I said they could and they did.
They did it, just as I said months ago against the opinion of the football pundits I wrote about how if they believe they could win the Premier League title they had a chance of doing it. Pundit after pundit was saying months ago that Leicester City Football Club couldn’t keep up the performances they were putting in and getting the results they were getting. I wrote about how self-fulfilling prophecies work and that if the players at Leicester City believed they could stay top until the end of the season they had every chance of doing so.
It wasn’t quite so simple in the end. They maintained their lead over second place Tottenham Hotspur but failed to get the win in their last to game that would have secured the title. They did however draw both of those games meaning in last night’s game Spurs needed to beat Chelsea just to maintain a chance of catching Leicester. They did, as is now recorded history, draw. This means that even if Leicester lose their remaining two games Tottenham cannot catch them and so Leicester are the new champions.
But while the pundits and sports reporters may have changed their opinions in the last month or two the fact remains that, Leicester City players are a group of players who should never have had a chance of winning the title. The team is made up of players rejected by other clubs, some of those clubs are not even in the Premiership and a star striker who only a few years ago was playing amateur football. At the start of the season even the book makers had 16 other clubs as more likely to take the title and Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri as the manager most likely to be sacked first. These players however played as a unit. They played with the belief that they could beat anyone, and they beat just about everyone. They have held top spot for 100 days and have been crowned champions with two games to go.
Why? It’s my belief that two things came into play, firstly they worked hard. They knew nothing would go their way if they didn’t put in the effort. You work for rewards, they don’t just come to you. Secondly, they didn’t listen to those who said they couldn’t do it, they believed they could so they did. Self-fulfilling prophecy at work.
It worked for them, it could work for you.
