5000 1 The Leicester City Story

THE INCREDIBLE AS-IT-HAPPENED STORY OF LEICESTER CITY’S MARCH TO PREMIER LEAGUE VICTORY In August 2015 bookmakers priced Leicester at 5000-1 to win the Premier League – the same odds as Elvis being found alive. On 2 May 2016, the impossible happened – Leicester won, to ecstatic celebrations in the city and around the world. Relive this remarkable season with Rob Tanner, the Leicester Mercury ’s chief football writer, from the great escape of 2015 to the curtain-closer at Stamford Bridge, via Ulloa’s last-gasp winner at Norwich and Vardy’s stunning volley against Liverpool. Detailing the key matches and turning points, Tanner’s book tells the inside story of Leicester City’s heroic year of triumph – and the players who under Claudio Ranieri’s inspired leadership became the most unlikely champions in football history.

“The odds of the Foxes winning the Premier League at the start of the season were the same as the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster being proven to exist, Christmas being the warmest day of the year in England or Barack Obama playing cricket for England after he left the Oval Office.” —ESPN On March 21, 2015, Leicester City lost their sixth game in eight matches. Without a victory for two months, they were rock bottom of the English Premier League, heading for certain relegation to the lower division, and about to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime financial bonanza of TV money and opportunity. As usual, London and Manchester would clean up, the rich would get richer, and the hopes of the small, overlooked, multicultural city would sink. But Leicester started to win. They stayed up; and in the new season they kept on winning. Favorites for relegation, rank outsiders as potential champions (their 5000—1 odds were the longest in the world for any major sporting event), their entire squad had been assembled for less than the cost of a single player for Manchester City. Still, they beat Manchester City and Liverpool, Tottenham and Chelsea: the most incredible cast of written-offs, grafters, misfits, and journeymen came together for the season of their lives. This is the story every underdog dreams of, every small town with a much larger, more affluent neighbor hopes for, and a triumph that defies logic and expectation.

The Sunday Times Bestseller and Number 1 Sport Book of 2016 'A tale that's truly inspirational' The Sun An ordinary lad from Sheffield, Jamie Vardy has become known as an against-the-odds footballing hero the world over. Yet a few years ago, things couldn’t have been any more different. Rejected as a teenager by his boyhood club, Jamie thought his chance was gone. But from playing pub football and earning £30 a week at Stocksbridge Park Steels, while still working in a factory, his off-the-cuff performances saw him rise. Jamie had a wild and turbulent youth, but football became his saving grace and, once he filled his boots with goals at FC Halifax Town and Fleetwood Town, he moved to Leicester City. After the miracle of surviving relegation, the team of unlikely outsiders bonded together to achieve the unthinkable: Jamie set the record as the first player to score in 11 consecutive Premier League matches and Leicester beat odds of 5000-1 to become champions. Jamie has now been nominated for the Ballon d’Or, firmly establishing himself as one of England’s leading goal scoring footballers. Not forgetting his roots, however, he has set up the V9 Academy in a bid to find the next big talent from non-league football. Defying all expectations, this is the story of the boy from nowhere who reached the top in his own unflinching, honest words.

**A REVISED AND SIGNIFICANTLY UPDATED EDITION OF ROB TANNER'S 5000-1- NOW COVERING THE FIVE YEARS SINCE LEICESTER CITY'S INCREDIBLE PREMIER LEAGUE TITLE WIN.** On 2 May 2016, English football was spectacularly altered as 5000-1 longshots Leicester City were crowned Premier League champions. Their victory broke a long-standing monopoly at the top of the table, and propelled the club into the Champions League for the first time. In The Leicester City Story: Five Years On, acclaimed Athletic Leicester City correspondent Rob Tanner relives City's title win, their summer of celebration and the highs and lows of the next five years that led to their first FA Cup win in 2021. Detailing the dramatic changes in the club's management since 2016, and reflecting on the great legacy of the club's much-loved owner, Khun Vichai, Tanner tells the inside story of a remarkable team still on the rise.

I had a hunch we’d be champions! The most unlikely story in the history of sport, told by our greatest football writer

"A few years ago, it would have been a brave man who bet on Jamie Vardy becoming one of the most feared strikers in football. Too small to play, too slight to mix it, earning so little that he was being forced out of the game he loved, the odds could not have been longer. In 2007, Vardy was playing non-League football at Stocksbridge Park Steels, earning GBP30 per game and supplementing it with a factory job so dire that his back almost gave out. Having been released by Sheffield Wednesday as a teenager, the indignity was compounded as Vardy was forced to wear an electronic tag after an assault outside a pub. He would frequently have to ask to be substituted and run home to avoid breaking his curfew. A lesser man would have been broken. Eight years later, after a meteoric rise through the football ranks, Jamie Vardy squared his shoulders against all the naysayers and set the Premier League on fire. By the time Christmas of 2015 rolled around, he had scored in 11 consecutive games for Leicester City, breaking Manchester United's Ruud van Nistelrooy's twelve year old record in the process. In The Boy From Nowhere, bestselling sports writer Frank Worrall traces how Jamie Vardy went from playing in a muddy field in Sheffield to being signed by the Foxes for a non-league record of GBP1 million, winning the Championship and terrorising Premier League defences in the process. A real-life rags-to-riches tale that every boy up and down the country dreams of, this is the incredible true story of Jamie Vardy, the boy who came from nowhere to the very top."--Publisher's description.