March 28, 2024

The One

May 20, 2016

Two weeks ago, the greatest upset in sports history took place in England. To most of the rest of the world, it was the greatest sports story of any kind, ever.

This will require some background.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. By any metric, it just is. More people watch it on television (more than 3.2 billion people tuned in to watch at least some part of the 2014 World Cup finals), more people watch it in person, there are more leagues in more countries, more professional and amateur players, more everything.

Even though about 5 million American boys and girls play youth soccer and our women’s national team is the best in the world, we are far more focused on other sports.

England, however, takes their soccer, which they call football, very seriously. They first codified rules in 1863 and started the Football Association, which is still their soccer governing body, in 1888.

With the Premier League at the top, there are five major divisions of professional soccer in England, and dozens more semi-professional divisions descending in size and quality.

There are 20 teams in the Premier League, playing each other twice during the 38-match season. Three points are awarded for a win and one point for a tie. At the end of season, the team with the most points wins; there are no playoffs.

In an especially cruel twist unlike anything in American sports, the teams that finish in the bottom three places are booted out of the league altogether, sent down to the next lower division in a process known as relegation. The three top teams from that lower division are then promoted.

Since there are no spending caps in the Premier League, there is a distinct hierarchy — the teams with the richest owners and the biggest stadiums buy the best players and fight for the title among themselves.

Until this year. They’ve never seen a year like the one just concluded.

Leicester has had a team, called Leicester City, for 132 years. They’ve never finished higher than second in the top division (in 1929) and have been relegated seven different times. In the 2007 – 2008 season they were mired in the third division and in danger of falling out of the major professional leagues altogether.

Last year, freshly promoted after languishing for seven years in the lower divisions, they seemed doomed to another relegation. In last place for a record 155 consecutive days, they somehow managed to win six of their final eight matches and survived. It will be forever known as the Great Escape. The manager’s reward was getting fired.

Things looked bleak this year, too. Leicester City’s big off-season acquisitions consisted of two players from France’s second division. One of their “stars” was considered washedup five years ago, playing semi-professionally for $43 a week.

Their new head man, Claudio Ranieri, a 63-year-old Italian, had been a manager at various clubs around Europe for 30 years but had never won a single top-tier title. He was fired from his last job as manager of the Greek national team when they lost to the Faroe Islands (ranked 187th in the world) in qualifying for the European championships.

English bookmakers, who are legal and licensed, made Leicester City even money to be relegated this year and Ranieri was the favorite to be the first coach fired.

The odds on Leicester City winning the Premier League? A staggering 5,000-1. You could get those same odds on Elvis being found alive or Kim Kardashian becoming president (our Lions, by contrast, have been pegged at 70-1 to win the Super Bowl next year; the hapless Cleveland Browns 200-1).

But Leicester City, whose demise was predicted weekly, kept winning. It was the billiondollar teams (Leicester City was purchased by a new owner in 2014 for about $55 million) and their $400 million payrolls falling by the wayside until none were left.

Leicester City’s team of has-beens and neverweres had won the English Premier League at 5,000-1. There is no analog in American sports. Or in any other sports.

The entire, extraordinary season is a tailormade bad commencement address exploding with clichés: You can do it, never give up, anything is possible, one game at a time, add whatever others you choose because they suddenly all came true.

The likelihood is Leicester City’s championship run was so outlandishly improbable it won’t be repeated anytime soon, if ever. European soccer is dominated by huge money that will surely rise back to the top. Probably.

Ranieri was asked what it was like to win after being 5,000-1 underdogs. “We were the one, yes?” he said.

The best part of this is that every underdog’s glimmer of hope now flickers a little brighter. They might be the one, too.

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