Leicester’s victory and more football business

12 May 2016

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 9 May 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or has something just happened in Leicester? My son was, until last Tuesday, a life-long fan of Manchester City, but now, he says he is a life-long fan of Leicester.
Boot Boy

Leicester has unfolded a thrilling story of written-off also-rans, fight-backs, team spirit, humility and a truly unexpected victory. Some strange chemistry has recently come together in Leicester that has the world (and me) excited. What is it?

I’ve never been to Leicester and I wouldn’t be able to place it on a blank map of England (I think it’s somewhere in the middle). Leicester’s Rugby Union team is the most successful in England, the city has a very, very large Indian community that first arrived from both India and Uganda and is now, I am told, home to one of the most spectacular Diwali displays in England. And it was under a Leicester car park that the remains of King Richard III were recently found. But something remarkable has just happened there that has people jumping for joy from England to Thailand and with a story that could have been and probably will be written in Hollywood. Even a French newspaper called it a victory for the world. Leicester City Football Club has just won the English Premier League and next season, they will be playing in the Champions League.

At the tail-end of last season, Leicester was at the bottom of the league and looking like a certainty for relegation before completing a thrilling run of victories that sealed their survival, but at the start of this season, nobody imagined they would go on to actually win the world’s richest league. Bookmakers were offering odds of 5,000-1, the same as they were offering for Bono to become the next Pope and for Kim Kardashian to be elected US president (although that one might sort of come true).

Nothing like Leicester’s victory has been achieved anywhere in European football since Brian Clough’s newly promoted Nottingham Forest won the then First Division back in 1979. Whereas Clough was charismatic, brilliant and arrogant (and usually very drunk), Leicester’s manager is the humble and fatherly Claudio Ranieri who celebrates victories by flying back to his native Rome to have dinner with his mother. Much uncertainty surrounded Ranieri’s appointment as manager at the start of this season because he had just led Greece to defeat against the Faroe Islands, and Gary Lineker, Leicester’s most famous son, said, “Ranieri? Really?” The popular and witty Lineker hosts the TV show Match of the Day and promised to go on air wearing only his underpants if Ranieri brought success to Leicester. In Ranieri’s long and increasingly less successful career as a manager, he had never led a team to a league victory, until now. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. Leicester will now be naming roads, buildings and even babies after Claudio Ranieri. We’ll have to wait and see if Lineker holds true to his promise. I’m sure he will. He loves his Leicester.

Much of Leicester’s success must be credited to their previous manager, Nigel Pearson, and to their chief talent scout Steve Walsh, who used to work for Chelsea where he “discovered” the late-blooming Didier Drogba. Leicester’s squad cost a mere £54 million to assemble, compared with the oil-funded Manchester City’s £418.8 million. One Manchester City player alone, Kevin de Bruyne, cost as much as the entire Leicester team. Meanwhile, among Leicester’s star players, the tricksy Algerian international Riyad Mahrez cost a mere £350,000 and top scorer Jamie Vardy was playing his football five leagues lower just five years ago and cost £1 million. Like many Leicester players, Mahrez was plucked from relative obscurity. He was playing in the French second division with Le Havre but a closer look at his statistics showed that he was consistently able to dribble past opponents.

As Lionel Messi has shown us time and again, being able to dribble past an opponent suddenly creates a new geography on the pitch by essentially giving your team an extra player, which makes Mahrez perfect for a team that bases its play on the quick counter-attack.

Scouting for a football team cannot be just about statistics. It must surely be important to be able to judge a player’s temperament. Does he and his family have the temperament to be able to move to a foreign country far from home, learn the language, live in a quiet provincial town and not become an unsettling presence in the squad?

I saw an interview with the amazingly good Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero. He said he tried to persuade his compatriot Messi to move to Manchester by telling him that it was a really great place to be in because you can get lots of sleep as there is absolutely nothing to do there. Clearly, Manchester works for Aguero but provincial England isn’t for everybody. The soft-spoken Mahrez turned down an offer from glitzy Paris Saint-Germain and chose to go to sleepy Le Havre because it has a famed youth academy. It sounds like Mahrez wants to learn and improve himself as a footballer and is happy to be away from the temptations of a capital city, for now.

And a major part of the chemistry must be down to the club’s owner, Thai billionaire Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who has the monopoly for duty-free shops in Thailand called King Power. He bought the club when they were in the Championship and has since pumped in £100 million, but that is a small amount compared with Roman Abramovich, who spent £400 million just to buy Chelsea. Leicester’s owner is very low-profile. He hand-picked the gentlemanly Ranieri and appears to be deliberately encouraging a family ethos within the club and between it and the local community, as well as with Thailand. His helmsmanship contrasts starkly with the often shambolic Malaysian forays into English football.

I think we can all learn something from Leicester’s triumph. Some strange chemistry came together for Leicester’s unlikely victory that has the world of football hoping and dreaming that their unfancied club can also achieve greatness. But there has been a method to the madness. The manager, players, the team, the tactics, the local community and even the owner have combined themselves to follow a deliberate plan that is both sensible, far-sighted and not arrogant or flashy. Perhaps we should use Ranieri’s words to describe this chemistry that will hopefully take them to Champions League glory next season: “Dilly dong!”

Reprinted with the kind permission of