The last decade has rewritten the meaning of an English football hero. Look at the Lionesses, who have won the European title, inspired young girls and boys alike, and transformed women’s sport for future generations by encouraging major investment and mainstream broadcasting.
Or Gareth Southgate’s England squad: a group of clued-up men from diverse backgrounds who advocated for tolerance, supported each other and were vocal about their principles, left their egos and club rivalries off the pitch and shifted the team’s reputation from seedy, flashy and brutish to an inclusive, optimistic representation of modern Britain. These players gave us hope, were ambassadors for the sport, became idols everyone could be proud of.
And then there’s another kind of footballing hero: Jamie Vardy. How would he describe himself in one word? “Twat”.
Jamie Vardy is not like England’s younger role models. He is unapologetically laddy, apologetically lairy, and famous for a training routine that involved downing cans of Red Bull before matches. He didn’t get talent-spotted as a teenager and fast-tracked to the Premier League, didn’t rise the ranks of its training academies – in fact, he got released from his beloved Sheffield Wednesday aged 16 for being too small. He just loved football, kept playing for £30 a week at Stocksbridge Park Steels while working full-time at a local carbon fibre factory, rushing home early from matches before his ankle tag went off at 6pm.
But great sporting heroes don’t always follow the rules, and Vardy became one by accidentally pulling off the unbelievable: his relentless goal-scoring in the lower leagues in his twenties got him noticed, got him an agent, got him signed professionally and he ended up going from non-league football to winning the Premier League with Leicester City in under four years. In 2016, the most incredible victory in the sport’s history coincided with the equally incredible rags-to-riches story of its star player. Leicester was football’s biggest underdog, that win a global sensation, and he its unlikely, 27-year-old hero.
With Leicester, Jamie Vardy pulled off the impossible (Photo: Getty)Vardy’s astonishing rise is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, which charts his life from his childhood in Hillsborough up to his 500th and final game for Leicester last May. It opens with Vardy instructing his interviewer to get him a beer, and to grab “my big wooden cock” (bottle opener) out of the drawer to open it. Bang-on brand Vardy: mischievous, cheeky, and batting off sincerity with a bit of knowing, boyish immaturity.
In the film, Vardy, his teammates, his wife Rebekah and his old friends “the Inbetweeners” take us through how Vardy became a legend in double-speed. The £1m signing from Fleetwood Town, the Skittles vodka, the “chat shit, get banged” mantra, goal after goal after goal. Rebekah explains how he won her round (persistence), how an unplanned pregnancy forced him to get serious and grow up, how he needed to curb his nights out as expectations grew.
Would all the Vardy mythology be as romantic if it weren’t for that Leicester title? It seems unlikely. Reliving the 2015-16 season here, which – as most watching will surely already know – started with 5000-1 odds for a Leicester win, still feels electrifying, and is the highlight this film. I felt the thrill as he beat Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record and scored goals in 11 consecutive games, felt hope rising as the film replayed old commentary from the season from astounded pundits as the chances of a win rose, felt the peril of the obstacles that almost derailed the season.
And there were many: Vardy’s racism row in a casino, which he acknowledges here was a mistake made because of ignorance, not prejudice, and his wife explains, “he said those words because he’s uneducated”. There was the press’s revelation that the father who raised him was not his biological one – he says here he has never met him. And the red card that forced his suspension from critical late matches of that season and left him helpless on the sidelines.
But watching back, you still get the feeling Leicester’s fate was always written. On the 2 May, 2016, the Leicester team gathered in Vardy’s kitchen to watch Chelsea equalise with Tottenham, denying them the points they’d need to knock Leicester off the top spot. That kitchen full of champions descended into jubilant chaos, the country watched on in awe and the city of Leicester changed for ever. I watched the match in a pub round the corner from the King Power stadium and will never forget the sense of electrifying disbelief of everyone on the streets that night and in the weeks that came after. It wasn’t about the title, really. It was the childlike, wondrous feeling that impossible things really can happen, and had happened here.
Vardy scored in his last-ever match for Leicester in 2025 (Photo: Craig Brough/Reuters)10 years later and Vardy seems as bemused about it as anybody. He retells the story with pride, but is reluctant to get too introspective about the strange trajectory of his life, or to get emotional about the magnitude of what he achieved. Certainly, he doesn’t celebrate his influence – he would much rather just keep scoring goals (he now plays for Serie A club Cremonese).
Which is a shame. We don’t really get to know him any better because this film resists exploring everything that happened after and just how far his influence reached. How that fairy-tale win allowed people to believe in miracles, and how he proved that it can happen to anyone.
Vardy may well be a normal guy – a bit ridiculous, a bit simple, enjoyably enigmatic – and may not be desperate to unearth untold hidden depths. And he may not be desperate, like those other, younger heroes, to bear the responsibility of his sport and its future. But on how he became one of the key players in its history, there is much more still to say.
‘Untold UK: Jamie Vardy’ is streaming on Netflix
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