'Now the world knows where Leicester is': city takes pride in club's title tilt

Posters of striker Jamie Vardy outnumber even those of Richard III, whose reinterment last year coincided with upturn in club’s fortunes

There’s something a little odd going on in Leicester. The city’s football club is mounting an increasingly promising Premier League title challenge – in what some may consider the greatest sports story ever told – and usually sober politicians are linking the team’s fortunes to last year’s reinterment of Richard III.
“I’m not one of those who buys into all this paranormal superstitious stuff,” said Rory Palmer, Leicester’s deputy mayor. “But the turning point last season was when Richard III was buried. Since the Richard III reburial last March, Leicester City have won 22 out of 34 matches.”
Despite a last-gasp defeat against Arsenal on Sunday, the Foxes’ title bid remains well and truly on. Winning the league would be a feat not far short of discovering the remains of the last Yorkist king of England under a council car park 530 years after he was killed.

Television trucks fill the city’s square, Hollywood scripts are being written, and posters of Richard III are outnumbered only by those of Jamie Vardy, Leicester’s talismanic striker.
At the back of the Clarendon pub, a back-street boozer 10 minutes from Leicester city centre, Ed Campion, 29, and his girlfriend, Rosie Horne, 29, had ditched the usual Valentine’s Day plans to revel in the football romance. “He’s lucky I’m quite laid back,” said Rosie of their Valentine’s plans. “I do like an underdog though.”
Campion, a postgraduate student originally from Ireland, has lived in Leicester for six and a half years, and until this year none of his friends in Ireland could place the city on a map. “Now I don’t need to tell them,” he said. “Now I’m proud”. Rosie added: “Rugby was the only thing going for it – well, that and curry”.

Even the border signs welcoming people to the city have had a facelift. Until last summer, motorists would pass weather-beaten signs heralding “Britain’s first environment city”, installed 16 years ago. Now they bear the face of Richard III and the slogan “Leicester: an historic city”. It is surely only a matter of time before the signage is overhauled once more to reflect the football club’s on-pitch achievements.
“Sport had always been important to the city but Leicester’s a self-deprecating place – it’s not a city to blow its own trumpet,” said Stuart Dawkins, 53, a businessman and board member of Leicester City’s supporters group, Foxes Trust. “Even now, more fans are signing ‘We’re staying up’ rather than ‘We’re gonna win the league’.”
No longer a city associated only with Gary Lineker, Walker’s crisps and the rock band Kasabian, once unfashionable Leicester is undergoing a renaissance.
“The East Midlands in general is not as cohesive and well known as other regions, like Merseyside and the north-east. People don’t have a mental image of what it’s like and the football this season has given us that – it’s fantastic,” said Dawkins.
“I’m old enough to remember in the late 70s a punk compilation album called ‘Where the hell is Leicester?’ – well now the world knows where Leicester is.”
Lifelong Foxes supporter James Walters, 60, is affronted at the suggestion that only now are people proud to be from Leicester. “I’ve always been,” he said, pulling open his jacket to reveal his Leicester City shirt. “But there is a buzz in the city. Richard III for the international status and now this. It’s been a fairytale.”
In November 1998, a statue was unveiled in front of Leicester’s historic clock tower to commemorate the city’s status as a hotbed of sporting achievement in football, cricket and rugby. The structure has lost some of its sheen in the intervening 18 years, a term that has seen the club claw its way back up the football ladder from financial administration in 2002.

In more than 130 years of history, Leicester City have never won the league or FA Cup; they have lost four cup finals. Its £22m team has outshone rivals whose constellation of stars cost 10 times that figure. Next season, barring an implosion, the galacticos of Real Madrid, Barcelona or Bayern Munich could be visiting the King Power stadium.

Town hall officials are already holding hushed discussions on how to handle the delirious celebrations if Leicester win the title. An open-top bus parade last year left the streets full to bursting, and officials know that lifting the Premier League trophy would see those crowds multiplied several times over.
“We’ve been getting letters from people wanting a road named after Jamie Vardy,” said Palmer, hinting that plans may be in place if they win the title. Away from the dry logistics of Leicester’s dream season, there is a real bursting sense of pride around the city, the 10th biggest in Britain but one of the least talked-about.
“One of the terms people talk about a lot in politics is civic pride, but no one ever can really define it,” said Palmer. “I would suggest that we are now starting to understand and see what civic pride is actually about – because civic pride for me is when people will talk to people about where they’re from in a really bold, confident way.”