Perfect storm enables Leicester City's surprising rise in Premier League
The difference between a miracle and a fairytale is that whereas miracles are lasting, fairytales end. By definition, miracles are unlikely and often unverifiable occurrences in real life, mostly theological notions that lean heavily on belief but are timeless. Fairytales are works of fiction that are finite.
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So which is Leicester City in this ongoing English Premier League season: A miracle or a fairytale?
That will all depend on how things end. On whether the magic runs out and the joint-league leaders tumble back down the standings, somewhere toward the bottom, where the natural order dictates that they belong. Or if manager Claudio Ranieri and his unlikely band of world-beaters can somehow summon enough remaining magic to see out the season at the top.
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Going into this weekend's 15th round of games, Leicester shares first place with Manchester City on 29 points, although City has the better goal difference – plus-16 to plus-8 – and therefore takes the lead outright. But Leicester is one of just two teams to have lost a lone game, along with Tottenham Hotspur. It has finished four matchdays in first place and has never dropped lower than sixth. With 24 games remaining, there is an awfully long way to go, of course, but for a team pegged by many to have a relegation fight on its hands, Leicester is the most surprising Premier League team in memory.
In some ways, this season has been an aberration. The Premier League is an oligopoly. Just three teams – City, Chelsea and Manchester United – have won it in the last 11 seasons. But even though December has dawned, the top five teams are just four points apart. And a mere nine points separate first place from 10th.
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Something of a perfect storm has enabled Leicester's surprising rise from the doldrums, after avoiding relegation by six points last season and placing 14th. All of the big clubs are troubled. City has been inconsistent. Defending champion Chelsea is suffering through an inexplicable crisis in form. United has forgotten how to attack and score goals. Arsenal is its usual mercurial self and, just as typically, beset by an injury rash. Liverpool has gone through a managerial switch. Tottenham is young and uneven.
And consider that of those Big Six, as we'll call them for these purposes, Leicester has faced just three of them in its first 14 games, all of them at home. They played Spurs to a 1-1 tie. When the Foxes played host to Arsenal, they got walloped 5-2. And last Saturday, when United came to town they pressed and countered them shrewdly, as ever, but spent much of the game chasing Man U around and getting dominated in a 1-1 tie that probably said more about United's inability to forge scoring chances.
Leicester's eight wins, meanwhile, have come against Sunderland, West Ham United, Aston Villa, Norwich City, Crystal Palace, West Bromwich Albion, Watford and Newcastle. Just two of those teams are presently in the top half. And while you're certainly supposed to collect the bulk of your points against the league's weaker teams, it indicates that Leicester has capitalized on a soft schedule and a real efficiency against the bottom feeders.
After playing Swansea City on Saturday, Leicester faces Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool and Manchester City to finish out the year and complete the first round of fixtures. But that isn't to diminish the Foxes. Ranieri's tactical nous has shone through. He has benefited, of course, from the breakout seasons by lava-hot striker Jamie Vardy and winger Riyad Mahrez. Vardy, just a month from his 29th birthday, has scored in 11 straight games to break Ruud van Nistelrooy's Premier League record and take the league lead with 14 goals. He has played out of his skin, just four years after he was employed by a club called Fleetwood Town in the fifth tier of English soccer.
Still, the numbers don't lie. In their seminal book "Soccernomics," Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski found that, from 1998 through 2007, there was an 89-percent correlation between the payroll of teams in the Premier League and the second-tier Championship and where they placed in the final standings. Since then, that's hardly changed, as United, City and Chelsea's wage bills tower over those of other teams.
In the 2013-14 season, the last for which we have reliable figures, United's payroll was $326 million, City's was $309 million and Chelsea's was $291 million. Leicester's was $55 million. Granted, Leicester played in the Championship that year and has surely increased its spending considerably since its promotion. But even if it has doubled, or even tripled, empirical evidence says the Foxes will slide down the table before it all ends on May 15.
Ranieri, cautious of needlessly inflating expectations, is saying essentially the same thing. After Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger (2013-14 payroll: $250 million) suggested Leicester "cannot be ruled out" as serious title contenders, he called Wenger "a joker."
"He knows the truth very well," the veteran Italian Leicester manager told the English press before the United game. "Normally these kind of clubs [like Leicester] can compete for long time, then at the end it becomes more difficult."
He insisted that Leicester's goal remains avoiding relegation. "The league is very strange and open but our goal is 40 points," Ranieri said. "Our goal at the moment is this, but let me see the next two months and then maybe I can change the goal."
Ranieri knows it's still fairly early. He knows that history and the numbers and common sense all say that this fairytale will run out. That, in all likelihood, the prince won't return with her glass slipper, and that Cinderella will forever remain a servant.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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