If you were French, you’d probably call them “Lay-ster”. If you were American, you’d probably say “Nah son, it’s, Lie-chester”.
If you had a working knowledge of the Queen’s English though, you’d look at the French and the Americans, shake your head sadly at their arrogance and their frequent mispronunciations, and tell them that L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R should be pronounced “Lay-cess-ter”.
And you’d be wrong.
Even if you were a Rugby Union fan and hence knew of the dominant Leicester Tigers (ten-time English and two-time European champions), or a social studies major studying the fabled “Leicester Model” (the city is upheld as one of Europe’s best models for multicultural and multiracial integration).
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Or even a potato chip lover whose obsession with the snack has manifested itself in inane research and the utterly useless knowledge that Leicester’s very own Walkers has the world’s single largest potato crisp manufacturing unit (over 11 million bags of crisps are made there every day using about 800 tonnes of potatoes) located in the city, you’d still probably be pronouncing it wrong.
Well, it’s pronounced “Lester” and you’d better get used to hearing that name, because the unassuming Midlands city is home to a football team that is scripting one of the greatest sporting tales in modern history.
Sitting pretty at the top of the heap – three points away from sealing their maiden First Division title (after 132 years of trying) – is Leicester City, and no one can quite make out what to think about this.
Is this the best or worst thing to happen to Football in recent times?
The bad and the ugly
Last year, when Chelsea became champions, Sky Bet – one of England’s leading betting agencies made a neat £150,000 in profit. If Leicester City (5000/1 when the season started, 1000/1 even in late November) were to become champions, they stand to lose a whopping £5.5 million!
But no one’s really going to be sad for a betting company.
Let us then, examine the case for why exactly Leicester City winning the title would be bad for football and in particular English football.
Are we giving Leicester a free ride because of their “David” status?
If Jamie Vardy played for Liverpool or Chelsea or even a Tottenham Hotspur, he’d have been worked on the anvil of public moral outrage with a relish that is often limited to the likes of Diego Costa and Luis Suarez, or a John Terry – whether it be with the nightclub incident or his various unpleasant on-field antics.
But the more important question is whether mediocrity is being celebrated merely because of the package that it’s coming in?
Are they really a good enough football side to merit being champions of England?
For many, Leicester are simply winning due to a combination of sheer luck and alarming ineptitude from the nation’s top sides, and nothing great from their own end.
That point's right to an extent. The “top” sides have been absolute garbage for large tracts of the season. Manchester City have been about as comfortable in their own skins as Rohit Sharma on a seaming track, Chelsea were an absolute disgrace for the majority of the season, Manchester United are still floundering about like a beached whale, Liverpool got Jürgen Klopp a season (and two months) too late and Arsenal have been, well, Arsenal.
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For these people, Leicester have simply taken advantage of this mass confusion to emerge out of the melee unscathed. You see, their tactics have generally been too simple and straightforward for them to be actually taken seriously.
Sit deep, chase everything, and kick the ball long to the strikers. And by strikers, I mean Jamie Vardy.
They are an out-dated team in an era where football tactics often require Ph.Ds to decipher and anything that does not have a false nine, or inverted wingers, or converted centre-backs is a faux pas.
In a world where purists consider tiki-taka and possession-based football as the only true form of the game, Leicester with their 45% average possession percentage (third lowest in the league) and 70% pass success percentage (the lowest!) are just a Tony Pulis side dressed up to look pretty, a side worthy only of contemptuous derision – in pure technical terms at least.
If you were to look at the statistics – seemingly the sole reliable barometer of all things football today - they are top on only three parameters: Interceptions per game, total wins and… total points.
It’s giving Opta a headache.
Does it reflect poorly on the quality of football in England?
The English Premier League’s self-marketed notion that it is the best football league on the planet in terms of footballing quality has been held as rubbish for quite some time now due to the complete incompetence of its top clubs in European competition.
The fear now is that this will be exacerbated by having Leicester become the standard bearers for English football. Imagine Messi, Suarez and Neymar vs. Huth and Morgan… *shudders*.
This surely is no way for English football teams to move forward and catch up with their continental counterparts
Most importantly, is it bad for business?
The English Premier League is arguably the most televised sporting league on the planet, with fans and fanatics sitting in front of TVs and large screens all over the place – from Manila to Manhattan, from Bangalore to Bangassou - screaming their lungs out for their favourite teams as they battle it out in far-away England.
Even those with only a passing knowledge of the EPL, and indeed Football - even the kinds that sneer at the rest of us for addressing our favourite teams as “us” and “we” (What? Are you from Manchester? “We played poorly it seems”! Humph!) - would still have heard about the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and maybe even Manchester City.
And all of these fans, fanatics, casual viewers and virulent haters - after taking a cursory glance at the EPL table - have been asking the same question for quite some time now. Who in bloody hell are these guys on the top of the table?
That’s not good for business.
You don’t sell out stadiums in China and the United States with unknown names - TV networks don’t shell out millions of dollars to obtain Champions League distribution rights so that they can show Genk vs. BATE Borisov (or in this case Leicester vs. anybody).
As Charles Stillitano, a US sports executive (Chairman of event promoter Relevent Sports and whose brainchild is the International Champions Cup) said “Let’s call it the money pot created by soccer and the fandom around the world. Who has had more of an integral role, Manchester United or Leicester... Leicester City have no place in the Champions League”
The fact remains that Leicester are still a big bunch of unknowns and no one in Dar-es-salaam, Colombo, Suva or Miami is going to shell out big bucks to buy a Leicester City t-shirt, or a Foxes imprinted pair of track-pants.
Yet.
The Good
Oh God! The Good.
Where do we start?
A team that shows the true power of the collective
While the three exceptional players of the season have been Riyad Mahrez (PFA Footballer of the Year – the first African to win it), Jamie Vardy (who broke Ruud Van Nistelrooy’s long-standing Premiership record by scoring in 11 consecutive games) and N’Golo Kante (who looks like he runs around even while asleep), each and every member of the squad has pulled their weight in this campaign.
Robert Huth and Wes Morgan have formed the kind of old-fashioned brawn-and-brawn central defensive partnership that sends shivers down opposition forwards’ spines, Christian Fuchs and Danny Simpson have been tirelessly superb bombing up and down their respective flanks and behind them, Kasper Schmeichel has been quietly impressive.
Danny Drinkwater and the aforementioned Kante have owned the midfield in almost every game they have played – often playing against three men central midfields, the two have been magnificent and have put in some truly superhuman performances, along the way resurrecting the dying art of the box-to-box midfielder.
Mahrez on the right and Marc Albrighton on the left have been superb, their dribbling imaginative, their passing incisive, their crossing accurate and their goal-scoring important.
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The frighteningly quick Vardy has been ably supported by the tireless Shinji Okazaki, and by the battering ram that is Leonardo Ulloa.
To a man, they have run their socks off every game, chasing and harrying when not in possession – their league topping interception numbers very much a lead indicator of the pressure the entire team puts on the opposition - and swarming forward instantly when they get the ball back.
Their pass percentages look so bad because more often than not their midfielders look for the killer through ball or an instant first-time long ball. Their willingness to take risks combined with a vein of underrated skill that runs through the team has made for some exciting, no-nonsense football.
They aren’t winning games through luck, or through the ineptitude of the opposition, they’re winning them because they are playing better football, plain and simple.
A manager who for once is a genuinely likeable person and owners that match
The genuinely nice guy rarely succeeds as a football manager.
As in life, you might say.
Have a look at the three most successful managers in modern English football – Alex Ferguson was preposterously arrogant, Arsene Wenger is the sorest sore loser in all history, and anyone who thinks Jose Mourinho is a nice man should immediately see a psychiatrist.
Claudio Ranieri has spent his entire managerial career proving this theorem correct.
The perennial runner-up hasn’t won a single first division title in thirty years of managing top teams in the Serie A, La Liga, Ligue 1 and the Premier League. How apt that it is he, who spearheads this most unlikely of title challenges.
Any manager who has the guts to admit his predecessor was right – and not tinker with a successful system, while slowly improving it and fuelling hitherto unseen self-belief deserves credit. Any manager that rewards his players for keeping clean sheets by buying them all pizza deserves to have statues made in his honour.
The owners have helped too, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha eschewing the traditional foreigner-billionaire format of operating football clubs for a more sensible approach.
Their non-interference in footballing matters has let Ranieri run the club just the way he would like it - buying (and not selling) the players he wants (and doesn’t want to let go) and allowing a rare team spirit to be fostered.
They have treated the fans – the most important part of any club’s fabric – with utmost respect, their little gestures of affection like celebrating New Year’s by providing free beer (and soft drinks to the under aged/dis-inclined) to everyone in the stadium and Srivaddhanaprabha’s birthday with doughnuts and more beer, the kind of thing you hope every football club did.
Even in more serious cases, like that of the racist incident involving James Pearson, Tom Hopper and Adam Smith last year, have been swiftly and decisively dealt with – with minimum fuss and a zero tolerance policy.
Besides, Thailand’s ninth richest person also arguably has enough marketing acumen to understand that nothing sells quite as well as an underdog story. Business is probably not going to be as affected as most people think.
The sheer romance of the story
Yes, it’s clichéd.
Yes, it has been overplayed at times.
And yet, yes, it counts.
As adults, one of the hard truths of life that most of us learn is that the ones with the big money usually win.
Everyone says money doesn’t matter, passion and hard-work will get you places, but generally, those places tend to be shut off from the places that really matter.
So, when you see someone walk around with a smile, smashing this societal maxim into smithereens, upsetting the apple-cart and reaching places they have no right to be at, they tend to become heroes for the lot of us who have never thought this possible.
Not heroes in the ilk of a Cristiano Ronaldo, or a Lionel Messi – unimaginable and unmatchable talents that are pure sources of joy - but heroes in the sense that if these guys are doing it, with guts, passion and hard work against the mega-bucks of the opposition, maybe, just maybe, we can too.
They are heroes because they are not an expensively assembled team of superstars, but an eclectic collection of rejects (Drinkwater, Albrighton, Schmeichels), journeymen (Morgan, Huth, Vardy, Mahrez), unknowns (Kante, Ulloa) and has-beens (Ranieri himself), whose combined wage demands wouldn’t get you a full forward line in any of Europe’s top sides and yet, here they are doing the unthinkable.
They are heroes because they give us hope.
They may have their flaws, but Leicester City’s run towards the 2015-16 English Premier League title will surely be remembered as one of the greatest things to have happened to modern football, and indeed modern sport.
Because Hope matters.
Here’s to hope, three more points and Leicester City Football Club.
