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| Photo creds to leicestermercury.co.uk |
If you've been on ESPN at all over the past three days, you've probably heard something about the soccer team that went from 5,000/1 odds all the way to winning the ultimate prize in the greatest league in the world. Yes, the American sports media has done a fairly good job of hyping this thing up as possibly the biggest shock in the history of sports. But no matter what anybody says or writes, nothing will ever be able to capture fully just how ridiculous the Leicester City story is. I won't be an exception, but I'll do the best I can.
Get ready, here comes the first cliche. Had somebody decided to produce a movie about a football club with 5,000-1 odds coming from out of nowhere to win their country's top prize, nobody would have gone ahead and made the film. It would have been too far fetched. This analogy gets thrown around a lot, but it applies perfectly in this situation. I'm sure there are a lot of you reading this who do not follow soccer at all, and some of you may know nothing about Leicester City, so here is some background.
In 2015, Leicester very nearly finished in the bottom 3rd of the English Premier League, which would have meant that they were to be relegated to the next highest division. But the Foxes got it together in the last month of the season and finished 14th. After the season, many skeptics and fans alike felt that LCFC had gone from rubbish to something worse than rubbish when they fired their popular manager, Nigel Pearson, and brought in Claudio Ranieri, and this is where our story begins.
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| Claudio Ranieri turned out to be the perfect choice for the Foxes. Photo creds to www.skysports.com |
Despite being one of the hottest teams in the league towards the end of the 2014/15 season, nobody was expecting anything good from the Foxes when the new season rolled around. Many people did not believe that Ranieri would be a good fit for a manager. After all, he had just been fired by the Greek national team after suffering humiliation at the hands of the worse than lowly Pharoh Islands, and in 30+ years managing, had never won a league title anywhere. Ranieri looked like a lame duck manager coming to a lame duck club.
One thing led to another. Leicester kept winning while others kept stumbling, and on Monday, the beyond impossible dream was realized. I understand we Americans have a natural bias towards all things American, but this British game has now given us the greatest shock in the history of sports.
Leicester winning the league is a bigger shock then that magical NC State basketball championship run of 1983. What Jim Valvano's Wolfpack accomplished was incredible, but it was only over a three week period. What Leicester accomplished took place over a span of 8 months. It is far more miraculous than when Buster Douglas took out Mike Tyson on that night in Toyoko, as Douglas was just a 42-1 underdog to take out Kid Dynamite.
This will be my most controversial statement of this article, but the Leicester's story is more shocking than that of the 1980 USA Olympic Hockey team that pulled off the ''Miracle on Ice''. Yes, the win over the USSR will always be a staple in the history of sports, but it was just one night. Leicester shocked the world for a whole season. With all due respect to the late Herb Brooks, the Miracle on the Pitch was a greater miracle than the Miracle on Ice was.
What is one of the most impressive things to me is the financial world of the sport in which Leicester won the title. Fans of small market baseball teams who think God hates them should try root for teams like Aston Villa, Bournemouth or Queens Park Rangers. In the premier league, the success of your favorite club depends on the man who owns them. In the past 24 years, a total of 6 teams (including Leicester) have finished at the top of the table (Arsenal, Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Blackburn Rovers preceded the Foxes. With the exception of Blackburn, all 4 of those teams have a considerable amount of money, particularly when it comes to Chelsea and the Manchester teams. The reason Blackburn was able to win in the 90's was because some loaded dude (Jack Walker) bought the team and invested in buying players, not too different from what Manchester City has done in the past decade. To put this further into perspective, in that same time span, 12 different MLB teams have won a World Series, 13 NFL teams have won Superbowls, 13 NHL teams have won Stanley Cup's, and 7 NBA teams have won titles. So, it's safe to say an underdog story in the English Premier League is more inspiring than in any of America's four major sports.
Leicester did not have to resources or the tradition to spend big, so Ranieri was forced to go under the radar during last summer's transfer window. He spent little, and came away with fools gold, singing two quality and tough defenders in Christian Fuchs and Robert Huth, as well as a solid man upfront in Japanese international Shinji Okazaki. But Ranieri's biggest singing came just five days before the season started in the form of a little-known French club called Stade Malherbe Caen; enter, N'Golo Kante. Kante played as big a role as any in Leicester's run and fit perfectly into Ranieri's counter attacking 4-4-2 style that emphasized teamwork, confusion to the opposition, and excitement for the fans. Ranieri was an old man who nobody wanted as manager, but his demeanor of a hip grandfather, as well as his tactical brilliance, made him the perfect man to lead the unlikely charge.
When Chelsea's Eden Hazard scored his beautiful goal on Monday to sink the title hopes of Tottenham Hotspur, I entered a state of happiness. For the past two months, I've braced myself for Leicester winning the league, but that did not make the reality any less surreal. But as awesome and happy as I was when Leicester got the job done and etched their names into the book of coolest things in history, the word ''inspiring'' never crossed my mind. ''Shock'', ''Yay'', ''How'', ''I don't believe it'' ''They did it''. Thoise were all things that were running through my skull early Monday evening, but the word ''inspiring'' never made it there until I got a text from a buddy of mine.
My friend, Mike Roberts, is a 2015 graduate of West Allegheny High School and a big time soccer fan. When I asked him about Leicester winning it on Monday, here is what he had to say;
''It's inspiring when you see where they came from. Jaime Vardy's story, in particular, is especially remarkable. I look at things like that and let them drive my mind to believe there are no limits to what you can do. Everton is my squad, but it's special to see what happened.
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| Vardy is a great example of ''rags to riches''. Photo creds to www.uktelegraph.com |
Vardy's story might be the most remarkable one of all. A football outcast before the age of 25, Vardy was signed by Leicester, who were in the second division at that time, in 2012 for a reported fee of just 1,000,000 pounds. After a difficult first campaign, Vardy picked things up in the 2013-14 season, scoring 16 league goals and helping the foxes back into the EPL. The next season saw Vardy begin to get noticed around the world, as his play in April of 2015 earned him the league's player of the month award. As you could figure, Vardy broke out this season, scoring 20 goals and leading his club to the impossible.
Just 4 years ago, Vardy was playing for Fleetwood Town, a club that was in the 5th division of English football. Now, he is the toast of England, and a champion. Now here is where I get cheesy. It's as cliche as anything in the world to say that one can do anything that he sets his or her mind too , but that does not mean it is false. People like Vardy, Raneri and Jake Arietta of the Chicago Cubs has shown within the past year that you never know when an unknown is going to become a superstar. Weather we like sports or not, we should look at the inspirational figures that athletics have given us over the course of history and apply it to our own lives, no matter what we want to become known for. Leicester City is the embodiment of the phrase ''impossible is nothing'', and I highly recommend that anybody reading this tunes in on May 15th at 10:00 A.M. to see Leicester City be recognized for their accomplishments in a road game at Chelsea, there last of the season. The reason why; you will never see their likes again.
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