 a week in 2007, is a whopping eight leagues below the Premier League in what is essentially the Marianas Trench of professional sports. Think about that for a second. Now think about the fact that next year Jamie Vardy could be facing off against Cristiano Ronaldo (who can earn $1 million in a day) in the biggest club competition in the world. Shame he’s a racist. Oh, and also banned from playing for one more game.
Will Leicester be fine without him?
Almost definitely. Vardy is a talent, but one of the many things that make Leicester’s rise so inexplicable is that it hasn’t been done on the back of one player. First there’s Riyad Mahrez, an Algerian winger who joined Leicester just two years ago, when they were still in the Championship. He cost less than a million dollars (peanuts in the global football market), but he could now easily make the starting roster of any team in the world.
The supporting players deserve recognition, too. There’s Robert Huth, who was deemed surplus to requirements at Stoke City (currently 10th in the table), sold to Leicester, and ever since has been one of the most consistent, toughest defenders in the entire league. There’s N’Golo Kanté, who runs the midfield, snapping at players and intercepting balls with inexhaustible energy. Hell, everyone’s been great. Albrighton, Drinkwater, Fuchs, Okazaki. Look ’em up!
What does all of this mean for the league?
Make no mistake, this is one of the greatest stories in sports history, regardless of what happens next. Going from fighting relegation to competing in the Champions League in one year is unheard of. Winning the title? Unthinkable. Leicester have made the big teams look clueless, old-fashioned, and dumb. They’ve essentially Moneyball-ed the entire league without even realizing it, but don’t think no one has noticed. Teams will almost certainly begin to build themselves like Leicester: burly defenders and 100-mph attackers. Next year will be fascinating.
With three games left to go and only one slip-up needed, there’s still plenty of time for anything to happen. Leicester know better than anyone that it’s not over until it’s over.
But, really, it looks pretty over.
Watch it, enjoy it, savor it. Whether they win the title or not, Leicester have already changed sports forever.
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