It’s one of the oldest stories of them all, deeply embedded in our nature and our culture. In some ways it’s the story that defines our humanity and we have told it a thousand times in a thousand different ways.
It’s in the Bible with Joseph and his coat of many colours, it’s King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, it’s the ugly duckling, Cinderella, Great Expectations, Moll Flanders and Jane Eyre. It’s Clark Kent becoming Superman, it’s Harry Potter leaving the cupboard under the stairs to become the greatest wizard of them all. It’s Rags to Riches. And it’s the tale of Leicester City.
Sport retells all our most ancient and archetype-crammed stories and does so again and again, providing us with a living mythology. It has brought us Rags to Riches times without number: once upon a time there was a little boy from Bowral in Australia. Day after day, he would hit a golf ball against the wall of his house with a cricket stump. His name: Don… Don Bradman.
The greater the odds against success, the greater the story. Rags to Riches is the daily stuff of sport, but no one thought that anything quite this ragged could aspire to — still less claim — such riches. The impossible truth is that Leicester City are on top of the Premier League, five points clear of Tottenham Hotspur in second with four games to go. So close! So far!
The Premier League, which began in 1992, is designed on the traditional rich-get-richer basis. It’s a competition in which a few clubs fight for victory while the rest try to avoid relegation: a carve-up in which oligarchs and sheikhs go chequebook to chequebook. Only five clubs have ever won it.
Could Leicester really make a sixth? Consider some of the obstacles that lie in their way.
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