Lost Teams story

Leicester City, 2016: Champions at Five Thousand to One

Leicester City, 2016.

The opening price on Leicester City to win the 2015-16 Premier League. Bookmakers use numbers at that level for novelty bets, not for football clubs.

The eventual payout is estimated at more than twenty million pounds, the largest liability in British bookmaking on a single sporting outcome.

The season before

On 4 April 2015 Leicester were bottom of the league with nine matches remaining. They won seven of them and stayed up.

Nigel Pearson, the manager who achieved that, was dismissed in June 2015.

The squad

Jamie Vardy played for Stocksbridge Park Steels, Halifax and Fleetwood Town before joining Leicester in 2012 for one million pounds, then a record fee for a non-league player.

Riyad Mahrez was signed from Le Havre in January 2014 for a fee reported around four hundred thousand pounds.

N'Golo Kante arrived from Caen in the summer of 2015 for roughly five and a half million.

Ranieri

Claudio Ranieri was appointed in July 2015, shortly after being sacked as manager of Greece following a defeat to the Faroe Islands. The appointment was received with open scepticism.

He simplified rather than complicated: a compact 4-4-2, deep defending, Kante winning the ball, Mahrez and Vardy in space behind.

The pizza promise, made in October in exchange for a clean sheet, is real and is usually mentioned as a joke. It was also a functional piece of management.

The record

Vardy scored in eleven consecutive Premier League matches between August and November 2015, beating Ruud van Nistelrooy's record.

Mahrez was named PFA Players' Player of the Year, the first African player to win it.

2 May 2016

Leicester did not play. Tottenham, the only side who could still catch them, went to Stamford Bridge and led Chelsea 2-0 at half time.

Gary Cahill scored in the fifty-eighth minute and Eden Hazard in the eighty-third. The match finished 2-2 and Leicester were champions with two games to spare.

Most of the squad watched at Jamie Vardy's house. Ranieri had flown to Rome that morning to have lunch with his ninety-six year old mother, and watched the second half after landing back.

Nine months later

Ranieri was sacked on 23 February 2017, with the club a point above the relegation places.

Why it goes on a wall

Because the price is the story. Not that an outsider won, but that the market had formally declared it a joke, and the joke was accepted by everyone including the people who eventually had to pay it.

The price of a joke.