“I was just a little freak in the works.” Jamie Vardy is reflecting on his career with the usual levels of self-deprecation and pondering whether anyone could possibly board the same rollercoaster. “It’s not the common way of doing things, is it? I don’t think it will probably happen again, but it did happen for me and it was hard work. It really was tough, but all worth it.”
Humour has always been a preferred Vardy tool for removing the sting from a serious point. He is speaking to mark a new documentary about his rise, which brought him from warehouse work making walking frames and crutches to scarcely credible levels of Premier League success.
In the film he is asked to describe himself in one word and opts for “twat”, tempering that to “joker” here when the choice of word is queried. Vardy has always known how to wind up opposition fans, players and, not infrequently, those around him but it has taken a special level of dedication to be fizzing around Serie A pitches at the age of 39 with Cremonese.
Is there a part of Vardy, even if it lies beyond the grasp of consciousness, that resolved to make up for lost time? “That’s the one I always struggle to think about,” he says. “Everyone always says: ‘Oh you didn’t come in [to the Football League] until 25.’ And I’m like: ‘I’ve still been playing football since I was five years old.’ It’s not like I’ve done anything different; I’m still training and playing on a weekend.”
In recent weeks injury has largely kept him from Cremonese’s push to stay in the top flight, although he returned for their defeat by Lazio on Monday. But Vardy will plough on, as he emphasises multiple times, for as long as the legs will take him. “When they say enough’s enough then that is finito,” he says. The days of being fuelled by Skittles vodka, which naturally makes an appearance in the documentary, are long gone; Vardy feels he has more to accomplish but looks back with fondness at the achievements that brought him here.
Foremost among them was the 2016 Premier League title win with Leicester, whose 10-year anniversary passed days after their shock relegation to League One. “We’re all still in a group on WhatsApp,” Vardy says of that remarkable group, forged by Nigel Pearson before Claudio Ranieri harnessed their momentum thrillingly. “We’re always talking to each other, always keeping in touch, seeing what lads are doing. The bond we had back then was unbelievable.
“We never needed to do anything, [new players] were always bang, done, right in the group. Big Nigel was really good with the foundations, getting everything really close-knit, and that just carried on into the following season.”
Pearson’s importance to Vardy is made amply clear in the film, which is comparatively light on mentions of the league-winning coach Ranieri. Looking back from a small cinema room in central London, Vardy praises Ranieri’s astuteness in making the lightest of tweaks to the formula that had somehow kept Leicester up in the previous campaign.
“He pulled us all together, said he’d watched the great escape the season before, and said he didn’t want to change hardly anything, which I think was right for the group that we had,” he says. “Do I think we could have done it if Nige was still there? We possibly could have because there wasn’t much different that we were doing from the previous season.”
He evidently feels a debt of gratitude to Pearson, whose playing days he had watched with adulation as a Sheffield Wednesday fan. Pearson refused him a move back to Fleetwood during tough early days at Leicester in which pulling him into line proved a club-wide job. Around the same time the club’s then vice-chair, Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha, pulled him to one side after he had arrived to training drunk. “Of course it happened, it had to at one point,” Vardy says. But instead of plummeting as quickly as he had soared, back to earning £120 a week with Stocksbridge Park Steels and largely treating football as an engaging side gig, Vardy shaped up and shone.
His wife, Rebekah, no stranger to headlines, is largely credited with supervising the turnaround. Longer-running threads also contributed. If Vardy feels fierce loyalty to Pearson there is no bond more profound than with the group he calls the “Inbetweeners”, close friends and drinking buddies since his youth. They make frequent appearances in the chronicle of his life and their value as a touchstone quickly becomes evident.
“They’re just no-nonsense,” he says. “If I’ve had a game, they’re in the box and I walk upstairs they’ll tell me straight away if I’ve had a good game or a shit game. They’re not bothered.
“That’s how we all are. That’s how we are together, how we connect with each other. If one of us is having a problem then get it in the [WhatsApp] group. Might get abused for a bit but at least it’s us lot keeping an eye on each other.”
It has been a life of chaos distilled, ultimately, into the order that separates the best. Vardy’s career has not escaped scandal: most notably, he was fined by Leicester in 2015 after using racist language in a casino, an offence he put down to ignorance. Trauma has surfaced too. Later that year he learned the identity of his biological father, a secret previously kept from him.
The thought of seeking counselling away from football did not occur to Vardy. “We had a good psychologist [at Leicester] so I had chats with them all the time,” he says. “It’s just normal conversations like we’re having now. It’s easy to speak when you’re in that environment. I think it’s when you’re alone and you’re trying to keep yourself to yourself. You don’t want to speak out to people, and that’s what then causes the problem.”
Vardy, who signed off at Leicester a year ago with his 200th goal on appearance 500, watched as much of this season’s disastrous Championship campaign as possible and found the experience gruelling from afar. Given the bell will toll on those searing last-line runs soon enough would a viable route back to the Foxes, or anywhere for that matter, lie in the dugout?
Perish the thought. “Management, no. They’re at the training ground even longer than the players. I can’t. I’ve not really thought that far down the line. I’m very much: ‘get today out the way, go to sleep and see what tomorrow brings’ and I’ve always been like that, which is annoying to some, I know.”
Rebekah, who is elsewhere in the room, laughs on cue. Vardy has changed plenty over the past two decades but certain elements are deeper set. When all is said and done, he harbours no regrets about the dizzying ups and downs. “There wouldn’t be any, any at all,” he said. “But if you asked me to go and do it all again, I wouldn’t!” One freakish joyride was enough for Vardy, and perhaps for the football gods too.