In the summer of 2015, British bookmakers priced Leicester City to win the Premier League at 5000/1 — the same odds some offered on Elvis Presley being found alive, and longer than on Simon Cowell becoming prime minister. The number was not a joke; it was a considered actuarial judgment about a club that had spent most of the previous season bottom of the table, had survived only via a late-season "great escape" of seven wins in nine games, and had then sacked the manager who achieved it. His replacement was Claudio Ranieri, a charming 63-year-old Italian nicknamed the Tinkerman, freshly fired by Greece after losing to the Faroe Islands. Gary Lineker, Leicester's most famous son, tweeted a review of the appointment that aged as badly as anything ever posted: "Claudio Ranieri? Really?"
What followed was, by consensus and by the mathematics of the betting market, the most improbable triumph in the history of team sport. Leicester's squad had cost a fraction of their rivals': Jamie Vardy, the spearhead, had been playing non-league football for Fleetwood Town four years earlier, having previously worked in a factory making carbon-fibre splints while turning out for Stocksbridge Park Steels, and had cost around £1 million — a record for a non-league player, and loose change by Premier League standards. Riyad Mahrez had arrived from French second-division Le Havre for roughly £400,000. N'Golo Kanté, the tireless midfielder of whom it was said he covered so much ground he must be twins, came from Caen for a few million. The entire starting eleven cost less than one or two individual signings at Manchester City or United.
The season logic couldn't stop
Leicester's method was almost old-fashioned: concede possession, defend in two banks organised around captain Wes Morgan and goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel — son of Manchester United's great Peter Schmeichel, and chasing the family's sixth Premier League medal by other means — and strike at speed through Vardy's runs and Mahrez's invention. From August they simply refused to go away. Vardy scored in eleven consecutive Premier League matches, breaking Ruud van Nistelrooy's record, and the pundits' weekly prediction of collapse became a national running gag. Ranieri played along beautifully, promising his players pizza if they ever kept a clean sheet and deflecting every title question with "dilly ding, dilly dong", his impression of the imaginary bell he rang at sleepy training sessions. Crucially, the traditional powers all failed at once: Chelsea, the defending champions, fell into crisis; the Manchester clubs stuttered; only Tottenham mounted a sustained challenge.
The end came with Leicester not even playing. On 2 May 2016, Tottenham needed to beat Chelsea at Stamford Bridge to keep the race alive; they led 2-0, were dragged back to 2-2 in a ferociously bad-tempered match remembered as the Battle of the Bridge, and Leicester were champions. The title was clinched, in footballing folklore forever, in Jamie Vardy's kitchen, where much of the squad had gathered around his television. Days later, the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli — a friend of Ranieri — sang "Nessun Dorma" on the King Power pitch before the trophy was lifted.
What 5000/1 actually meant
The bookmaking industry paid out a reported £25 million or so, the largest loss on a single sporting market in British history, and promptly abolished four-figure odds on such outcomes; no Premier League outsider has been offered 5000/1 since. Statisticians had a field day pointing out that the odds were less a probability than a shrug — implied chance 0.02 per cent — and that far likelier-seeming juggernauts had been priced shorter for decades without ever losing. Mahrez was voted PFA Player of the Year, Vardy the Football Writers' winner, and Kanté was gone within months to Chelsea, where he immediately won the league again — making the point, as clearly as anyone ever has, of what Leicester had briefly assembled.
Ranieri was sacked barely nine months after the title, with Leicester a point above relegation — football's gratitude having its customary half-life — and the fairy tale acquired a tragic coda in 2018 when the club's owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, died in a helicopter crash outside the stadium. But the season itself is untouchable. Every subsequent underdog, in any sport, is now measured against it and found plausible by comparison. That is Leicester's real legacy: they moved the boundary of what "impossible" is allowed to mean.
Quiz nuggets
- Leicester City won the 2015-16 Premier League at pre-season odds of 5000/1 under Claudio Ranieri.
- Jamie Vardy, signed from non-league Fleetwood Town for about £1 million, scored in a record 11 consecutive Premier League games.
- Riyad Mahrez, a £400,000 signing from Le Havre, was voted PFA Player of the Year.
- The title was sealed on 2 May 2016 when Tottenham drew 2-2 at Chelsea — the "Battle of the Bridge" — while players watched at Vardy's house.
- Bookmakers paid out roughly £25 million, their biggest single-market loss, and stopped offering 5000/1 on league winners.