LEICESTER CITY

‘As the Fosse is known throughout the land, so the new club will be known to the future.’

FRANK GARDNER co-founder, 1884 – optimistic about the future, and the fame of the Fosse

‘I watched Leicester City lose in the 1969 Cup final with my dad and grandad when I was eight and cried all the way home.’

GARY LINEKER

There were mixed emotions when Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016. Euphoria, of course, for Foxes fans. Frustration for fans of the few teams that usually win it these days, and a sort of ‘what the fuck just happened?’ from the rest of us. How did a decent team with only one or two genuinely top-class players just win the Premier League title? Scratch that. One genuinely top-class player. Jamie Vardy,* who appeared from nowhere to score goal after goal against the best clubs in England. Although as we have seen, fans of Stockbridge Park Steels, Halifax and Fleetwood will know that it wasn’t nowhere he had come from.

There was one emotion that was shared by all football fans. That was a mixture of mild fear and disgust as Gary Lineker had promised to present Match of the Day in his pants if his home-town club won the League. But as Gary told me, the win meant as much to the city as to the club: ‘People were interested in my city. They flocked to see the market and the car park where Richard III was buried, to see the place where this most extraordinary sporting feat had occurred.’

So, without wanting to sound like a local newsreader in 1970, when did this journey to an unlikely title begin? One night in 1884, a group of lads in a Bible class decided to start a football team. Hang on, what? A group of who? Surely you mean a group of lads in a pub? Or a factory? Or a cricket team wanted to get fit over the winter?

Nope. A group of lads in a Bible class. Actual lads too. The average age of the Leicester Fosse team that played in their first game was 16. Wow, that is young. (Sorry, what’s a fosse, by the way? That’s right, it is a way. The Roman road that went in a straight line through Leicester from the south-west to the north-east. Yes, I did know that already.)

Because they were so young, and because football folk are hilarious, they were landed with the nickname ‘The Fossils’,* and in 1891 they were landed with a new ground called Filbert Street, where most of their history unfolded, although not the really good bit in 2016.

The young men of the Bible class were obviously quite modest too, because their original kit consisted of a black shirt with a sky-blue sash and white trousers. It took some time before they came to wear their famous blue and white via a dashing detour of brown and blue halves.

Leicester became City in 1919, leaving the Fossils a long way behind them and eventually becoming the Foxes because of the county’s association with hunting. Amazingly, in these more enlightened times, not only do they not apologise for the fox-hunting link, they play a hunting horn as the teams emerge.

They got themselves another nickname in 1963. The winter of 1962/63 was the worst in living memory, and for 10 weeks barely any football was played anywhere. Halifax Town actually charged people to use their pitch as an ice rink. But Leicester’s groundsman had treated his topsoil with a mix of fertiliser and weed-killer, which caused a chemical reaction that kept the frost out just enough that a ‘dozen burning braziers’ made the pitch playable. After an army of fans had cleared the snow, of course.

I still don’t know why that solution didn’t work at any other club, but it enabled Leicester to get some games in, and playing a tantalising brand of football that the Guardian called ‘whirl and switch’ they established a healthy lead in the First Division and the title of ‘the Ice Kings’ in the tabloids. Sadly, it didn’t last, and they fell away to finish fourth, and lose the FA Cup final. But it’s an indication of what a force they have been in the past, and I bet a lot of you didn’t know that, because they are a team and a city that often went unnoticed. As Gary Lineker also told me: ‘It’s neither up north, nor down south, it’s not a big city, it’s not a small city and no one outside Leicester could spell it properly.’

The whole world can spell it properly now. In 2002, they moved from Filbert Street to the King Power Stadium, thus causing every away fan in the country to breathe a sigh of relief. Historic the old ground may have been, but only if ‘historic’ is a euphemism for ‘dangerously ramshackle’.

The move didn’t lead to success. By 2007 they were in the third tier of English football for the first time ever, but were back in the Championship when they were bought by a Thai-led consortium led by Khun Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha.

English football fans are an insular bunch and tend to be wary of overseas owners – particularly fans like me who don’t like the idea of any club being ‘owned’ – but there’s no denying that at Leicester (and Man City) there has been an unusually healthy symbiosis between the owners and their fans, and an unusual understanding of the area from the overseas money men. So the football world shared the genuine grief of the people of Leicester when their chairman was killed (along with four others, lest we forget) when his helicopter crashed leaving the King Power after a game in October 2018.

At least he got to witness the Premier League season of 2015/16, one of the most remarkable in modern times. All the more so because the season before had been pretty special, but for very different reasons. Well adrift at the bottom of the Premier League with nine games to go, they won seven of them and stayed up by the skin of their teeth. So it was with some justification that they went into the new season as 5,000 to 1 outsiders to win the Premier League, even though they were now managed by the likeable but eccentric Claudio Ranieri, who over the course of the season looked on in as much confusion as the rest of us and said ‘dilly dilly’ a lot for no apparent reason.

Oddly enough for a team with few amazing players, they were, well, an amazing team. They probably got a bit lucky, in that all the usual top six suspects had an off-season, but there was nothing lucky about their wins or their goals.

Gary Lineker calls it ‘possibly the greatest miracle in the history of team sport’. I cannot think of any more uplifting words on which to end a chapter.

Why You Shouldn’t Support Them

■ They sacked Ranieri the season after.

■ Gary Lineker is only a little older than me but looks much, much better in his pants.

■ They put a car park on top of my favourite king.