LEICESTER, England — The party to celebrate the Cinderella story of our time in global soccer will have to wait a little longer.
But for many here, it seems like only a matter of time before the team clinches the English Premier League title — and shows the world that plucky underdogs can indeed triumph over big global brands.
Leicester could clinch the championship of the most popular soccer league in the world as early as Monday if Tottenham Hotspur, the only team with a mathematical chance of surpassing Leicester, loses to Chelsea.
“Chelsea will thump Tottenham tomorrow,” said Danny Laing, a 50-year-old forklift driver who was nursing a pint after watching his Leicester City team draw Manchester United, 1-1, in a game he described as “not good for your nervous system.”
He was one of thousands of people who piled into the city’s pubs and cafes to watch what could have been a fairy-tale finish had the Foxes beaten United, one of the world’s most famous teams, at Old Trafford, one of the sport’s most hallowed venues. Leicester City last won at Old Trafford in 1998.
“A win against Manchester would have been huge,” Bradley Roehrig, 19, said as he spread his arms wide. But it didn’t seem to dampen business at the cafe where he works, which was attempting to cash in on excitement with “Vardy cappuccinos,” a version with chocolate powder sprinkled on top to form an image of the team’s star striker, Jamie Vardy.
In recent days, this ethnically diverse town about 100 miles north of London has transformed into a sea of blue, Leicester City’s color. It’s not just the fans — who wear blue shirts, scarves, wigs and nail polish. It’s the cityscape as well. The train station, for instance, is festooned with blue and white bunting; the team’s flag flies over the town hall; a blue scarf is draped around a bronze statue of King Richard III; and, in the evenings, landmark buildings are lit up blue.
None of it was supposed to be happening.
At the beginning of the season in August, British bookmakers were offering 5,000-1 odds on the club to win the title. To put that in context, bookies were offering 500-1 odds on former “American Idol” and “X Factor” judge Simon Cowell becoming the country’s next prime minister.
But under the leadership of Claudio Ranieri, an Italian who had last briefly coached Greece’s men’s national team, Leicester City rapidly climbed to the top of the league standings.
“This is a real one-off to enjoy in an era when rich teams win everything,” said Simon Kuper, a British author of a number of books about soccer. “What’s happened is not a trend. It’s not like small teams will continue to win. This is a real one-off. You don’t see anything like this in the big European leagues.”
It’s hard to overemphasize just how improbable the ascent has been. In the Premier League, teams that finish at the top get more money, which they then can spend on players — there isn’t a salary cap — which then helps them win more games. And there isn’t a draft system as there is in U.S. sports to encourage parity by giving teams at the bottom of the league first dibs on new players.
Instead, there is a meritocratic system of promotion and relegation: At the highest level in England, the three best Football League Championship teams join the Premier League each season, while the three worst Premier League teams move down.
Here’s what makes the Foxes’ journey read like a Hollywood script: Last season they languished at the bottom of the league, only barely escaping relegation.
The story line this year, of course, has been dramatically different, and it has caught the imagination of fans in Leicester and beyond. All the club needs to do now is to win one of its last two games — or Tottenham to lose one of its final three — and it will be crowned a most unlikely champion.
"There are people here who used to support other clubs because they are glory-grabbers," said Jenny Harrison, 27, a credit controller who watched the game at the Slug and Lettuce, a packed local pub. "But now they are supporting Leicester because it's a fairy tale."
To be sure, Leicester City is not an upstart village team, but it is a relatively small club in a league in which the amount of money a club has correlated , at least to an extent, with how well it does.
Or so it seemed.
In a fun little calculation, the BBC recently examined the relationship between salaries and points earned this season and found that Chelsea, the league's defending champion, spent £4.5 million ($6.56 million) for every point it earned this season, whereas Leicester City paid £600,000 ($877,000).
So what did the Foxes do so right?
Locals point to the new coach, the scouts who found players who were good value for money and the club’s style of rock-solid defense that has proved infuriating to rivals.
The more superstitious point to the reinterment of Richard III, the monarch immortalized by William Shakespeare, whose remains were sensationally discovered underneath a car park.
He was, after all, buried here last year amid much fanfare, and around that time, Leicester City’s fortunes started to change.
“Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But thank you, Richard!” said Irfan Chhatbar, 32, a graphic designer from Leicester. Even more than Richard III, he suggested, it has been the success of its football club that has put his city on the international map.
“I went to Barcelona a few weeks ago, and never have people known where Leicester is on the map,” Chhatbar said. “I didn’t have to explain, ‘It’s this far from Birmingham, this far from London.’ This is the first time people knew where it was.
“That’s because of Leicester City.”
