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A female CEO who took some risks and a coach they said was past his prime moulded a bargain basement side into a team of winners. S’Busiso Mseleku tells the real-life fairy tale of the Leicester City victory
How does R10.8 million grab you?
Well, that’s how much you would be worth today had you put R2 167 on Leicester City winning the English Premiership title when the current season began last August.
You see, the club that survived last season, by winning seven of their last nine league matches after spending six months at the foot of the table, began this season on 5 000-1 odds to win the title.
The bookies are usually never wrong. It is their business to make as much money as possible from those fanatic enough to bet on football, a game that depends on the mood and performance of 22 men running after a pigskin ball on the field.
It would appear, based on the information they had at hand, that the bookies were not far off the mark.
Here are just some of the odds that could have counted against The Foxes winning the league at the beginning of the season:
- City have never won the title in their 132-year history.
- Susan Whelan had no football background when she was appointed CEO in 2010 after several years of working successfully in trade and retail.
- She hired 64-year-old Claudio Ranieri in July last year, amid some resistance from some stakeholders.
And here is some interesting information:
- They come from an unglamorous East Midlands town of Leicester (pronounced Less-ter, making most people from outside the UK mispronounce it) with 330 000 residents.
- Leicester is 160km out of London.
- One of the most famous residents is English pop singer, Engelbert Humperdinck. (Ever heard of him? Well, I can’t blame you if you haven’t. He was born in Chennai, India, 80 years ago on May 2 1936 and is best known for his 1967 songs Release Me and The Last Waltz.)
- The town is famous for its excellent local cheese and David Attenborough.
- Their entire squad cost about R1.1 billion, which is almost what Manchester City paid for Belgian star Kevin de Bruyne.
- Leicester City’s Algerian player, Riyad Mahrez, who picked up the Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year award last week, was bought for about R11.2 million.
The club was bought by Thai billionaire Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in 2010 for R844 million.
It is not known whether the owner of King Power, a retailer that enjoys a near-monopoly in Thailand airports, is a gambling man.
But today, his investment six years ago is worth 11 times more.
Just to try to put the entire Leicester City story into perspective, Mahrez, who grew up in the northern Paris suburbs, had this to say when he was signed: “I thought they were a rugby club.”
Ranieri, described by some as “a shrewd Italian, but a man whose best years, at 64, seemed to be behind him”, had quite an average career before this season’s achievement.
He first made his name by taking Cagliari from Serie C1 up to Serie A in successive seasons in the early 1980s.
He led Napoli to qualification for the Uefa Cup, but was fired the next season and moved to Fiorentina in 1993.
Then he moved to Spain in 1997, where he managed Valencia and Atlético Madrid, with whom he won the Copa del Rey and the Uefa Intertoto Cup.
Ranieri was brought to Chelsea in 2000 where the club finished as runners-up in 2004 and reached the Champions League semifinal in the same season.
His nomadic tendencies saw him back in Spain with Valencia before revisiting Italy for spells with Parma, Juventus, Roma and Inter Milan.
From there it was to Monaco, whom he promoted to Ligue 1, where they finished as runners-up in his second season. An attempt at international management backfired when he was sacked as the Greek national team coach four months into the job following an embarrassing 1–0 defeat against minnows the Faroe Islands in a Uefa Euro 2016 qualifier.
This must have come as a blessing in disguise as he found himself back in England last July to finish off what he had started with the other “Blues”, Chelsea.
That was the last stop before moving to the Blues.
The Foxes’ win is such a beautiful tale that Fifa president Gianni Infantino has called it “a beautiful story” and a “fairy tale”, while British Prime Minister David Cameron said it was “an extraordinary, thoroughly deserved, Premier League title”.
The odds were so much against Leicester at the start of the season that only 47 people placed a bet with Ladbrokes for Leicester to win the title at 5 000-1.
One of them cashed in early his R1 083 bet and pocketed R1.6 million. Had he stayed the full course, he would have been R5.4 million richer.
Leicester City’s story is indeed an oral narrative centered on magical tests, quests and transformations, as some would describe a fairy tale.
