Leicester City win English Premier League
May 3rd, 2016
Leicester City started the season as 5000-1 outsiders and have ended the season as league champions with two games to spare.
It was the first time since Nottingham Forest in 1978 that a team in England won the top division for the first time, and with money increasingly dominating the top of the game it seemed unlikely that ANY club would do it for the foreseeable future.
Hindsight shows that the bookmakers were probably a little bit lax to start The Foxes at 5000-1 after the arrival of a new big spending owner who splashed out 83m on 23 new players, and ignoring their end to last season when they won 7 of the last nine fixtures – but no-one expected the unsung Leicester City side to last at the top of the table all season.
Should we have been surprised though?
Looking at the other big leagues in Europe, they had all had “first-time” winners over the last 25 years- two of them in the last decade.
– Italy celebrated Sampdoria winning in 1991
– Spain had Deportivo La Coruna in 2000
– Germany saw Wolfsburg win in 2009
– France witnessed Montpellier succeed in 2012
So yes it was a long shot, but perhaps not quite as long as those 5000-1 odds the bookmakers offered, and I suspect that we will see a little more thought put into those league winning odds at the start of the 2016-17 season in August!
Entry Filed under: English Football
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