Leicester City had finished fourteenth the season before, having avoided relegation with seven wins from their last nine. Bookmakers priced them at 5,000-1 for the 2015-16 title, longer than odds offered that year on the discovery of the Loch Ness monster.
How it worked
Not by possession. Leicester averaged well under half of it and ranked near the bottom of the division for passes completed. They defended in a compact mid-block, won the ball through N’Golo Kanté, and released Jamie Vardy into the space behind a defence that had pushed up. Riyad Mahrez provided the version of the same idea that worked against sides who refused to push up.
Vardy scored in eleven consecutive league matches. Mahrez was voted the players' player of the year. Kanté was sold to Chelsea that summer and won the title again.
Why it has not happened since
The gap between the top clubs’ revenue and everybody else’s grew sharply over the following seasons, and the tactical answer to a low block and a fast forward is now standard rather than novel. Leicester also enjoyed an almost untouched injury record and a season in which the established sides were unusually poor simultaneously.
Take away any one of those and it does not happen. That is what makes it worth returning to: not that it was unlikely, but that it required everything to be unlikely at once.
