Early last summer, Leicester City Football Club went on an end-of-season tour of Thailand. These trips are fairly standard for European clubs, a mix of branding exercise and group bonding session. They also provide an excuse to unwind in an unfamiliar place. While in Bangkok, three young players from the team’s academy system filmed themselves having an orgy with local women, making racist jokes the whole way through. As if this incident weren’t horrific enough, one of the players was the manager’s son. And to compound the damage to Leicester City’s public image, the team was in Thailand representing its owner, a Thai billionaire named Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who had spent years trying to redirect his countrymen’s allegiances away from such glamorous powerhouses as Chelsea and Manchester United and toward his gritty, East Midlands club. Within days of the video’s leak, the three players and their popular manager had been released. It was an ominous way to start a new season.
Given Leicester’s comparatively modest resources—they had the league’s fourth-lowest payroll—as well as the distractions of the summer, many expected the club, known to their fans as the Foxes, to finish near the bottom of the standings and return to England’s second tier of professional soccer. For the past few months, however, their squad of overlooked and largely unknown players has put together one of the most remarkable seasons in the history of professional sports. Where soccer’s underdogs traditionally opt for a highly defensive style of play, preferring a potential draw to an otherwise likely loss, Leicester has been aggressive and thrilling. On Monday, when second-place Tottenham was unable to defeat Chelsea, Leicester City accomplished the seemingly impossible, clinching the English Premier League title. It was the first top-tier title in the club’s hundred-and-thirty-two-year history, and the first time in over two decades that a club other than Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, or Chelsea had won the league. When the current season began, last August, the British betting firm Ladbrokes was offering 5,000–1 odds on Leicester City winning the league. Even when they were leading the league a few months ago, those odds only dropped to 1,500–1. (Ladbrokes currently gives the Cleveland Browns, perhaps the worst team in the National Football League, 150–1 odds to win next season’s Super Bowl.)
From an American perspective, it’s difficult to think of an apt comparison for this achievement, since the most legible forms of success here involve streaking through a playoff series or triumphing in a single championship game. The Premier League is a war of attrition that unfolds over thirty-eight weeks, with international and domestic tournaments interspersed in between. It’s dominated by the handful of billionaire-backed prestige clubs with the resources to keep up with this grueling pace. Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal, and Manchester United not only have better players but also more players, allowing a smart manager to keep his squad fresh. The smaller clubs are more or less content with their local rivalries, or the occasional, fluke opportunity to derail someone else’s title chase. Given the vastly uneven distribution of wealth in the Premier League, Schadenfreude tends to take on an outsized role in one’s rooting interests. Nowadays, the only way a team can radically reboot its fortunes is to luck into a new owner with godlike ambition and deep pockets.
All season long, then, the assumption was that Leicester City would fade from the top four, restoring the natural order of things. There was something slightly disturbing about seeing them with a comfortable lead at the top of the table well into spring. But they have stayed remarkably healthy, a crucial factor given their style of play, which is built on a disciplined, now-instinctive understanding of one another’s responsibilities on the field. Their defenders rarely get dragged out of position and their midfielders are hardworking, selfless, and shrewd, constantly harassing their opponents whenever they have the ball. Of course, none of this would matter were it not for speedy attackers such as the English striker Jamie Vardy and the Algerian winger Riyad Mahrez, who have been unusually efficient with their chances on goal.
Leicester is not the poorest club in the league; still, most of their recruitment and investment has been built on bargain-hunting, finding unpolished talent from unproven leagues, and hoping that cast-offs from bigger clubs could find their confidence leading a side with lower expectations. A lot of their success this season is attributable to Steve Walsh, an assistant manager and scout credited with having found some of their best players. In the post-“Moneyball” era, when quantitative analysis sometimes seems capable of predicting everything in advance, there’s something tremendously romantic about Leicester’s rise. It’s nice to think that something so unexpected and strange might happen simply because a group of individuals commit themselves to a common cause. It felt especially poignant this year, as many of England’s traditional powerhouses, like Manchester City, Manchester United, and last season’s champions, Chelsea, went through extended stretches of dispirited play, when their world-famous players seemed to wish they could be anywhere else but on the field.
And yet, there’s still a question of whether Leicester City’s rise will be remembered as an anomaly or as a turning point in European soccer, which has lately luxuriated in the limitless possibilities of globalization. England, with its veritable round robin of four or five big clubs trading trophies every year, isn’t even that top-heavy compared to Spain or Germany. There’s a growing interest, in Europe as well as in American college sports, to consolidate powers and form “super” leagues and élites-only conferences restricted to the most famous (and most marketable) teams. An American sporting executive named Charlie Stillitano even expressed concern about the prestige deficit when Leicester, and not one of the world-famous corporate monoliths like Chelsea or Manchester United, represents English football in the next Champions League, which brings together the national champions from across Europe. (Stillitano later clarified that he, too, admires Leicester City’s success—he called it “the greatest, most improbable event we’ll ever live through”—but reiterated that conversations around élite competitions will only grow in the coming years.)
It seems likely that Leicester City will remain an outlier—that this won’t occasion a radical recalibration of sports. Perhaps Srivaddhanaprabha, buoyed by the prospect of élite status, as well as the influx of cash that Champions League qualification and the Premier League’s new TV deal will bring, plans to pour his fortunes back into Leicester City. But inequality is a built-in feature of any system where prestige matters. It still seems probable that larger, big-name clubs with money to spare, sponsors to please, and reputations to uphold will continue treating smaller, more efficiently run clubs like Leicester City as farm teams, making them extravagant offers they can’t refuse for their best players.
The most hopeful scenario, then, might not be the emergence of more small, scrappy sides challenging the oligarchs; it’s Leicester City joining the oligarchy. If my perspective sounds cynical, it’s because this is the path I’ve chosen. As someone who roots for one of these corporate monoliths—Manchester United—the idea that Leicester City will merely become a powerhouse like any other bums me out. In the end, I didn’t mind losing to them. Leicester City’s rise has been a profoundly strange experience—especially since they were led by a few players who weren’t deemed good enough to play for my club. The by-the-bootstraps euphoria each time they upset one of the big clubs may be the closest I’ll ever come to understanding what Occupy Wall Street must have looked like to those inside office towers. At one point, I joked to a friend that maybe United didn’t actually need to spend a quarter of a billion dollars after all. That it was, in fact, impossible to imagine otherwise strikes me as a sad comment on what we’ve come to accept as fans.
The British bookmaker William Hill suffered their worst losses ever yesterday; they are slated to give out nearly three million dollars to people who had bet on Leicester City to win the league. A representative from the company said they had learned their lesson, and that they would no longer be offering 5,000–1 odds on a club winning the premiership; next season’s poorest club, Burnley, will start at 1,000–1. But some things never change. Sky Bet, one of England’s largest bookmakers, has Leicester at 33–1 odds to repeat as champions, which would seem a sign of their newly won respect. But Sky Bet also has them at just 25–1 odds to fall back to Earth, finish near the bottom of the league, and be relegated to the second tier, just as everyone expected them to do this year.
