At the age of 20, having been dropped from the Sheffield Wednesday academy as a teenager, Jamie Vardy finally made a first team.
It was with that noted international powerhouse, Stocksbridge Park Steels, an eighth-tier team in Yorkshire. Roughly speaking, Stocksbridge is not much closer to the Premiership than your beer-league team is to the NHL. Vardy's first contract paid him $60 a week. He remembers it as a lot of money.
This wasn't a quick Hollywood pit stop on the high road to glory. Vardy played in South Yorkshire for four seasons. Then he moved up slightly to Halifax Town, in the fifth tier. Then Fleetwood Town in the third. Four years ago, he landed at Leicester City, which at the time played in the Championship, one division below the Premier League.
Vardy's was the sort of career that was supposed to stall near the top, earn him an upper-middle class wage for a few years and then fall back to Earth. Most of these sorts of players end up as coaches before they hit 30.
Instead, Vardy, 29, became the best striker in England. There's no mystery to how he did it – Vardy is uncommonly quick and aggressive, has a world-class first touch and a poacher's mindset. The mystery is why no one noticed he was capable of it.
The same can be said for his Leicester teammate, Riyad Mahrez. Weaned in the French second division, Mahrez was sold to Leicester in 2014 for $800,000 – the big-time footballing equivalent of a rounding error. This year he is arguably the best player in the best league in the world.
Leicester is shot through with these sorts of stories. Three years ago, N'Golo Kanté was playing in the French third division. Danny Drinkwater spent his entire career being shuttled around on loan. Marc Albrighton was cut by Aston Villa, far and away the worst team in the Premiership.
Most observers tapped Leicester to be relegated this year. With more than two-thirds of the season done, the Foxes sit first. They've just run the toughest gauntlet of their season, playing Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal in successive weeks. They won twice convincingly, and were unlucky to lose the third.
Now they have to hold on for 12 more games. If they can manage it, they will have accomplished the greatest team feat of the 21st century in any major sport. This is much more than unlikely. Six months ago, every reasonable observer would have called it impossible.
That's not because the Foxes were bad (though they were). It's because they're poor. And an economic hierarchy is hard-coded into soccer.
Some teams – the Stocksbridges and Halifax Towns – are feeders. They develop players, amuse their own fans with them for a season or two, and then sell them on to bigger clubs. The best talent moves up the chain quickly. A few late-bloomers go through more slowly.
The biggest clubs might be called the eaters. Their financial heft is based entirely on the idea that they can predictably win. This allows them to spend (and, often, misspend) ludicrous amounts of money acquiring talent.
Great players end up on great teams, sold for a great deal of money. The cash from a single sale at the top can work its way down the ladder, eventually propping up dozens of smaller clubs.
That's how the system works. Or, at least, that's how it worked. Leicester City has flipped the model on its head. They are neither sellers nor buyers. They're just winners.
Before Christmas, Leicester played Chelsea. The defending Premier League champion had been having a rough go of it. Its roster that day – starters and subs – cost nearly $600-million to assemble. Leicester's cost a sixth of that. Leicester won.
Chelsea is owned by a billionaire oligarch. He's happily bled a fortune into the set-up. The club doesn't need to turn yearly profits.
But losing can have a terrible inertia beyond red and black ink. Once you get going the wrong way, not only does your revenue stream dry up, but the people you're counting on to turn things around – the players – start looking for the exit.
Last year, Eden Hazard was Chelsea's best player. He cost an insane amount and is outrageously compensated. This week, he mused that it would "be difficult to say no" to a move to Paris-Saint Germain, or any other team with a decent shot at winning the Champions League. Chelsea will not be in next year's Champions League. So Hazard's loyalty has already begun to waver.
That's the problem with a world constructed entirely on the basis of spreadsheets. Purely financial logic extends itself to all questions surrounding performance.
Once your team begins losing, you don't screw yourself down for a couple of bumpy seasons. You begin pressing for a move to a winner. In the player's mind, the club has gone back on its deal – it promised to win, and now it isn't. So he feels no guilt about abandoning ship.
That's how eaters become feeders. If things don't get turned around – by spending more money than you are earning – the situation can conceivably become permanent.
A year ago, the organization worked. The biggest teams prospered. The middle tier was able to stay afloat. The worst were part of a changing cast. Every once in a while, someone got lucky and jumped a level. But the top did not change.
It has now. Leicester City is leading a revolution.
Whether they can maintain is a real question. Vardy is now one of the most sought-after players in the world. He just signed a four-year extension that bumps his pay to $6-million a year. Manchester United pays Wayne Rooney – who's become Vardy's sidekick on the English national team – $25-million. That number cannot be reconciled, no matter what Leicester wins.
Having come from outside the established system, will Vardy do what players within it will not – stay loyal?
Better question: Would you?
Cathal Kelly