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| Sweet! |
THANKS to Shinji Okazaki’s brilliant overhead kick, Leicester City defeated Newcastle United 1:0 on Monday evening. The win brought the Foxes to 63 points with eight games remaining in the EPL season, five points clear of 2nd-place Tottenham Hotspur and 11 ahead of 3rd-place Arsenal and ESPN’s SPI now lists the Foxes as being 73% favorites to win the title.
To put that into some perspective, at this time a season ago, Leicester City were dead last in the EPL and staring at relegation. Only a seemingly miraculous late season run salvaged the club, as the Foxes won seven of their last nine matches to save themselves in 2015. Even so, the Foxes were assumed to be a relegation candidate this season. They were picked to finish dead last, or near to it, by virtually every single pundit and sports journalist in the U.K., and had the longest odds of any of the 20 league clubs at the start of the year, with the bookies offering 5000-1 on Leicester to win the title. (Even the Philadelphia 76ers had better odds on winning the NBA title.)
And it isn’t as if they had a whole lot of takers. The British press has now put in considerable effort beating the bushes in search of people who willingly tossed £5 or £10 down on Leicester back in the summer. It’s one of those dumb sorts of bets you might make just for the hell of it with the loose change jangling about in your pockets. Bookies love those sorts of bets. It’s easy money. If the Foxes can hang on for eight more games, and win the championship in the most popular sports league on earth, it will go down as probably the biggest upset in the history of sport.
Oh sure, there has been a one-off prizefight here and there where the underdog channeled their inner Rocky Balboa and sprung a big upset, but you’re talking about the EPL here, the longest and one of the most rigorous campaigns in sport. The EPL season is 10 months long, and unlike other European leagues, they take no winter break. Most countries have one domestic cup competition, but in England they have two, so if you’re progressing in the tourneys, the fixture backlog can get completely ridiculous. (Liverpool was playing two games a week for the better part of two months, as they juggled three different tournaments.) With injuries and depth issues and mid-season transfers, a squad can come to look and play, by the end of the season, absolutely nothing like they looked and played at the beginning. To win, therefore, takes sustained excellence, which makes a scrub club like Leicester’s achievements truly impressive.
And this is good for the game. It’s good for a sport which has become predictable to the point of being stale. This past weekend, Paris St.-Germain defeated Troyes 9:0 – yes, that’s 9:0 – to clinch the French Ligue 1 championship with eight games to go. Barcelona has a 30+ game unbeaten streak going, and are now well on their way to winning in Spain, while Bayern Munich and Juventus went on their inevitable long winning streaks to win their inevitable championships yet again in Germany and Italy, respectively. After a bit of early season upheaval, the old guard have reestablished themselves and the season is playing out like it usually does. Big money rules the roost in soccer, where great talent doesn’t come cheap. As the season has progressed, all of the big clubs, with their big wage bills and big financial backing, have taken their rightful and predictable places at the tops of the tables.
Except in England, where apparently everyone showed up drunk, and everything has gone mad. Manchester City fielded the first £300 million side in history earlier this season, but you’d think that for £300 million you could afford more than one quality center back. The Citizens sleepwalked their way through a goalless draw with Norwich this past weekend that pretty much killed whatever chances remained of winning the title. Meanwhile, Manchester United salvaged a scrappy 1:1 draw in the FA Cup with West Ham United over the weekend, but since when does Man U have to be scrappy? Manchester United has a £200 million wage bill, and the club made £190 million in jersey sales alone in 2015. Two other big spenders were taking part in the FA cup over the weekend as well, with perpetually flaky Arsenal getting beat by Watford (who was trawling in Div. 2 a year ago), while Chelsea was busy getting whomped by Everton, which was newsworthy insofar as that it wasn’t really an upset at all. Everton aren’t a small club by any means, but they’re probably a better team than Chelsea at the moment and are constructed for about half of the cost, and they’re spearheaded by striker Romelu Lukaku, who Chelsea gave up on. EPL clubs spent over £1 billion this year acquiring players, and a whole lot of that is looking like it was money very badly spent.
But Leicester City just keeps on winning and it’s awesome. It’s totally awesome. And you should root for Leicester City. Everyone should root for Leicester City. The Foxes are, quite simply, turning the sport on its head. And as a purveyor of Lose, and a regular fan of a similar sort of club, I simply have no choice but to wholeheartedly back the Foxes for the remainder of the season. Not only is Leicester City’s potential triumph in the EPL a chance to stick it to the man, but there is a possibility that business as usual in the EPL may never be usual again.
There is essentially a caste system in the sport, one which has been established over 100+ years. There is a hierarchy and a pecking order. There are 92 clubs in the four professional leagues in England, with hundreds of more clubs in the levels below that, and every club comes to find some sort of a comfort zone for itself. As much as the local fans of some collection of Division 4 duffers would like to see their club somehow rise to greatness, it doesn’t wind up working that way. I recommend everyone read The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, Joe McGinniss’ wonderful book chronicling a backwater Italian club rising to the second division. The club is completely out of its depth once it reaches Serie B – and, in fact, no one involved in the operation of the club has any real interest in seeing them succeed at that level, since doing so would require a substantial financial investment. The ownership is perfectly content with Serie C mediocrity, and trying to compete at the Serie B level is a burden and also something of an annoyance. Being successful on the pitch gets in the way of being profitable off of it.
Leicester are one of the great yo-yo clubs of British football. They’ve won the second division seven times in their 130-year history, more than any other club – which means, of course, that they also get relegated a lot. They go up, they go down, they go up again. There is a whole group of clubs who do this sort of thing (with my beloved Norwich City being one of them) Some simply rise to the top level, cash the big EPL cheques, spend very little money and drop back down to The Championship (aka Div. 2), using a year or two of EPL windfall as a nice budget for the club. (The current Div. 2 leaders, Burnley, employed precisely that strategy a season ago.) Some clubs, meanwhile, go all gung-ho when they arrive in the EPL, rife with delusions of grandeur and glory, deciding that they need to pony up and spend like the big clubs – which can be disastrous if you do it wrong. Fairly regular EPL yo-yos Bolton Wanderers went all-in and got it all wrong: they are now saddled with £180 million in debt, verging on bankruptcy and sitting dead last in the second division, having been forced to sell players and having had no money to buy quality replacements. The yo-yo clubs like Leicester and Norwich, like Wolves and Hull City and the sort, have generally placed their emphasis on talent development over the years, and have maintained policies of zero sentimentality when it comes to selling off players. There have been quite a few great players over the years who’ve donned the Foxes’ blue jerseys, but usually they were simply passing through on their way to bigger and better things.
And with modest means and modest results come modest expectations. A 50-point EPL season and maybe a nice cup run constitutes a successful season. You temper your hopes and you redefine success. Winning seven second divisions at Leicester, while definitely a step down from the big time, has still contributed to a creation of culture and tradition at the club. Some of the game’s best and most ardent fan support lies within those loyal to the yo-yos, be it Leicester or Norwich or Crystal Palace or what have you. You learn to take the good with the bad, celebrate the successes and not let the defeats – of which there are many – get to you too much. It’s an unfair game, after all. In this day and age, the disparity in finances between the big clubs and the yo-yos is so vast that you cannot hope to win.
Or can you?
We all love the Moneyball idea, of course, but as has been pointed out on this blog countless times before, Billy Beane’s approach to building the Oakland A’s into a perennial MLB playoff contender, in spite of budget constraints, only went so far. Theo Epstein then took many of Beane’s ideas and instilled them in the Boston Red Sox, with the financial wherewithal of the Red Sox organization to back him up, and it was Boston who wound up pinning three World Series championship banners up on the clothesline and not the A’s. Perhaps the most successful “moneyball” devotee in the game of soccer was the French club Lyon, who parlayed savvy buying and selling into an incredible seven straight Ligue 1 titles – and Lyon also happens to be the only domestic club to defeat Paris St.-Germain this season, the Paris club having been purchased by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund several years ago and infused with so much money to spend on players that the scales have now been seemingly impossibly tipped. It seems simply unimaginable that anyone other than PSG could win the French league anymore. It’s unthinkable.
But Leicester winning the EPL seemed unthinkable as well, yet here they are on the cusp of doing just that. Leicester City are a triumph of scouting and player development, and of employing creative solutions. Not only are they winning the league, but they’re playing the game in ways like no other club does. For most of the season, Leicester have been near the bottom of the EPL in several statistical categories. They possess the ball less than almost every other club, and are near the bottom in terms of the number of passes completed. Indeed, for most of the season, they seemed perfectly content not to have the ball at all. Rather than play out from the back, the Foxes are perfectly happy to lump the ball forward into wide open spaces and chase down the opposition. They are a high-pressing, high-tempo team and they hunt the ball in swarms and in packs, counterattacking in numbers and at speed when they turn over the opposition.
This is a style of play built somewhat out of necessity. It’s been the time-tested strategy of lesser clubs to try and be well-organized against superior foes and then try and hit them on the counter. Yet this approach has been somewhat tailored and customized at Leicester to fit the particular skill sets of their players – an approach which has yielded a whole far greater than the sum of the parts. About the only name of note on the club at the season’s dawn was that of the goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel – not for anything he has done but because his goalkeeper father, Peter Schmeichel, was a Manchester United legend who also spearheaded Denmark’s unlikely European championship in 1992. Leicester City’s squad are a mix of journeymen and cast-offs, a lot of whom couldn’t have gotten a game at any other EPL side.
And they play as if they’re never going to have this chance again. The Foxes run like hell. They generally play at 100 miles an hour. They are tenacious and resilient. It doesn’t bother them if they concede a goal – they simply go about scoring another one. No team has more 1-goal wins than Leicester, and no team has more comeback wins.
But simply to speak of effort sells the Foxes’ tactics short. There is method to the madness. It’s a scheme built around the strengths of their players, and one which aims to hide their deficiencies. For example, the two center halves are both terrific at attacking the ball, but neither is a great man-marker and neither is all that fleet of foot. To compensate, the right back tends to hang back instead of overlapping on the offense, thus giving them a more solid three in the back. The front pairing of Okazaki and Jamie Vardy tend to stack one behind the other, with Okazaki clogging defensive space and freeing the speedy Vardy to serve as an upfront outlet – any sort of danger situation that arises can be solved simply by clearing the ball into vast open spaces and letting Vardy go chasing it down. The Foxes like to pinch the wings and force everything into the middle, where rangy defensive midfielder N’Golo Kanté breaks up the plays and springs the counterattack, at which point the Foxes pour forward at pace.
Kanté has been one of the breakthrough players in the EPL this year. The Foxes acquired him this past season from France’s SM Caen for £5.6 million. Defensive midfield is one of the most rugged and difficult positions on the pitch, and it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to be employing the 5’6” Kanté in that position, yet here he is ranging touchline to touchline and box to box, breaking up all the opposing rushes and making all the plays. Kanté is the leading tackler in the EPL, and it’s hard to find another player in the world playing the position any better.
And this is precisely the sort of bargain buy and barn find that the Foxes have thrived upon. The striker Vardy is a classic late bloomer, 29 years of age and having been playing in England’s 5th Division four years ago. (Vardy was sitting on the Leicester bench, in fact, when this bit of madness occurred in the Division 2 playoffs in 2013. Ironically, he was sitting alongside Harry Kane, the two of them now likely to be spearheading the England attack at this summer’s Euros.) Algerian midfielder Riyad Mahrez, meanwhile, was found in the scrap heap that is the French Ligue 2, purchased from Le Havre for £400,000. Mahrez has 15 goals and 11 assists this season, and is one of the leading candidates for EPL Player of the Year. The entire roster is filled with guys who’ve bounced from club to club, some of whom toiled in Div. 2 obscurity or generally flew under the radar, and together they’ve bought into the system and played as a team, first and foremost.
The mastermind of the Foxes success this year, Claudio Ranieri, is a journeyman in his own right, having gone through about 8 managerial jobs in the past decade, the most recent being a disastrous spell in charge of the Greek national team, during which time they lost twice to the Faeroe Islands in European qualifying. Ranieri was the betting favorite, at the start of the season, to be the first EPL manager sacked. When faced with what appeared to be the worst job in all of the Premier League, Ranieri has responded with positivity, creativity, and clearly he’s tried to keep the game fun. The defense was so bad at the start of the season that Ranieri finally promised pizza for everyone if they could actually keep a clean sheet. And his mantra from the beginning of the season was “40 points” – that being the theoretical number Leicester would need to see them safe from relegation. In every post-match interview during the first half of the season, Ranieri and his players would say the same thing: Leicester’s goal was 40 points, and that’s all that mattered. Leicester had 40 points by Christmas – the first team ever in England to be in last place one Christmas and atop the table the next – and then the mantra changed: now that the Foxes had 40 points, everything else was gravy.
And that may sound trite, but think of the motivation at play here. Relegation is a professional humiliation, one which can affect the trajectory of your career – and also affect your wallet, as many players’ contracts contain clauses allowing for wage cuts if relegation occurs, and your value on the transfer market sinks like a stone. Part of what makes the last two months of a soccer season fascinating is that moribund clubs seemingly rise from the dead. They fight like hell to stay up, and weird results start happening all over the place. The last team you want to face towards the end of a season is a team that’s desperate to avoid relegation. The Foxes carried that mentality from last season over to this one, fighting for every point from the outset, oftentimes rallying from 2-goal deficits and leaving it late. Avoiding being put to the sword was their only team goal – and having done that, they’ve played with freedom and relief ever since. Pundits keep wondering at what point Leicester City will start to feel the pressure. But there is no pressure! The Foxes have been playing with house money for months, and that sense of joy and belief is palpable when you watch them play.
The irony of being so successful is that now everyone in the EPL is giving them respect. Teams sit in deep against Leicester now, attempting to prevent the furious counterattacks and trying to force the Foxes to unlock the defenses. Norwich basically published the blueprint on how to play against Leicester City a few weeks ago, fielding three center backs who collectivity rendered Vardy irrelevant while the rest of the team went about gumming up the works. Nonetheless, Leicester managed to sneak an 89th minute goal to win 1:0. The Foxes have taken 10 of 12 points from their last four games, all of them games which were rather ugly and methodical in nature. Strangely, this spate of ugly wins constitutes further progress for the Foxes. Having run and gunned their way to the top of the table, they’re now showing the guile and moxie necessary to stay there.
The Foxes’ rise to the top has been met constantly with skepticism from the British media, of course, all of whom feast upon the daily soap opera afforded by the divas from Manchester and Greater London. Even now, I’m still finding mildly idiotic predictions online of Leicester somehow winding up finishing third. Leicester is bad for the punditry business, of course, because Leicester are a modest club from a modest city who are drama-free and don’t do anything other than win all the time. Have they been lucky at times this season? Of course, particularly on the injury front, where they’ve skated by all season with a very thin bench (although you could also argue that a team which plays with that tempo and a thin bench is also a product of superior conditioning and preparation). And they took some points here and there which they probably didn’t deserve. They were dreadful in that Norwich game I mentioned before, and could’ve and probably should’ve lost. (Sigh.) But after 30 games of this, it’s no longer a fluke. Plucky little Leicester is no longer plucky. The British press have run out of condescending diminutives to describe this team by now.
And quite honestly, Leicester isn’t so small any more, either. No one in the EPL is. Of the 30 biggest clubs in the world in terms of revenue in 2015, 17 of them were in the EPL. As I’ve said before, middle-class members of the EPL may not have as much money to spend as the Arsenals and the Man Uniteds and the Chelseas, but they now have more money than just about everyone else on the planet! And all of those non-glamourous clubs have been making up for their lack of resources over the years by being smart. Leicester and Stoke and West Ham and the like spend wisely, since they have less margin for error, but now the quality of player available to them is much greater than in the past. This is why what Leicester’s doing in the EPL this year shouldn’t be labeled as just a one-off or a fluke. And it’s also why it’s an outdated notion to assume that their players, now all of whom have enormous pricetags, are suddenly all going to want to jump ship and go elsewhere. Leicester can afford the players they have, and afford new players, and guess what? WINNING IS FUN! (Or so I’ve been told, anyway.) Ranieri was asked about this possibility in his press conference on Monday, and he shrugged and asked, “why would they want to leave?” You know, that’s a good question. Unless Real or Barca come around throwing £50 million at you, how does it get any better? You’re making good money, and you’re also making history.
And if you’re a fan of one of the bigger clubs in the EPL, you should be outraged by what you’re seeing. Arsenal is flaking their way to another failed season, Man City folds up like a house of cards, Man United has provided nothing but boring dross, and we’ve already been over the tire fire that is Chelsea. You have all the money on the planet, you can buy almost any player you want, and you’re getting beat to the finish line by Leicester? By LEICESTER? Really? Business as usual clearly isn’t cutting it any longer, not when you have smart teams like Leicester and, to a lesser extent, Spurs leading the way. Spurs have spent stupidly over the years themselves, but finally decided to put an end to that nonsense and actually trust in the development of young talent. That team has potential to be terrifying in the future if they keep the core together, and still just might overhaul the Foxes just yet.
“But lads, it’s Tottenham.”
– Sir Alex Ferguson
OK, so maybe not.
And for us Norwich fans and Stoke fans and Crystal Palace fans and Newcastle fans and the like, Leicester up top is the greatest thing we’ve ever seen. The good guys can and do, in fact, win every now and then. Not that often, but it doesn’t have to happen that often to rekindle your faith. Money can’t buy you heart, it can’t buy you guts, it can’t buy you steel, and it can’t you buy you brains – and in the modern EPL, it clearly can’t always buy you a championship.
There have been cases in the past, most recently Nottingham Forest in the 1970s, where a club has been promoted to a higher division and then promptly won the title. But that was back before the big money of the EPL and the Champions League came into play, when the finances were less dissimilar and the gap between divisions wasn’t nearly as severe. Probably the closest thing you can find to this in America would be the worst-to-first Twins and the worst-to-first Braves playing in the 1991 World Series, or the case mentioned previously of San Francisco 49ers starting out the 1981 season at 200-1 odds on the Tahoe books and winding up winning the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t even come close to a 5000-1 shot. 5000-1!
And this is March, which means March Madness here in the U.S., a chance for the underdogs in college basketball to take their place center stage and take their shots at the blue bloods. But in the end, the underdogs never win out. They might pull a stunning upset, but rarely do they go further. The biggest longshots in the NCAAs to win out in my lifetime were, in fact, pretty well-established basketball schools – NC State in 1983, Villanova in 1986, Kansas in 1988 – who reached the role of underdogs by underachieving during the regular season. Butler was a true underdog, a team you knew nothing about but who were scrappy and who punched above their weight and who you could get behind and root for, but then they had to go and lose the final to Duke, who hate fun, and then lose the final to Connecticut in a game so bad that it set college basketball back about 20 years. This year’s NCAA bracket sucks precisely because it has far too few interesting fringe teams and far too many boring big conference schools laden with athletes who can’t shoot and do no particular phase of the game well, thus making a boring sport become even more boring. But I digress.
We need the romance and the excitement of the underdogs. We need the unexpected to happen from time to time to keep our interest. What Leicester is doing this year it wonderful and exciting, and we should all hope they ultimately win the title. Will they be able to defend it? Will they do well in European play next season? Who gives a shit? Live in the moment, and learn to love the Foxes. What they’re doing is unprecedented in sports, and deserving of admiration and support.
And since I referenced a band I really liked in the title of this blog post, the music maven in me feels compelled to throw in one of their songs. This video includes a great interchange between the band and a fan at a concert recorded in Essen, Germany. “We want rock!” Rock on Leicester City:
