Picture a stadium, filled to the brim with over 32,000 people. Every seat is packed inside King Power stadium. The energy of the crowd is buzzing, active and eager to watch the spectacle before them. The spectacle? It is the perfect story of soccer, the best underdog one could ever imagine. It is Leicester City taking the Premier League title for the first time in their club’s history. A team that had been stuck at the near bottom of the rankings from the previous year and narrowly avoiding relegation, they are now champions of English Soccer.
Coming into the 2015-2016 season, the Leicester City Foxes had been seen to try and break a highlight season they had the previous year, which had them sitting at a comfy 14th place in the Barclays Premier League. They had almost not made it past relegation, or removal from the Premier League to the Football League Championship, which is the next tier under for English Soccer. Their chances of winning the Premier League Championship was 1 in 5000 this year. There was a better chance of finding Elvis Presley alive this year, or Simon Cowell becoming the Prime Minister of England!
The Foxes started off well, with the preseason friendly matches ending on a positive note as they only tied to Mansfield Town, a lower tier team. The regular season continued off actually very well from there, Leicester winning most games, and only losing once in the first two months to Arsenal 2-5. The team then had another series of great wins, tying Manchester United in November, and beating Chelsea in December. The second half of the season was just as fruitful, only losing two more times, once to Liverpool, and once more to Arsenal. The rest of the games not listed all resulted in wins or ties for Leicester. As the season end draws near and Leicester prepare to play their last game against Chelsea, they have come away with the Champions Trophy already. The second place team, Tottenham Hotspurs, cannot overcome Leicester anymore, with six points in between them and only one game left.
Leicester city has come away with only three losses the entire season! That is a feat to be impressed of, and their record coming into the last game at Chelsea is 23-11-3. They have had a monumental season, breaking multiple records along the way. Their striker, or attacker, Jamie Vardy, broke a record earlier this season for games consecutively scoring at least one goal, setting the new record at eleven. Riyad Mahrez, a Right Midfielder for the team, has come away as the first Leicester City player to ever win the Professional Footballers’ Association’s Players’ Player of the Year Award. He is also the first African player to ever win the award. In addition to the other monumental club and personal records broken, the team had four players from their club represented on the Team of the Year roster, tying Tottenham Hotspurs for the number of players appearing.
So what does this mean to us as Americans? Well, it means you should be watching more soccer! Soccer is a huge sport, growing and getting bigger every day. Leicester City winning the Title could open new doors for new teams getting into the leagues. It could mean that the traditional big names might be falling soon, and the soccer community is the biggest it has ever been, internationally and in the United States. Now is a fantastic time to get into the sport. It is not all just about kicking a ball around either. Half of the experience is seeing games live, and interacting with the outlandish and intense chants that people scream for their favorite team!
The Cinderella Story of the year, Leicester City, has shook the international soccer community. People are clamoring for more, and want to see more teams like Leicester City have seasons like this. It makes the game exciting, and brings more tension onto and off the field. It makes the game more fun too. The eyes of the soccer community will be on Leicester this summer as they have been invited to compete in the International Champions Cup, a tournament that takes place all over the world and features some of the greatest clubs like FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Bayern Munich. The even better part? They often play in the United States! It will be exciting to see the players on Leicester compete this summer as the Euro Cup will be in full swing as well. Go Foxes!
