I want to tell you about a conversation I had with my dad sometime around December 2015.
We were talking about the Premier League title race, the way we always did during the season, going through the contenders and the pretenders and settling on whatever conclusion seemed most obvious at the time. City were struggling. United were inconsistent. Arsenal were Arsenal, perpetually promising and perpetually finding new ways to fall short when it mattered most.
And then my dad mentioned Leicester.
Not seriously. Not with any conviction that what he was about to say reflected a genuine footballing reality. More in the way you mention something absurd to acknowledge that it exists before moving on to the serious conversation.
Leicester City were top of the Premier League. They had been there for a while. The football they were playing was direct, organised, devastatingly effective and built around players that most of the clubs around them had either rejected or never looked at twice. It was, my dad said with the expression of a man trying to make sense of something his brain was not quite equipped to process, quite something.
Quite something. The understatement of a decade.
What happened that season in English football has no parallel in the history of sport. Not just football. Not just English football. Any sport, anywhere in the world, at any point in recorded sporting history. A team given odds of 5000 to 1 to win their league title before the season started not only won it but won it by ten points, with games to spare, in a manner so complete and so authoritative that the margin of victory understated the scale of the achievement.
The greatest upset in sporting history. I will not be argued out of that position because the argument does not exist that can shift me from it.
Where Leicester Actually Were
To understand what Leicester City achieved in 2015/16 you have to understand what Leicester City were before it happened. And what they were was a club that had no business being in the Premier League at all, let alone competing for its title.
They had been promoted from the Championship in 2014. Their first Premier League season was the kind of experience that makes clubs question whether promotion was worth pursuing in the first place. By the time April arrived they were seven points adrift at the bottom of the table with seven games to play and the Championship was beckoning with the inevitability of something that had always been going to happen.
Then they won seven of those final nine games. They survived on goal difference. They avoided relegation in circumstances so dramatic and so unlikely that the survival alone should have been the story of their season.
Nigel Pearson was sacked in the summer despite saving the club from relegation, replaced by Claudio Ranieri, a sixty three year old Italian manager whose most recent job had ended with a defeat to the Faroe Islands in a Euro qualifier with the Greek national team.
The Guardian ran a poll of football journalists asking whether Leicester would be relegated in the coming season. Almost every single one said yes.
The squad cost approximately £22 million to assemble. For context, Manchester City spent more than that on a single player during the same transfer window. The starting eleven that would go on to win the Premier League contained players who had been released by lower league clubs, players who had been deemed surplus to requirements by clubs in the Championship, and players who had arrived from leagues that most English football fans could not have located on a map.
This was the foundation on which the most improbable title in the history of the game was built.
Claudio Ranieri and the Perfect Appointment
The mockery that greeted Ranieri’s appointment was immediate, widespread and almost entirely wrong.
He was too old. He had not won a title in years. His most recent job had been an embarrassment. He was a safe pair of hands, a steady presence, the kind of appointment clubs make when they want stability rather than ambition. The narrative wrote itself and almost everyone accepted it without scrutiny.
What the narrative missed was that Claudio Ranieri was precisely, specifically and almost uniquely suited to what Leicester needed at that moment.
He was not a revolutionary tactical thinker who would impose a complex system on a squad built for something simpler. He was an experienced, intelligent man who understood people, who knew how to create an environment in which players felt valued and motivated and clear about their roles. He was warm without being soft. He was demanding without being destructive. He had the emotional intelligence to manage a dressing room of players who had been told repeatedly that they were not quite good enough and make them believe, collectively, that they were.
The pizza that he promised the squad if they kept a clean sheet and which he subsequently delivered personally to the training ground became one of the stories of the season. It sounds trivial. It was not. It was the act of a manager who understood that the relationship between a coach and his players is built on small moments of humanity as much as tactical meetings and training drills.
Dilly Ding Dilly Dong. The phrase he used to ring an imaginary bell and wake his players up when they were not performing at their best. Childish, in a way. Also somehow exactly right for a group of players who needed to be reminded of what they were capable of rather than lectured about what they were doing wrong.
Ranieri gave Leicester permission to believe. And once they started believing, the rest of the Premier League ran out of ways to stop them.
How They Actually Did It
The tactical foundation of Leicester’s title winning season was straightforward in a way that made it simultaneously easy to understand and almost impossible to replicate without exactly the right personnel.
A disciplined defensive shape, compact and hard to break down, that conceded space reluctantly and transitioned from defence to attack at a speed that left opponents structurally exposed. N’Golo Kante sat at the base of the midfield and covered so much ground with such relentless intensity that he appeared to be two players simultaneously. His energy, his interceptions, his ability to win the ball and immediately set Leicester moving forward was the engine of everything.
When the ball was won, it went quickly and directly to Jamie Vardy or Riyad Mahrez, two players who were about to have seasons so far beyond anything they had previously produced that their performances looked, in real time, like something from a different dimension.
Vardy scored in eleven consecutive Premier League games, breaking the record held by Ruud van Nistelrooy. He ran channels with a pace and a directness that Premier League defenders had no template for because nobody had prepared them for the possibility of facing Jamie Vardy in this form. He was a player who had been working in a factory and playing non-league football several years before this moment, a fact so extraordinary that every time I repeat it I have to pause and let it settle.
Mahrez was different in style but equal in impact. The Algerian winger produced moments of individual brilliance that belonged in a highlights reel from a player at a club three levels above where Leicester were supposed to be. His dribbling, his creativity, his capacity for the decisive contribution in the biggest moments gave Leicester an attacking dimension that nobody had anticipated and nobody could consistently contain.
The team spirit that surrounded all of this was genuine rather than constructed for consumption. These were players who knew they were living through something unprecedented, who could feel the significance of what they were doing and who had formed the kind of collective bond that only emerges in genuinely extraordinary circumstances. They socialised together. They celebrated together. They believed together in a way that the squads of richer, more celebrated clubs around them demonstrably did not.
The Night Tottenham Drew at Chelsea
May 2nd 2016. Leicester City were champions of England before they kicked a ball.
Tottenham needed to beat Chelsea at Stamford Bridge to keep the title race mathematically alive. Leicester’s players gathered at Jamie Vardy’s house to watch. The nation gathered wherever they happened to be, an enormous collective audience united by the shared suspicion that something historic was about to be confirmed.
I was watching at home. I am a Palace fan. I had no personal stake in the result beyond the general human desire to witness something remarkable. And yet the tension of that evening was unlike anything I had experienced watching a match I was not personally invested in. The sense that history was happening in real time, that you were watching a moment that people would be talking about for decades, was almost physical.
Chelsea drew 2-2. Tottenham, a side of genuine quality that had pushed Leicester all the way, could not do it. Could not breach a Chelsea defence that seemed to understand the weight of the occasion even if they had no direct interest in the outcome.
When the final whistle blew at Stamford Bridge, the footage of Leicester’s players in Vardy’s living room became one of the most watched videos in Premier League history. Grown men in tears. Champagne everywhere. Ranieri crying in Italy, watching alone, the emotion of the moment overwhelming a man who had been in management for decades and had never experienced anything like this.
The scenes at the King Power Stadium, where thousands of supporters had gathered to watch on a big screen, were extraordinary. People who had watched their club fight relegation battles and lose their best players and navigate financial difficulties and wonder whether the Premier League was simply too big and too wealthy for a club like Leicester were standing in their ground in tears watching their team be confirmed as champions of England.
I challenge anyone to watch the footage from that night and feel nothing. It is impossible. The joy is too pure and too genuine and too completely uncontaminated by cynicism to resist.
What Happened Next
The postscript to Leicester’s title is one of the most bittersweet in football history and it needs to be told honestly because it is part of the story.
Kante left for Chelsea in the summer, recognising that his development required a stage bigger than Leicester could offer. Mahrez would eventually follow to Manchester City. The squad that had achieved the impossible began to disperse in the way that squads always do when the players in them are suddenly recognised as being far better than anyone had previously acknowledged.
And Ranieri was sacked in February 2017, nine months after delivering the most improbable title in the history of the game, with Leicester sitting above the relegation zone but performing below the standards of the previous season.
The decision was defensible on purely footballing grounds. The performance levels had dropped significantly and the club was in real danger of relegation. But the timing and the manner of his dismissal felt, to many observers, like a profound ingratitude toward a man who had given Leicester City the greatest moment in their history.
Ranieri took it with the grace and the dignity that had characterised his entire time at the club. He thanked everyone. He wished them well. He said he was proud of what they had achieved together. There was no bitterness in his public statements, no suggestion of the hurt that the decision must have caused privately.
It remains the most uncomfortable chapter in a story that is otherwise one of pure joy.
The Greatest in History
There is a version of the Leicester story that frames it as a football fairy tale, a charming anomaly that the game produced once and will never produce again before returning to its normal rhythms of wealth and dominance determining outcomes.
I think that framing undersells what actually happened.
Leicester City did not get lucky. They did not stumble into a title while the big clubs all happened to have bad seasons simultaneously. They played sixty four competitive matches in a season and won the Premier League by ten points. They were not fortunate champions. They were demonstrably, statistically, comprehensively the best team in England that season and they won accordingly.
What made them extraordinary was not that they won despite being a small club. It was that they were a small club who found a way to be the best team in the country through intelligence, unity, perfect personnel decisions and the specific genius of a manager who understood exactly what his players needed from him.
No other sport has produced an equivalent. A 5000 to 1 shot winning anything in any sport at the highest level is unprecedented. Winning a thirty eight game league season against the wealthiest clubs in the world by ten points at those odds is not just an upset. It is an event that sits entirely outside the normal parameters of what sport is supposed to be capable of producing.
I was a kid in South London talking to my dad about whether Leicester might actually do it. I am still not sure either of us genuinely believed it was possible even as it was happening.
It happened. Claudio Ranieri and Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez and every single player who wore a Leicester shirt that season made it happen.
The greatest upset in the history of sport. Nothing will ever come close.
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