The Fearless Foxes story

Jonathan Northcroft is the author of Fearless: The amazing underdog story of Leicester City released on September 22nd.

Here, the Sunday Times football correspondent puts their achievement in context while explaining why it wasn’t quite so inexplicable…

There are so many ways to express just how unexpected Leicester’s triumph was, but 5000/1 seems to have become the shorthand. Are there other examples that sum it up well for you?

For me, you have to start with the economics. Money determines so much nowadays. The Aberdeens don’t beat the Real Madrids to lift trophies anymore – sadly. Every year the Premier League, Champions League, Primera Liga, Bundesliga – you name it – is won by one of a small group of elite clubs.

Until Leicester came along. I write about it in the book: no team with a wage bill outside the top five had ever won the Premier League and indeed no team outside the biggest three wage bills had won since Arsenal in 1998. Leicester’s wage bill was in the bottom five. No fewer than seven clubs in the league had one or more individual players who cost more than Leicester’s entire team.

For me, incredible as Nottingham Forest’s feats were under Brian Clough, you can’t ignore the fact that back then financial differences between clubs just weren’t as great. In fact, Forest held the British transfer record in 1979. In the same era, what my club, Aberdeen, did was magical – but when Alex Ferguson joined Manchester United he actually took an earnings cut.

On the 5000-1 thing, it tickled me that when Nigel Pearson left some fans tried putting money on the next manager being ‘an ostrich’ and were quoted 500-1. So…the bookies basically thought a giant bird was ten times more likely to take charge of Leicester than they were to win the league.

You actually moved to Leicester didn’t you…

I did…I’ve had good luck with timing over the years. I moved to Liverpool at the start of the Istanbul season and grew up near Aberdeen during the Alex Ferguson era. The move to Leicester was more good fortune.

My wife’s from Walthamstow but her parents retired to Leicester 12 years ago and we have two young daughters. We wanted to be nearer the grandparents and started house-hunting in and around the city in the spring of 2015. Leicester were bottom of the league then, and I remember thinking ‘if they could just stay up somehow then maybe I’ll get the odd local game to report on per season -when big clubs come to the King Power’. When we eventually did move, in March 2016, Leicester were on a quite different path…

Did living there help to give you a real feel for what this means to the people there?

I already knew the city as a regular visitor, but only living somewhere gives you the real picture and Leicester has a character that you have to unravel. There’s a multiculturalism that’s remarkable but also complex in places. It’s a university city. It’s bang in the middle of the country. It’s at the centre of a rural county from which people come in to town. It’s an east Britain place – and east-Britainers (I am one!) are just a little quieter and calmer than those on the western side of the country.

You experience all these things when you live here. Of course I haven’t been a resident very long and have plenty to learn but at least being in Leicester gave me some kind of handle on what 2015-16 meant locally. Put it this way, I was in Liverpool city centre the night Liverpool paraded the Champions League and it was mayhem, like Naples or Montevideo. Leicester last May was a gentler and more nuanced party. I had some understanding why.

Everyone at Leicester always appeared very ‘in the moment’ when interviewed last season. Speaking to them afterwards, did you capture more unguarded admissions of just how incredible this must have felt?

I interviewed players in May, when winning the title was still very fresh for them. They were still ‘in the moment’ and I wanted that, because their emotions and feelings were vivid. I was struck by Andy King’s description of what the players went through during the party at Vardy’s house on …

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