There is no doubt they are the dogs of this day and a few more to come in the Champions League next season, where they will start at 100-1, according to most bookmakers. Leicester, whose best top-flight finish in 118 years was second in 1929, were 5,000-1 to win the Premier League at the start of the season but they are now everybody’s favourite adopted puppy, it seems.
Not only are they winning with the sort of commanding elan rarely seen before at the club, but they are turning an entire sporting culture upside down. That is the underlying reason for their popularity. They are not Manchester United, Manchester City, or Chelsea, or Arsenal, or Liverpool or, dare I say it, Tottenham.
While the tale of their ownership and management is a complicated one best left to my colleague, David Conn, on the pitch Leicester have bloodied posh noses on a weekly basis. This is a fresh narrative, too long in coming and all the more welcome for that.
Leicester have injected the one ingredient that has been missing from English football since the “Big Five” created the Premier League in 1992: uncertainty. They have become universally acclaimed gatecrashers. Everyone loves an upset.
A quarter of a century ago in Tokyo, Buster Douglas got Mike Tyson at precisely the right moment in his decline and made the most of it. When the United States, 500-1 outsiders who had a 45-2 goal deficit in their previous seven matches, beat England 1-0 at the 1950 World Cup, imperial self-regard took an almighty blow. Every hobo in Depression-era America was said to have put their nickels and dimes on ugly old Seabiscuit, a fleabag who lost his first 17 races and became the people’s champion. England’s cricketers, inspired by Ian Botham with the bat and Bob Willis with the ball, got off the floor to beat the bookies and the Australians at Headingley in 1981, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh cashing in at 500-1, as good Aussies do. Tyson Fury beat Wladimir Klitschko. Danny Willett outlasted Jordan Spieth. And so it goes.
Some of the above winners delivered on their previously buried pedigree. Others got lucky on the day. Few were as lightly regarded as Leicester – and none sustained their impudent rise over the entire course of what is acknowledged as the toughest league in football.
What a glorious journey Claudio Ranieri’s team have had: from irrelevant outsiders to the point where they will win the title if they beat the remnants of the once dominant Manchester United at Old Trafford on Sunday afternoon. It would close the most pleasing circle.
To put their achievement in an historical context, only nine managers in the 117-year history of league football in England have won the top division’s title at the first attempt. Manuel Pellegrini two years ago at Manchester City was the last – but he had more money at his disposal than George Osborne. In their time, so did the previous debutant winners: Matt McQueen (Liverpool, 1923); Joe Shaw (Arsenal, 1935), Tom Whittaker (Arsenal, 1948), Joe Fagan (Liverpool, 1984), Kenny Dalglish (Liverpool, 1986), José Mourinho (Chelsea, 2005), Carlo Ancelotti (Chelsea, 2010).
By: Kevin Mitchell
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