When the names were revealed, it was official. Fifty per cent of the best footballers in the Premier League this season play for Leicester City. The league leaders had a trio – Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and N'Golo Kante – on the six-man shortlist for the PFA Player of the Year award.
They were uncontroversial choices. Vardy had only scored five top-flight goals before the current campaign commenced. He had 21 by the middle of April, including a divisional record of 11 in as many games. Mahrez, either by scoring or creating, contributed to seven league goals last season. He has played a pivotal part in 27 this year. Kante, an unheralded arrival in England, has won the most tackles in the Premier League.
Read more:
• Greg Lea: Can a Tottenham or Arsenal star stop Leicester trio? Six possible Player of the Year contenders
• Richard Jolly: Fortune has favoured Leicester City but that is only a small factor in their remarkable season
• Richard Jolly: Leicester City rise to the top of the table will be tough to replicate
• Steve Luckings: Dimitri Payet, Tottenham's deadly duo, even Hector Bellerin – evaluating Player of the Year contenders
Each, beyond doubt, is enjoying the best season of his career. Yet the unique element about Leicester is that so is each of their teammates.
For some, it is only the second season of regular top-flight football.
Indeed, Danny Drinkwater and Marc Albrighton started fewer than half of Leicester’s games last season, when they were almost relegated. Captain Wes Morgan had looked a stalwart of the lower leagues, right-back Danny Simpson the sort of player that would yo-yo between the top division and the Championship.
Even those with more of a pedigree – Shinji Okazaki contributed 15 goals in a season for Mainz while Christian Fuchs was a regular in the upper reaches of the Bundesliga with Schalke – have never reached such levels. Not just collectively, either, but individually.
The rarity value of a side where everyone is peaking in the same season is extreme. It goes without saying that title-winning campaigns tend to be built around in-form players.
Yet the difference with Leicester, which explains in part how such outsiders can suddenly emerge from obscurity to dominate the division, is that generally they were players who had sustained excellence over a period of time and, in many cases, had actually performed better in other years.
Take Chelsea.
Branislav Ivanovic, Nemanja Matic and Eden Hazard arguably enjoyed their outstanding campaign to date for last season’s champions, but others did not.
They benefited from a considerable contribution from Diego Costa, who chipped in with 21 goals. Yet he had provided Atletico Madrid with 36 just 12 months earlier. That represented his personal peak.
Cesc Fabregas topped the division’s assist charts, but this view is that his finest campaign came in the colours of Arsenal in 2009/10.
By common consent, John Terry was the division’s best defender but he did not quite reach the heights he scaled in 2004/05. Willian has confounded a trend at Stamford Bridge by performing better this season than last.
Or consider the last great Manchester United side.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s best year – until he joined Real Madrid, anyway – was 2007/08, when he scored 42 goals. Wayne Rooney’s finest was 2009/10. Paul Scholes peaked, arguably, in 2002/03, Nemanja Vidic in 2008/09, Nani in 2010/11, Michael Carrick perhaps not until 2012/13.
Yet teams with Chelsea or United’s talent could win the league without requiring every player to reach his optimum level. Those with Leicester’s resources cannot. It is one of the remarkable elements required for a club of their stature to upset the favourites.
Perhaps the closest comparison, at least as far as English football this millennium is concerned, is the Ipswich Town team of 2000/01, a promoted group who were tipped for the drop and finished fifth. Leicester, who are already guaranteed a top-four finish, have surpassed them.
Ipswich present history’s warning to overachievers. Individually and collectively, they reached heights one year, failed to sustain them the next and suffered.
Marcus Stewart, the Vardy of his day, scored 19 goals in 2000/01 and only six the following season. Ipswich went from conceding 42 to sieving 64. They went from fifth to 18th and were relegated.
None of which is to suggest the same fate awaits Leicester. But it does illustrate the dangers of what happens when a team who peak together revert to type.
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