Leicester City's story is so magical, it even includes an almost as unbelievable story within the club with Jamie Vardy. The 29-year-old striker who was playing non league football just five years ago before rising up the ranks and winning the Player's player of the year award and leading the Foxes to the title.
But it could have been oh so different.
Leicester were very close to releasing Jamie Vardy for turning up to training drunk. The striker struggled to adapt to earning so much money after being a non-league footballer, and took to boozing every night. Leicester’s vice-chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha told the A Day magazine just how close Vardy was to throwing things away:
He went straight from the bottom to the Championship, which eventually led him to start drinking booze every single day. We had no idea what to do. I didn’t even know about this until someone told me that he came to train while he was still drunk.
Vardy clearly had no idea how to act after his 2012 move from non-league Fleetwood for £1 million. Srivaddhanaprabha went to the striker with an ultimatum to change things or risk losing his career and going back to non-league football:
So I went to talk to him myself, I asked ‘do you wish to end your career like this? Do you want to stay here like this? We’ll let your contract run out then release you. Don’t expect a better career path.’ He said he didn’t know what to do with his life. He’d never earned such a large amount of money.
The pep-talk clearly worked. The warning and introspection caused Vardy to turn himself around and he started training harder.
After that he simply quit drinking and started working hard in training. He’s adapting, working on fitness training, he’s turned into a new person. And that’s better.
Leicester fans will be thankful for Srivaddhanaprabha's intervention. But the rest, as they say, is history.
