So… Listen to this… Jamie Vardy’s story is no miracle… After learning damn near everything I possibly could about him, I’m convinced the main reason why he only managed to go pro at 25 years of age was self doubt, self destruction, self sabotage… whatever you wanna call it… Even when he was back in the 7th tier, people were already trying to set him straight, telling him that he could play for England one day… But he never believed them… Instead, he seemingly kept doing everything in his power to destroy any chance he had of making it… From getting wasted every single day, to getting slashed across the face in a bar fight, landing himself in jail, being put on house arrest, even playing with an ankle monitor and almost quitting football entirely on more than one occasion… you name it, if it was a horrible idea, he probably did it… As he said in his autobiography: “Balotelli would have been proud of me”. . .
But really, I think even good old Mario would have been worried for him… Even once he got to Leicester, he was still arriving at training, stinking of booze, he was going down the rabbit hole for nearly a decade before he set himself straight and once he did… well… Do you want me to list some of his records? By 2020, Guardiola’s Man City had only allowed someone to put a hat trick past them on 3 different occasions… One was Lionel Messi, the other two… were Jamie Vardy. In fact, at one point, across the entire history of the premier league, only Rooney and Shearer had more goals than him against the big 6… He literally reached 100 Premier League goals faster than Ronaldo, Rooney and Drgba… And in the past 10 years, no English player has ranked higher in the Ballon D’Or than Jamie Vardy… And this isn’t new, no matter if he was in the 7th, 5th or 2nd tier… He broke records everywhere he went… And you know what made him so special?
Well… He wasn’t made in a lab, he wasn’t some robotic wonderkid who’s been carefully curated in some high tech academy, in a way it was the fact that he lost himself completely, that made him so special, so tough, so unpredictable… as Arsene Wenger once said: “The kind of player that runs through a stone wall to score goals? They’re not here, not anymore”. .
. But Jamie Vardy, he was always that guy… Even as a kid he was a menace… but he was also outstanding at anything sports related… He literally held the record for the longest javelin throw at his school for years… He didn’t even train for that, he just tried it one day and broke the record… So don’t get it wrong, Vardy was well aware that he was a bit of a prodigy… Ever since he was a kid, his biggest dream was to be the next David Hirst and bring back the glory days to his dear Sheffield Wednesday, but just as everything seemed to be going great, the club had to get rid of one of their academy levels as a way to cut some costs and in the middle of all that mess, a lot of players were released and Vardy just happened to be one of them… But, well… even though the managers encouraged him to find somewhere else to play and tried to explain to him that he was just on the receiving end of a massive butterfly effect… he convinced himself that it was all his fault, that he just wasn’t good enough and though I’m sure a lifetime of being the “troubled kid” didn’t help with his self belief, he took it way too far… He just quit… Eight months went by before he put on a pair of cleats again and even then it was like he was so afraid of failing that he refused to even try… Instead of finding a proper club, he began representing a local pub’s football team at the request of one of his friends… It was just ridiculous… As he described it himself: “I came on in the second half and within 30 seconds, I hammered a shot at the keeper… And everyone was like “What just happened there? ” By the end of the match I had scored twice, as I walked out the coach was asking my friend “Where the hell did you find him?
”. . .
In fact, the story of that match even made the local paper at the time, the only reason you might have a hard time finding it was that Jamie was using his friend’s ID, that day the man of the match was “Glenn Maris”. . .
Still, even if by the end of the season, Vardy was on 50 goals and his pub were local champions… It meant absolutely nothing… By the age of 23, he was dividing his time between breaking his back working in a prosthetics factory and playing for the mighty Stocksbridge Park, in the 8th tier of English football… There were less than a thousand people in the stands and Vardy got paid 30 pounds per match… he was lost there for 3 years… He tried college, he even tried to join the army, but he got rejected everywhere and eventually his life ended up going in the complete opposite direction… Vardy got into a bar fight, things got violent and suddenly he was being fitted with an ankle monitor and put into house arrest… At 6pm each day, he had to be back inside his house, otherwise the cops would be coming after him. As you might imagine, that made away games especially difficult… the coach would literally have to sub him off at the 60 minute mark so that he could make it back home in time… It was a miserable existence, every night his monitor would glitch and go off without any reason, waking him up over and over again, eventually it had made him so paranoid that he struggled to even fall asleep… It was borderline torture and what made all of this especially heartbreaking was that the only reason Vardy got into that fight was that he was protecting a disabled friend who was being bullied by two strangers. Yeah, it’s hard not to feel like it was undeserved… But as Vardy sat in a pub watching the likes of Aaron Lennon, the same age as him, travel to South Africa for the world cup… Even though he felt he was as far away from that life as any of the overweight regulars who sat next to him, then he was offered a lifeline… Now on 66 goals in 107 games, he managed to get his team promoted for the first time ever and somehow that convinced Halifax Town to put down an impressive 15 thousand pounds for his signing and though they were also only in the 7th tier… Things were much better at Halifax.
The club staff convinced him to quit his job and even though he was still only making about minimum wage, the chance to train every day for the first time in his life worked wonders and he ended up scoring 25 goals in 37 matches that season, leading his team to yet another promotion, being named the league’s player of the year… and among all of this, his goalkeeper, who was friend’s with Theo Walcott’s agent, called him and, in his own words, told him: “You gotta come take a look at this player… He’s a lunatic, but he is single handedly winning us the league! ”. .
. Maybe it was the new agent, maybe people were just finally realizing he was a massive fish in the tiniest of ponds, but after just one year, Vardy was already moving to Fleetwood Town, in the 5th tier… But don’t get it wrong, as Vardy said “they were a non league club run on a professional basis”. .
. There, he would finally be earning more money from football than he had ever made on any 9 to 5, he would finally get to have his name on the back of his shirt and what at the time impressed him the most… He even made national news… 5 short sentences on the BBC website, under the headline ‘Fleetwood Town sign FC Halifax midfielder Jamie Vardy’. .
. I mean, they got the position wrong, but it meant something to him… And his price tag, a club record 150 thousand pounds carried a lot of weight… As one of his new teammates would say: “At first we were like: ‘Why have we spent so much money on some random lad? ’ but after one match we knew why….
Every time he ran through on goal we just knew that he was not gonna miss. It was unreal. ”.
. . And in that same fashion, the scouts also began turning up wondering who the hell was this random guy scoring goals for fun and though his agent didn’t think his new mohawk was great advertising, there wasn’t much of a way to deny 31 goals in 36 matches, a 29 game unbeaten run and 103 points in the league, especially when his own manager claimed that “If we didn’t have Jamie, there would be no chance we’d win the league”.
. . Add to that the fact that he kept scoring in the FA Cup against teams several tiers above him and suddenly Southampton, West Ham, Fulham and Leicester were all reported to be considering signing this non league player… but there was just one problem… Fleetwood Town had already rejected a bid in January and informed everyone that Jamie Vardy was now the million pound man… The most valuable non league player of all time… And though that scared many of the clubs away… One didn’t budge… Leicester broke the record and hoped for the best… However, unlike before, things didn’t start well… at all.
Even though Vardy would start his time in the Championship with almost a handful of goals in the first month and a half… then he would be almost goalless for the rest of the season… 1 goal in 19 matches before he ended up being almost dropped from the squad, not playing any of the last 13 matches of the season… It didn’t just seem like it had been too much of a step up, Vardy was sure it was… He became seriously depressed and as he said in his book: “My way of dealing with that was to go and get p---ed with my mates”. . .
Before the season was even over, he was already begging his managers to send him back on loan to Fleetwood… And when they denied him that, he even considered just quitting football altogether, going on about some fantasy where he’d move to Ibiza and become a nightclub promoter… He had lost it really… At one point he was struggling massively to recover from a simple thigh injury, no one understood why, so they began questioning him about his daily habits and found out that he would drink himself to sleep every night, chugging vodka from a 3 litre bottle he had filled with skittles… taste the rainbow… I guess… If you haven’t figured it out by now, well… It feels fair to say that Jamie Vardy was a high functioning alcoholic and in fact, he had to hit rock bottom yet again, before he made it back up… With his fiance pregnant with his second child, Vardy went on a weekend bender and ended up going missing for days… When she finally found him, he was nearly passed out in a bar… The look of disappointment in her face should’ve been enough but it was the words she uttered that changed everything: “I’m not gonna bring a child into your crazy world… People would die to be in your position… You gotta make something of your life, with or without me… But don’t throw this away”. . .
By the next year, Vardy traded his skittle vodka for a matchday diet consisting of 3 cans of red bull, a double espresso and a cheese and ham omelette and though that wasn’t the healthiest option either, it “allowed him to run like a nutjob all match” and so things finally took a turn for the best… You see, around December, after a good start, Leicester suddenly dropped to third place after going 3 matches without a win… and as they needed to pull everyone together in order to secure that first place, no one was expecting Jamie Vardy to repeatedly save them, scoring 10 goals, 8 of which were either openers or match winners… as he led them on a 21 match unbeaten run… taking the title and being named the club’s player of the season, even making sure to amp up the team’s celebration in the locker room by filling their water jugs with his famous skittle vodka… At 27 years of age, Jamie Vardy had finally arrived at the Premier League. And his first season was… something… I mean his first ever Premier League start went something like this… Leicester were losing 3 to 1 against United and though he had already assisted their first goal, then he not only won them 2 penalties, but he scored one of the goals and assisted the other to make it 5 to 3… Di Maria, Rooney, Falcao and Van Persie were all on the pitch and somehow some guy who just 3 years before had played in the 7th tier managed to pull off more goal contributions than those 4 put together… It was the first time in Premier League history that United had surrendered a two-goal lead and lost… At that point, Vardy thought “What could possibly go wrong? ” and then Leicester went 13 matches without a win and he himself went 6 months without scoring… By April, they were still bottom of the table… No club had ever spent that long at the bottom and managed to survive… that was, until Vardy had something to say… With 4 minutes left in their match vs West Ham, he assisted the winning goal in injury time….
in the very next match, he scored the winner and then the only goal vs Burnley… by the end of April, not only was Vardy the league’s player of the month, but Leicester were already out of the relegation zone. . And with Roy Hodgson watching from the stands… Only 2 weeks after the end of the season, Vardy got his international debut thanks to an injury crisis… In fact, as the Daily Mirror would write “though it makes for an interesting story, it is unlikely this will turn into an international career” and Vardy… Well, once again, he felt the same, he even asked his agent to pretend like he was injured because he saw no point in missing out on his vacation to join them if he was never gonna get called up again… But thankfully, his friends and family damn near forced him to go and once he came back, he was a changed man… Vardy had never wanted anything as bad in life as he wanted to be called back to that team… as he wrote: “Once you’ve rubbed shoulders with the country’s best players, you don’t want to let it go” and honestly, I think that week was what jumpstarted everything for him… If he was good before, now he just seemed to be in a completely different frame of mind, his motivation was on a whole new planet… 17 matches into the league season, he had contributed to a goal in every match except one… and right in the middle of that spree, there was something even more impressive… 11 consecutive matches scoring… The longest streak in the history of the premier league… and to make all of that even more shocking… Aside from their defeat to Arsenal and a 3 nil beat down at Newcastle, Leicester had either won by a single goal or tied every single one of their matches… To say that Jamie Vardy had been the difference maker would be an unfair representation of how much he had carried them to the top… His goal contributions had won 26 points for his team in the space of 3 and a half months… Take those points away from them and instead of being top of the league, they’d be tied for second to last… It was only fitting that Vardy got to break Van Nistelrooy’s record at Old Trafford, as the fans yelled out the name of their legendary goalscorer, Vardy put the nail in his coffin, he ran towards those fans and yelled back at them “No, me, me….
All fucking me”. . .
It couldn’t have been more iconic, not even if Tarantino had choreographed it… Leicester were unstoppable… If at the beginning of the season, the bookmakers famously claimed they had a 5000 to 1 chance of winning the league, with 11 matches to go they were still at the top, if the question in everyone’s mind used to be “when will their luck run out? ”, by then it was more like “who is going to stop them? ”.
. . And that was when Harry Kane had the brilliant idea of declaring himself as the man for the job, posting a picture of blood hungry lions on twitter, hinting that his beloved Tottenham was somehow gonna ruin Leicester’s plans… But again, Vardy was there to make sure that did not happen… If he had already assisted the winners for 2 out of their last 4 matches, then he did it once more and followed it up by scoring both of their goals against Sunderland, as well as another one in a draw against Everton, to total 16 points won for his team in 10 matches… and even if then he got hit with a 2 match ban that nearly led him to lose his mind… the team kept it together and 2 weeks later, they all stood in front of the TV at Vardy’s house, with hundreds of fans standing outside, as everyone watched Chelsea kill any chances Tottenham had left… and the moment the whistle was sounded, first Jamie posted a picture of Mufasa on twitter to remind Kane who was laughing last and then… it was pandemonium, as they said “Jamie Vardy was having a party”.
. . and Jamie Vardy was a Premier League Champion… and though the PFA snubbed him, both the FWA and the Premier League itself named him the player of the season… and even more importantly for him, he was called up for the 2016 Euros… By the end of that perfect year, Vardy was ranked 8th in the Ballon D’Or, above Zlatan, Lewandowski, Aguero, Benzema… and his achievements did not stop there… The next year, he scored in the champions league against Sevilla and Atletico, leaving Leicester one step away from the semi finals, the year after that he scored the goal of the season and joined England for the world cup… And in 2020 he finally made up for what was maybe the biggest regret in his career… If in his memorable 2016 season, he had finished one goal off of the golden boot, much thanks to his 2 match ban, then he made up for it, beating Didier Drgba to become the oldest ever player to take the award… and leaving him 7 goals off of the premier league 100 club, which obviously he reached the following season, which was made even for impressive by adding on one more achievement….
