Once upon a time, James “Buster” Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson and won the heavyweight championship of the world, and in the process became the standard bearer for hopeless causes that turned out to be not so hopeless after all. When the subject of the greatest upsets in sports history comes up, as it does any time a consensus underdog upends conventional wisdom, he’s the one that most everyone brings up.
But it was one night, one fight, and what we all believed of Tyson then – that he was pretty close to unbeatable – turned out to be a myth just waiting to be exposed.
With this, there are no asterisks attached, there will be no historic re-evaluation. There’s no way it ever should have happened and it may well never happen again.
Leicester City has won the Barclay’s Premier League, and that’s pretty close to impossible.
The Foxes clinched the title Monday when their closest rivals, Tottenham Hotspur (a great story in their own right) gave up a late equalizer at Stamford Bridge, drawing 2-2 with Chelsea.
Where to begin to explain to non-followers of football why this feat so completely, ridiculously bucks the odds?
Well start with the economics.
The Premier League was founded in 1992 in large part as a mechanism to direct the maximum amount of television revenue to the elite clubs in British soccer. It has no salary cap and no draft system designed to promote competitive balance. Clubs can spend as much as they want on talent.
Unlike similarly uncapped Major League Baseball, the practice of buying and selling players, straight up, is fundamental to the business of the sport. Should a player for the ages emerge on a smaller club, he will inevitably be snapped up by a bigger one. In fact, developing and selling talent is how the minnows pay the bills – in some ways, it’s their raison d’etre.
It’s a system designed so that the rich win and get richer (there’s also an added payoff for finishing near the top of the tables which bring automatic qualification for the Champions League, and even more money) while the relative poor hang on by their fingernails. The only shifts in the status quo have come when a club was bought by a Russian oligarch or a sheikh from Abu Dhabi – as happened to Chelsea and Manchester City respectively – willing to drain their bank accounts for the chance to win a championship.
Chelsea won the Premiership last year and Manchester City the year before that and Manchester United the year before that, and the safe bet heading into the 2015-2016 was that one of them would win it again – safe considering that one of those clubs has won every title going back to 2004, and that if you added Arsenal to the mix, no one but one of those four had ever won the Premiership with the exception of outlier Blackburn Rovers in 1995.
Now consider Leicester City’s colourful modern history, which includes relegation and promotion, a Sven Goran Eriksson cameo, a wealthy Thai owner and a racist sex video scandal, but suggested nothing of what was to come this season.
In the distant past, they have had their moments on the pitch – a lone top tier league title back in 1929, and a few proud days during the Martin O’Neill era, when at the tail end of the 20th Century they finished in the top ten four years in a row and won a couple of League Cups.
But by 2002, the Foxes had been relegated to the Championship – the league one level below the Premiership – and went into administration (meaning that the club was broke) because of the lost television revenue. By 2008-2009, they were playing in League One, one more level down, though that lasted only a single season.
They fought their way back to the Premier League in 2014, but the elation of that triumph was short-lived. Leicester City was dead last by Christmas, and still seven points short of safety on April 3. They then embarked on what was arguably the greatest comeback from the brink of relegation in Premiership history, winning seven, and tying one of their final nine matches. Manager Nigel Pearson was briefly a hero – at least until shortly after the season ended, when his son James, a reserve player for the club, and a couple of his teammates, decided to tape their orgy in Thailand. That led to Pearson’s firing last June, and the hiring of journeyman manager Claudio Ranieri, who had made many stops during his career, most recently leading Greece’s disastrous qualifying campaign for Euro 2016 until he was fired following a loss to the Faroe Islands.
You look at all of that, you look at the league, you look at it’s economic realities, and there was not a hint, not an inkling, not a chance that Leicester City was poised to do what it was about to do over the course of a full season. No one saw Riyad Mahrez, a bargain basement transfer from a second division French side, as the PFA’s player of the year, or Jamie Vardy, who not so long ago was playing the fifth level of English football, winning the same award from the Football Writers (and scoring goals for England…) or N’Golo Kante as the other serious contender for both awards.
Leicester were 5000-1 to win the Premier League this year. The odds if you were betting that they’d be relegated wouldn’t have been worth the investment.
Buster Douglas was only a 42-1 underdog that night in Tokyo.
That’s because he had a chance.