The Jamie Vardy appreciation thread

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Relentless Jamie Vardy is a rare old gem in game that reveres youth​


Still starting every game for Leicester City nine years after their miracle season, striker will reach 140 Premier League goals if he scores against Nottingham Forest​

James Gheerbrant
, Sports writer
Thursday October 24 2024, 6.45pm, The Times
To win a league title, and then to still be representing the same team in the top flight a full ten seasons later, is a feat which distinguishes a tiny band of players. In English football this century, you could count them on your fingers: the likes of Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, John Terry and Michael Carrick. In the other major European leagues, you’re looking at Paolo Maldini, Sergio Ramos, Sergio Busquets, Thomas Müller, Koke. You know the type: paragons of loyalty and professionalism, whose perdurance amid younger, springier men was usually ascribed to some combination of yoga or asceticism or an elite football intelligence which allowed them to transcend the fast-twitch energy of the game.

To this list, we are not very far away from adding the name of Jamie Vardy. Now 37, Vardy is nine years on from Leicester City’s miracle season, but he continues to be an every-game starter: in Europe’s top five leagues, he is one of only six outfield players older than 34 to have played more than 75 per cent of the available minutes this season. His three goals have helped Leicester already to significantly strengthen their chances of survival: from 39.7 per cent at the start of the season, according to Opta, to 72 per cent now. If they beat Nottingham Forest on Friday, they will move nine points clear of the relegation zone.

And perhaps this is a good moment to reflect on Vardy, a player who is talked about in a very different way to those aforementioned mo’ai of 21st-century football. Doubtless there is some old-fashioned snobbery at work, but the fascination of Vardy is that he really is a very different footballer from the usual superannuated survivor at this level: untouched by gym machines, powered by Red Bull, double espressos and tobacco, and still fundamentally a “movement” player, still chasing and pressing and rounding keepers at an age when most players have fallen back on a recumbent chess-brained role.

Vardy celebrates with the travelling fans in Southampton after Leicester came from 2-0 down to triumph at St Mary’s

Vardy celebrates with the travelling fans in Southampton after Leicester came from 2-0 down to triumph at St Mary’s
DAN ISTITENE/GETTY IMAGES
Sergio Agüero once called him a phenomenon, and perhaps he would be more appreciated in a football culture like Argentina’s, which prizes cunning and mischief and the ravenous will to win they call grinta. But by any analysis Vardy’s numbers are amazing. Should he score against Forest, it would be his 140th Premier League goal. Only 11 players have ever made it to 150. More surprising, perhaps, is that he also has 44 assists, more than Robert Pirès or Gianfranco Zola, and only two away from catching Harry Kane, who played more Premier League seasons for a better team in a deeper, more creative role.

Maybe Vardy won’t quite reach 150 + 50, but here’s the full list of players that he’d join if he did: Alan Shearer, Wayne Rooney, Andy Cole, Frank Lampard, Thierry Henry, Mohamed Salah. He has had what in American sporting parlance would be called a Hall of Fame career, compressed into half the usual window, having played his first Premier League game four months before his 28th birthday. At the same age, Michael Owen, for example, had already scored 126 of his 150 top-flight goals. Vardy really is a marvel of late-starting, long-lasting excellence.

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What keeps him going? Two things stand out. The first is his seemingly endless ability to nark, rattle and rile — and feed off it. The spume of rage and bile from opposition fans is his anti-ageing serum. In the game against Tottenham Hotspur in August, as he was being substituted, Vardy pointed to the Premier League logo on his sleeve, then pointed to the Spurs end and made a zero with his thumb and forefinger. Last week, after Leicester came back from 2-0 down away to Southampton, he stood before a wall of fuming home fans with a look of actual bliss on his face, like a backpacker basking in the spray of a Balinese waterfall. For some veteran players, the game is their playground; for some, it’s the canvas of a fresco they can’t bear to finish. For Vardy, it’s his own inexhaustible salt mine.

Fuelled by Red Bull and tobacco, the 37-year-old Vardy continues to live for the weekend with Leicester

Fuelled by Red Bull and tobacco, the 37-year-old Vardy continues to live for the weekend with Leicester
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
The second is that unique chronology: that Vardy was playing in the Conference until he was 25, and as a result is still relatively young as a professional player. He is beginning his 13th season at Premier League or Championship level, the same as Luke Shaw, and only two ahead of Jack Grealish, who are both 29. His non-League years immersed him in the game and gave him a rough-and-ready tutelage in the centre-forward position, without subjecting his muscles to the same load that most players absorb in those early years through intensive training and attritional match-play.

There is a lesson in Vardy’s staggering success, and indeed the excellence of Ethan Pinnock, the Brentford defender who at 31 still seems to be getting better, having spent the first seven seasons of his career in non-League. The tactics and positional cues of top-level football can be picked up far later than is often assumed. The normal age curve, in which the peak years fall between 24 and 29, can map very differently on to a player who arrives late at the top. And given the fundamental challenge of recruitment in a game which demands speed and intensity but also erodes it, and the trend for top players to be more and more depleted at a younger age, perhaps it is surprising that clubs don’t take more swings on players further down the pyramid. After all, the one thing you cannot do is bleed miles off the clock.

It’s tempting to wonder, of course, what Vardy might have achieved if he had arrived in the Premier League five years earlier — whether he might now be challenging Alan Shearer for the all-time goals record — but the beauty of Vardy’s career, and not just for physiological reasons, is that he didn’t.

Vardy is still an ever-present for Leicester nine years on from their miracle season

Vardy is still an ever-present for Leicester nine years on from their miracle season
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
Football, you’ll have noticed, is an industry which worships youth. Gradually, as the game itself has become more and more overlaid by the lens of transfers, the basic truth of the market — that you are buying a player’s future output, not their current status, and that younger players are therefore more valuable — has become the prism through which all things are viewed. The biannual frenzy for new signings, the clamour for certain players to be in the England squad, tends overwhelmingly towards those 25 or younger, because it is predicated not so much on what those players are as what they might be.

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If Vardy had burst on to the scene at 22, he would have been subject not only to acclaim and wonder but also all manner of projections and conjecture and overtures. He would probably have been a magnet for the kind of advisers and hangers-on who see a talented footballer’s future in much the same way that property developers see a vacant plot: the larger the better, the more monetisable. But because Vardy was 28 before anyone really realised how good he was, that plot was much smaller than usual, and so he has been able, more than the vast majority of players, to cultivate it for himself.

True, Arsenal met his release clause in 2016, but Vardy decided to stay at Leicester, and since then he has had the sort of career that players used to have: not foreshadowed by his own potential, not distracted by the capital of his future and the need to maximise it, just living for the weekend. He has existed for a decade at the sharp end of the sport almost entirely in the now, not as an asset or a target or a desirable object, but simply as a player, and paradoxically within that narrow frame has always seemed to be far freer than those with all the choices of youth.

Who knows how many more seasons he’ll hang on for? There has been talk, inevitably, of interest from Saudi Arabia. By all accounts, Vardy the man has slowed down, from the coltish tearaway who broke his wrist punching an arcade boxing machine in Magaluf to a family man who enjoys spending time tending his allotment. It might seem an incongruous image, but in a way it’s a fitting one for a player who from his narrow tract of time brought forth abundance.

Leicester City v Nottingham Forest​

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TV: Sky Sports Main Event & Premier League

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