Would Leicester City winning the Premier League be good or bad for football?
If you were French, you’d probably call them “Lay-ster”. If you were American, you’d probably say “Nah son, it’s, Lie-chester”.
If you had a working knowledge of the Queen’s English though, you’d look at the French and the Americans, shake your head sadly at their arrogance and their frequent mispronunciations, and tell them that L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R should be pronounced “Lay-cess-ter”.
And you’d be wrong.
Even if you were a Rugby Union fan and hence knew of the dominant Leicester Tigers (ten-time English and two-time European champions), or a social studies major studying the fabled “Leicester Model” (the city is upheld as one of Europe’s best models for multicultural and multiracial integration).
Or even a potato chip lover whose obsession with the snack has manifested itself in inane research and the utterly useless knowledge that Leicester’s very own Walkers has the world’s single largest potato crisp manufacturing unit (over 11 million bags of crisps are made there every day using about 800 tonnes of potatoes) located in the city, you’d still probably be pronouncing it wrong.
Well, it’s pronounced “Lester” and you’d better get used to hearing that name, because the unassuming Midlands city is home to a football team that is scripting one of the greatest sporting tales in modern history.
Sitting pretty at the top of the heap – three points away from sealing their maiden First Division title (after 132 years of trying) – is Leicester City, and no one can quite make out what to think about this.
Is this the best or worst thing to happen to Football in recent times?
The bad and the ugly
Last year, when Chelsea became champions, Sky Bet – one of England’s leading betting agencies made a neat £150,000 in profit. If Leicester City (5000/1 when the season started, 1000/1 even in late November) were to become champions, they stand to lose a whopping £5.5 million!
But no one’s really going to be sad for a betting company.
Let us then, examine the case for why exactly Leicester City winning the title would be bad for football and in particular English football.
Are we giving Leicester a free ride because of their “David” status?
If Jamie Vardy played for Liverpool or Chelsea or even a Tottenham Hotspur, he’d have been worked on the anvil of public moral outrage with a relish that is often limited to the likes of Diego Costa and Luis Suarez, or a John Terry – whether it be with the nightclub incident or his various unpleasant on-field antics.
But the more important question is whether mediocrity is being celebrated merely because of the package that it’s coming in?
Are they really a good enough football side to merit being champions of England?
For many, Leicester are simply winning due to a combination of sheer luck and alarming ineptitude from the nation’s top sides, and nothing great from their own end.
That point's right to an extent. The “top” sides have been absolute garbage for large tracts of the season. Manchester City have been about as comfortable in their own skins as Rohit Sharma on a seaming track, Chelsea were an absolute disgrace for the majority of the season, Manchester United are still floundering about like a beached whale, Liverpool got Jürgen Klopp a season (and two months) too late and Arsenal have been, well, Arsenal.
Also Read: Leicester City - The anti-capitalists
For these people, Leicester have simply taken advantage of this mass confusion to emerge out of the melee unscathed. You see, their tactics have generally been too simple and straightforward for them to be actually taken seriously.
Sit deep, chase everything, and kick the ball long to the strikers. And by strikers, I mean Jamie Vardy.
They are an out-dated team in an era where football tactics often require Ph.Ds to decipher and anything that does not have a false nine, or inverted wingers, or converted centre-backs is a faux pas.
In a world where purists consider tiki-taka and possession-based football as the only true form of the game, Leicester with their 45% average possession percentage (third lowest in the league) and 70% pass success percentage (the lowest!) are just a Tony Pulis side dressed up to look pretty, a side worthy only of contemptuous derision – in pure technical terms at least.
If you were to look at the statistics – seemingly the sole reliable barometer of all things football today - they are top on only three parameters: Interceptions per game, total wins and… total points.
It’s giving Opta a headache.
Does it reflect poorly on the quality of football in England?
The English Premier League’s self-marketed notion that it is the best football league on the planet in terms of footballing quality has been held as rubbish for quite some time now due to the complete incompetence of its top clubs in European competition.
The fear now is that this will be exacerbated by having Leicester become the standard bearers for English football. Imagine Messi, Suarez and Neymar vs. Huth and Morgan… *shudders*.
This surely is no way for English football teams to move forward and catch up with their continental counterparts
Most importantly, is it bad for business?
The English Premier League is arguably the most televised sporting league on the planet, with fans and fanatics sitting in front of TVs and large screens all over the place – from Manila to Manhattan, from Bangalore to Bangassou - screaming their lungs out for their favourite teams as they battle it out in far-away England.
Even those with only a passing knowledge of the EPL, and indeed Football - even the kinds that sneer at the rest of us for addressing our favourite teams as “us” and “we” (What? Are you from Manchester? “We played poorly it seems”! Humph!) - would still have heard about the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and maybe even Manchester City.
And all of these fans, fanatics, casual viewers and virulent haters - after taking a cursory glance at the EPL table - have been asking the same question for quite some time now. Who in bloody hell are these guys on the top of the table?
That’s not good for business.
You don’t sell out stadiums in China and the United States with unknown names - TV networks don’t shell out millions of dollars to obtain Champions League distribution rights so that they can show Genk vs. BATE Borisov (or in this case Leicester vs. anybody).
As Charles Stillitano, a US sports executive (Chairman of event promoter Relevent Sports and whose brainchild is the International Champions Cup) said “Let’s call it the money pot created by soccer and the fandom around the world. Who has had more of an integral role, Manchester United or Leicester... Leicester City have no place in the Champions League”
The fact remains that Leicester are still a big bunch of unknowns and no one in Dar-es-salaam, Colombo, Suva or Miami is going to shell out big bucks to buy a Leicester City t-shirt, or a Foxes imprinted pair of track-pants.
Yet.