Leicester City: Changing Soccer in a Changing UK

There's a revolution happening in England.

For a time, it was whispered -- quietly, fleetingly -- as if simply mentioning the movement would cause it to begin unravelling at the seams.

Considering loyalists are now shouting their support loud enough to trigger minor earthquakes, it's safe to say that time has passed. Concerns of jinxing an improbable run appear to be long gone, and Leicester City's time is now to potentially pull off one of the single greatest underdog achievements in modern sports.

Yes, this is about a European soccer team. And, yes, it's also about much more than that.

It's difficult to put into words exactly how monumental Leicester's domination of the English Premier League has been this season. The Foxes, as they're known colloquially, are one win away from claiming the best record in the Premier League -- one of the most competitive soccer competitions on the planet.

The Leicester players have three games left in the season to snatch a single victory that would make it mathematically impossible for anyone to shake them from the throne. And that win may not be necessary at all if Leicester ties all three games or if the teams below it slip up. The crowning achievement could happen as early as Sunday, when the Foxes face off against perennial powerhouse Manchester United.

But at the beginning of the season, European bookmakers pegged Leicester's odds of winning the Premier League at 5,000-to-1. That's about five times as improbable as the 1980 U.S. hockey team winning a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Lake Placid -- a feat now known to American hockey fans as the "Miracle on Ice" and hailed as one of the greatest underdog sports victories to date.

In fact, it's now significantly more likely that U2-singer Bono becomes the next pope ( 1,000-to-1), that reality television star Kim Kardashian wins the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize ( 500-to-1), that Sean "Diddy" Combs becomes the next actor to star in the James Bond movie franchise ( 250-to-1) or that the Cleveland Browns win the 2017 Super Bowl after coming off of a 3-13 record last season ( 200-to-1) than it is for Leicester to win the league at the start of the season.

"This is a phenomenon. It really is," says John Avello, the director of race and sports operations at the Wynn Las Vegas, whose own books had Leicester at a more modest but still longshot 1,000-to-1 heading into the season. "You take the National Football League. No team's ever going to be 1,000-to-1. They are capable of going from last to first with one or two key players. And so the highest you'll see an NFL team is 200 or 250. It's the same with baseball."

And now the lucky few gamblers who took those 5,000-to-1 or 1,000-to-1 odds are costing international bookmakers millions of dollars.

"We stand to lose a small fortune if Leicester do what everybody must now be expecting them to do," Joe Crilly, a spokesman at U.K. bookmaker William Hill, said in a statement earlier this week. "5,000-to-1 is the biggest priced winner in betting history."

All told, William Hill -- one of the U.K.'s largest bookmakers -- is expected to pay out more than $4.4 million should Leicester win the Premier League. That's a rather small sum, all things considered, but that's due in large part to the fact that the largest individual payout the company would be responsible for comes from an initial bet of just under $110 -- and that bet wasn't even made until a few weeks into the season, when Leicester's odds of winning improved to 1,500-to-1.

Unsurprisingly, soccer fans weren't particularly eager to bet thousands of dollars on a team whose odds of winning the league were about 50 times less likely than the current odds that U.S. Republican Party presidential dropout and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio somehow locks up the GOP's presidential nomination at a contested convention in July (100-to-1 as of 4/28).

"Most of the guys that make those kinds of plays are betting $5 or $10," Avello says of those who bet on Leicester at the start of the season. "We did take some pretty good action at them when the odds were at 3-to-1, because it looked like they had a chance to win it. But this was back five weeks ago or so."

William Hill and several other firms in recent weeks have offered some of their clients the opportunity to cash out early, offering a less substantial but still guaranteed sum. All told, though, William Hill estimates Leicester's triumph will result in a loss of $14.6 million for the bookmaking industry -- the largest payout in Premier League history.

"I mean, let's face it. There's a lot of luck for this team this year to end up winning this whole thing. And so I can honestly say that I really haven't seen anything like this," Avello says. "The team could have collapsed very easily. We were expecting a collapse. Everyone was looking for it. But the Man. Us and the Man. Cities and the Liverpools just didn't pan out."

Since the 1997-98 season, a rotating cast of only five teams has finished in the top two positions in the league: Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea. And there hasn't been a single season in which none of these teams finished either first or second in the Premier League's 24-season history.

But heading into the weekend, Manchester City, Arsenal and Manchester United are ranked third, fourth and fifth, respectively. Liverpool is seventh, and Chelsea is 10th. Leicester and the Tottenham Hotspurs are on the verge of making history by bumping the usual suspects from the top two positions for the first time in the league's modern era.

But the failings of England's most successful soccer clubs shouldn't take away from what Leicester has been able to accomplish. The team was dead last in the standings for much of last season and only narrowly avoided being bumped down to England's second-tier league -- where they played from 2009 to 2014 after being promoted from a stint in the domestic third-tier league.

"I realize what Leicester had going against it. It hasn't even come close to winning [a Premier League title]. They have a new manager there, and he's average at best," Avello says. "It looked like they weren't even going to be able to stay in the first tier last year."

But the team has gone from zero to hero without investing in some of the top-tier talent for which the team's rivals have paid top dollar. The total market value of Leicester's starting lineup during the team's 4-0 victory over Swansea City last weekend is estimated to have been about $89.8 million, according to TransferMarkt statistics company.

That may sound like a lot of money, but consider that the lineup used this week by Manchester City -- widely regarded to be one of the most valuable soccer teams in England (and the world) in terms of market value -- in a game against Real Madrid was priced at about $328.6 million. That's more than 3.5 times the value of Leicester's team, but the Foxes still managed to beat Manchester City 3-1 in their last matchup.

Manchester City could put its two most valuable players on the field -- midfielder Kevin De Bruyne and forward Sergio Agüero -- and they would be worth more on paper than Leicester's entire starting lineup of 11 players. Leicester's own most valuable player, Algerian midfielder Riyad Mahrez, is valued at only a third of De Bruyne's price tag.

And yet Mahrez proved this year that it's tough to put a price on talent, as the 25-year-old player lifted his first Player of the Year trophy earlier this week. He is hardly the first Algerian to find success in England's most competitive soccer league. But he is the first from his country -- and from the continent of Africa -- to claim the title.

Mahrez and the Leicester City team in many ways embodies change. Mahrez represents a changed face of award-winning soccer stars -- before 2013, no player from a country outside of Europe had ever won the league's Player of the Year. The Leicester team represents a changed focus on team chemistry over market value.

And even Leicester City itself in many ways represents a changed United Kingdom. Those who cheer on Mahrez week after week hail from one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country. White Britons most recently accounted for only about 45 percent of Leicester City's population, according to the U.K.'s 2011 census data. Those of Indian descent make up about 28 percent of the population, and those of African heritage were the fastest-growing minority group in both Leicester City and broader Leicestershire County during the past two decades.

Between 1991 and 2011, the ethnic minority population ballooned by 94 percent in Leicester. And while that level of growth is not necessarily representative of the broader U.K., it's clear that the country has attracted millions of ethnic minorities during the past several years. The percentage of individuals in England and Wales who identified as Caucasian stood at 86 percent in 2011, down from 94.1 percent back in 1991.

Immigration policy has recently erupted as a fundamental issue in the U.K., due in large part to an influx of refugees from Syria and neighboring countries that are currently flowing into Europe. More than a million displaced individuals have reportedly crossed over into European soil as a result of regional violence in and around Syria, and the U.K. is believed to have received more than 38,000 first-time asylum applications from all over the world between the fourth quarter of 2015 and the year prior. The United Nations most recently estimated the country held more than 117,000 global refugees within its borders.

And while U.K. voters could decide later this year to peel away from the EU altogether so the domestic government can more easily regulate its own border policies, their decision won't erase the change already underway in the country. The little-known Algerian star on the country's most successful and most improbably dominant soccer team stands as a testament to the monumental movement underway in the U.K.

Andrew Soergel is an Economy Reporter at U.S. News. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter or email him at asoergel@usnews.com.