5,000 to Won: Making Sense of What Leicester City Just Did

We’ve seen some pretty awesome underdogs in the history of sports, but we’ve never witnessed one quite like this.

Today, these underdogs completed the conquest of their sport and attained what might be the most unlikely title in the history of sports. Yes, the history of sports.

Going into the English Premier League season, nothing very little was expected of Leicester City FC.  That lack of expectation has followed the Foxes since last March; the team was ranked last in the English Premier League with seven games to play last season.  Things were so bad that they were seven points behind the 19th and second to last place squad, facing the very real prospect of relegation to the Football League Championship.  (The bottom three teams in the Premier League are relegated and the top three teams in the Football League Championship are promoted to the Premier League each season.)

However, the team pulled off a miracle, securing 22 points in its final nine games and finishing in 14th place to ensure another season of Premier League football.  As it turns out, the comeback finish would be a harbinger of things to come.

The team was, and you may want to be sitting down for this, 5000-1 underdogs to win the league this season.  We’ll come back to that figure later.

Leicester City was 5000-1 odds to win the Premier League title. That’s the same odds as Elvis being found alive. https://t.co/VeJBRHzXHW

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) May 2, 2016

Anyway, the team wasn’t expected to go very far this year.  The odds of their relegation were assuredly greater than those of them actually winning the league.  Despite these slim chances, Leicester got off to a strong start, accumulating 40 points in its first 17 games to top the league table on Christmas.  A winless three-game stretch from December 26 to January 2 dropped them to second, but a three-game winning streak kickstarted by a 1-0 January 13 win over Tottenham Hotspur put the team back on top.  And that’s where they would stay. Tottenham blew a two-goal lead with seven minutes to play and ceded a 2-2 draw to Chelsea today, clinching the title for LCFC.

Impressively, the team would lead the table for a total of 147 nights over the course of the season.  This means that it led for 52% of the year; this certainly wasn’t a wire-to-wire championship, but leading the league for over half the season isn’t bad either.

With all of that being said, the team was a 5000-1 longshot to win the league.  How is it possible that they actually pulled this off?  That we may never know, but it is important to add context to this championship.

For example, the Weber State Wildcats made this year’s NCAA Tournament as a 15-seed.  They would ultimately fall, 71-53, to Xavier in the first round.  As a team in a mid-major conference (Big Sky) that has never had a national champion, you would figure that their odds of winning one next year are pretty long.  They are; according to vegasinsider.com, the team is a 2000-1 longshot to be featured at the end of next season’s edition of One Shining Moment.  The Wildcats still aren’t nearly as big underdogs as Leicester was this year.

The closer you look, though, the worse it gets.  The Cleveland Browns look like they might be one of the worst teams in the history of the NFL this coming season.  They’re a glorified expansion squad, and that is a serious, majority opinion.  The Browns are so bad that they turned to a baseball executive, albeit an analytics guru, to run its front office.  Not to pile on, but the team will probably be an underdog in every single one of its games.  Translated: Las Vegas thinks the Browns will go 0-16.

But do you know what their odds are to win the Super Bowl?  200-1. I’m not sure how that is possible, but that’s the Browns’ chances of winning it all in 2016.  If it’s any consolation, Cleveland’s odds to win the AFC are 100-1.  Let’s do one more of these, shall we?

The Atlanta Braves have been baseball’s worst team so far this season, winning 5 of 23 games in the month of April.  They’ve hit a grand total of five home runs to this point in the season; three of them have come from star first baseman Freddie Freeman.  Atlanta is quite obviously going nowhere this year, and as I write this, the Braves are losing 4-0 to the Mets.

The best part of all of this?  They only face 500-1 odds to win the World Series this season.

The point of this exercise was to demonstrate how disrespected the Foxes were by oddsmakers and pundits going into the season. Relegation was the most likely outcome for the team and anything more would have been considered a pleasant surprise.  But a championship?  That is a complete and utter shock, to say the least.

There have been many memorable, inspiring, and shocking underdog championships in the history of sports.  Some that immediately come to mind are the 1983 North Carolina State Wolfpack, the 1985 Villanova Wildcats, the 2008 and 2012 New York Giants, the 1969 New York Jets, the 1969 New York Mets, and the 1980 U.S. Hockey Miracle on Ice.

This is the difference with Leicester, though: they did it for a full season.  There were no playoffs for the Foxes to win and there would be no getting hot at the right time.  The team would have to be the best team in the Premier League for an entire season, all while having to manage injuries and cold stretches.  All of the aforementioned squads weren’t the best in the regular season and simply played their best at the most opportune time.

It’s hard to win consistently in sports, but to be the best team in the sport for the majority of the season at such long odds is far more difficult.  Leicester City did that and defied every prediction and prognostication in the process.  They also took much of the world by storm, captivating those who may not have been otherwise interseted in the Premier League season.

Not bad for a team that should have been relegated.