Jamie Vardy reflects on his unlikely rise from warehouse work to Premier League glory with Leicester, his friendships, injuries at Cremonese, and the scandals and trauma he carried.
Jamie Vardy still sounds like the same character who could wind up a whole stadium. but his latest reflection is less about performance than persistence.. At 39. he’s looking back on a career that feels like a rollercoaster built from hard work. loyalty. setbacks and a level of self-belief that kept pulling him back on the track.
Asked whether he could imagine doing it all over again, Vardy does not hedge.. “If you asked me to go and do it all again. I wouldn’t. ” he says. before adding that it was never straightforward anyway.. “It’s not the common way of doing things, is it?. I don’t think it will probably happen again, but it did happen for me and it was hard work.. It really was tough, but all worth it.”
The remarks come as he helps mark a new documentary on Netflix, Untold UK: Jamie Vardy, which traces the arc of his rise. The film charts how he moved from warehouse work making walking frames and crutches to levels of Premier League success that still seem, even to him, slightly unreal.
Humour has long been one of Vardy’s ways of defusing the harder edges of a serious story.. In the documentary. when he’s asked to describe himself in one word. he goes with “twat”. then tempers it to “joker” when pressed.. It’s a small moment. but it matches the larger pattern of his career: the ability to needle opposition fans and players. and sometimes the people around him. without losing focus on the work.
By the time he was fizzing around Serie A pitches at the age of 39. those around him could easily forget how far he had travelled from the early. less glamorous reality of training for a life that might not have come with a spotlight.. Vardy’s own perspective on the “lost time” narrative is dismissive.. “Everyone always says: ‘Oh you didn’t come in [to the Football League] until 25.’ And I’m like: ‘I’ve still been playing football since I was five years old.’ It’s not like I’ve done anything different; I’m still training and playing on a weekend.”
He’s currently been held back by injury. which has largely kept him away from Cremonese’s push to stay in the top flight.. He did, though, return for their defeat by Lazio on Monday, and Vardy’s mindset remains stubbornly forward-looking.. When asked about stopping. he is clear: “When they say enough’s enough then that is finito.” For now. the body is still part of the mission.. The documentary also lays bare that the old days of being fuelled by Skittles vodka are behind him. even if the drink makes its way into the story for what it symbolises.. He believes he has more to accomplish, even as he looks back with genuine fondness on what brought him here.
For Vardy. the centrepiece remains Leicester’s 2016 Premier League title win. a moment whose 10-year anniversary passed days after the club’s shock relegation to League One.. “We’re all still in a group on WhatsApp. ” he says of the squad. forged by Nigel Pearson before Claudio Ranieri harnessed their momentum into something thrilling.. “We’re always talking to each other, always keeping in touch, seeing what lads are doing.. The bond we had back then was unbelievable.”
In Vardy’s telling, the foundations mattered.. Pearson, he says, was key to how tight the group became.. “We never needed to do anything, [new players] were always bang, done, right in the group.. Big Nigel was really good with the foundations. getting everything really close-knit. and that just carried on into the following season.” In the film. Pearson’s significance is made more prominent than Ranieri’s. with fewer mentions of the league-winning coach.
Still, Vardy clearly respects the tactical and psychological job Ranieri did after Leicester’s earlier escape attempt.. Looking back from a small cinema room in central London. he describes Ranieri as someone who understood the danger of tinkering too much.. “He pulled us all together. said he’d watched the great escape the season before. and said he didn’t want to change hardly anything. which I think was right for the group that we had. ” Vardy says.. “Do I think we could have done it if Nige was still there?. We possibly could have because there wasn’t much different that we were doing from the previous season.”
Pearson is not just a managerial reference point.. Vardy credits him with shaping him during difficult early days at Leicester. when Pearson refused him a move back to Fleetwood.. Vardy had been watching Pearson as a Sheffield Wednesday fan. and the admiration had become. over time. something closer to gratitude.. He says Pearson “refused” to let him return after he was pulled into line as a club-wide project rather than a single-person correction.
There were other moments that could have derailed him.. Vardy recounts how around the same time. Leicester’s then vice-chair Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha took him aside after he had arrived to training drunk.. “Of course it happened, it had to at one point,” Vardy says.. “But instead of plummeting as quickly as he had soared … Vardy shaped up and shone.”
He ended his Leicester career by scoring his 200th goal. a landmark that feels like a bookend to a journey that started far from the Premier League spotlight.. If the club chapter was about discipline and faith. the personal chapter is where the documentary leans into the people who never let him float too far away from reality.
Vardy’s wife. Rebekah. who has been in the spotlight for much of their time together. is credited with supervising much of the turnaround.. But longer threads also run through the story.. No relationship. in his telling. is as grounding as the group he calls the “Inbetweeners”. close friends and drinking buddies since youth.. They appear frequently in the chronicle and, as Vardy says, their value becomes clear because they do not play roles.
“They’re just no-nonsense,” he says. “If I’ve had a game, they’re in the box and I walk upstairs they’ll tell me straight away if I’ve had a good game or a shit game. They’re not bothered.”
The group, he adds, is built on the principle that problems should not be carried alone.. “That’s how we all are.. That’s how we are together, how we connect with each other.. If one of us is having a problem then get it in the [WhatsApp] group.. Might get abused for a bit but at least it’s us lot keeping an eye on each other.”
Yet the story of chaos and success includes darker elements.. Vardy has not escaped scandal.. In 2015. Leicester fined him after he used racist language in a casino. an offence he said at the time he put down to ignorance.. Trauma also surfaced later that year. when he learned the identity of his biological father. a secret previously kept from him.
Even with those burdens, Vardy says seeking counselling away from football was never part of the plan.. “We had a good psychologist [at Leicester] so I had chats with them all the time,” he says.. “It’s just normal conversations like we’re having now.. It’s easy to speak when you’re in that environment.” He suggests it becomes harder when you are alone. trying to hold everything in.. “I think it’s when you’re alone and you’re trying to keep yourself to yourself.. You don’t want to speak out to people, and that’s what then causes the problem.”
The same stubborn honesty extends to his relationship with the game now, from the other side of distance.. Having signed off at Leicester a year ago with his 200th goal on an appearance 500. he watched much of this season’s Championship campaign as possible from afar.. He describes it as gruelling, even when it was not his responsibility to fix it.
Asked whether he might return to the Foxes, or any club, one day from the dugout, his answer is firm.. “Management, no.. They’re at the training ground even longer than the players.. I can’t.. I’ve not really thought that far down the line.. I’m very much: ‘get today out the way. go to sleep and see what tomorrow brings’ and I’ve always been like that. which is annoying to some. I know.” Rebekah laughs at that point. as if to confirm that some traits are harder to change than others.
Still, the documentary ends where Vardy began: with no regrets, but also no appetite for repeating the entire ride. “There wouldn’t be any, any at all,” he says. “But if you asked me to go and do it all again, I wouldn’t!”
For Vardy, one freakish joyride was enough. It was perhaps enough for the football gods too, at least for now. Untold UK: Jamie Vardy is available on Netflix from 12 May.
Jamie Vardy Leicester City Premier League title Cremonese Nigel Pearson Claudio Ranieri Netflix documentary