Vardy is the oldest starting striker in Europe's top five leagues and he's still causing chaos. His is the most remarkable story imaginable
Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
It is several minutes before Leicester City are due to play Brighton in the Premier League and the two teams are in the tunnel.
As the players warmed up, before heading back inside, two mascot girls kicked a ball to each other at the side of the pitch. If they were even born when Leicester won the Premier League, they cannot remember it. But they have been told. Both have “Vardy 9” on the back of their shirts.
Those two girls are now stood either side of Jamie Vardy, waiting for him to lead them out. They both look up at him with wide-eyed awe, as do Mads Hermansen’s two mascots who have bunched forward to get a better view. No offence to Leicester’s goalkeeper, but he is not who they are here to see. They both have Vardy shirts on too.
I’m in a similar situation of sorts, here to write about the most fascinating career in the last 20 years of the Premier League and here now because, against most expectations, that career is blooming again.
We could just say that a bloke was getting paid £30 a game and he won the Premier League six years later and that would do. But there’s a lot more to say.
Leicester City are in an odd position in 2024, a seemingly endless struggle with their own identity.
That is the burden for enjoying arguably the most extraordinary, unexpected period of success in the history of the game, given the supposed glass ceilings they punched through.
Between 2015 and 2021, Leicester played in six domestic cup quarter-finals, won their first ever FA Cup and completed the most unexpected title victory this sport had ever seen.
Nobody is stupid enough to believe any subsequent curse to overshadow such blessing, but it does create an odd psychological conundrum: how do you process magic and how can anything feel so hyper-real thereafter?
There was horrendous tragedy, frustrating incompetence and the inevitable ageing of players; all of it left Leicester supporters unsure of what to expect because they hadn’t expected any of it in the first place.
Seasons past and the protagonists of the miracle faded away. Some, like Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kante, grabbed their chance at superclub riches and further success. Others stayed but simply grew old for their environment – Kasper Schmeichel, Wes Morgan, Marc Albrighton.
Only one of that 30-man first-team squad is left, but his time has not passed. He’s the Leicester City captain and he’s currently standing in the tunnel of the King Power well aware that the hopes of a city, and four kids surrounding him, rests squarely on his shoulders.
The good news: Vardy has always been able to treat time as a fluid concept.
You’d have been forgiven – and I’m asking for it too here – for thinking that Vardy’s high-level career, for all its wonder, had finally slowed to a close. During his last Premier League season, Vardy scored three goals and almost half of his league appearances were as a substitute.
In the Championship in 2023-24, Enzo Maresca largely stuck to that strategy. There was a knee injury that caused a ten-game absence, but Vardy started in only two Championship wins between 28 October and 20 April. The goals still came, but Vardy was being moved aside. Another season in the Premier League seemed a bridge too far.
So obviously Vardy is now the third top English goalscorer in the Premier League, with six goals and three assists in 14 matches. And so obviously Vardy has started all 14 of those matches and played more minutes than any other Leicester attacking player.
And obviously his current manager Ruud van Nistelrooy), manager just gone (Steve Cooper) and manager last season at Leicester (Maresca) are waxing lyrical about his impact upon this team.
The longevity is more than faintly ridiculous. Vardy will turn 38 next month and only four older strikers in Premier League history have scored goals.
Leicester City 2-2 Brighton (Sunday 8 December)
Game no.: 45/92
Miles: 31
Cumulative miles: 7,205
Total goals seen: 127
The one thing I’ll remember in May: The inevitability of Jamie Vardy. The game until his miraculous late interventions
Teddy Sheringham, Dean Windass, Mark Hughes and Mick Harford belong to a different generation and none were guaranteed starters for their clubs at the time. No older forward has started a match in Europe’s top five leagues this season.
This summer, England supporters fretted whether it may soon be time to look for Harry Kane’s replacement – Kane is seven years younger than Vardy.
Vardy is older than world-class strikers now in retirement leagues (Karim Benzema and Luis Suarez) and England internationals who seem like yesterday’s players (Aaron Lennon, Joe Hart, Micah Richards). Thirty-four players have scored 100 goals in Premier League history. Vardy has scored 108 since turning 30.
Vardy’s own explanation for this is simple: he started late and so can carry on longer. He’s said as much repeatedly when stating his intention to keep going into his 40s. As far as Vardy goes, that’s the argument won. Once he’s decided something is happening, the strength of will means it usually does.
But surely the opposite is more often true? It wasn’t as if Vardy was resting up until reaching the Premier League. He was playing as many games and working full-time. He wasn’t getting expert medical advice, likely wasn’t managing his recovery as elite professionals do and injury management is far less available.
LEICESTER, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 06 : Jamie Vardy of Leicester City during the Leicester City Training Session and press conference at Seagrave Training Complex on December 06, 2024 in Leicester, England. (Photo by Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
Vardy could not possibly have planned his career arc (Photo: Getty)
Vardy has always been a freak. The Red Bull, the Skittles vodka, the nicotine pouches, the catcalls of opposition supporters and his own self-belief; these have been the fuel for this career. None of it makes much sense. None of that matters.
Trulife Ltd sits at the end of Amos Road, beyond the mini roundabout, the end of the line on a small industrial park on Sheffield’s outskirts. Across the road, behind a row of trees, is the River Don, Meadowhall and the M1.
It is here where Vardy worked for seven years alongside semi-professional football, working in the manufacturing of prosthetic limbs.
Hollywood endings are usually constructed in hindsight. It is easy to assume that Vardy long held a Premier League dream tight and believed it would come; nonsense.
Even after he had moved from Stocksbridge Park Steels to Halifax Town in the Northern Premier League, Vardy was offered a deal at Rotherham United. He turned it down because he didn’t want to lose the full-time job in the factory. Vardy loved playing football, but Stocksbridge and Halifax were not part of some grand masterplan.
Know too that this could feasibly, easily, have been someone else’s dream. Talent is everywhere below the National League, but often with a caveat: bad timing, bad injury, bad attitude, bad luck. In 2010-11, when Vardy scored 24 goals for Halifax, Ross Hannah scored 35 times for Matlock Town in the same division.
Like Vardy, Hannah was born in Sheffield. Like Vardy, Hannah had been released by Wednesday in his teens, the year above at school. Like Vardy, Hannah had played for Stocksbridge. Like Vardy, Hannah got his big break, a move to Bradford City. He made his debut against Leeds United and scored his first Football League goal in August 2011, a year before Vardy.
Twelve days after that goal, the Bradford City manager who signed Hannah was sacked. He started two more Football League matches and is now at Rossington Main in the Northern Counties East League Premier Division. This is not to compare ability, but careers can turn and roads are winding. Progress is rarely linear and lives can be defined by small decisions.
Part of the reason for Vardy’s most recent career renaissance is that he has refined his game through necessity. He was so fast that even losing a little pace would not hamper the ability to sit on the shoulder of a defender, but there was a Buckaroo edge to Vardy’s peak in the Premier League, a riotous pest of a striker who would run constantly and explode frequently.
It takes only an amateur psychologist to interpret that version of Vardy as desperate to make the most of this unexpected time in the sun.
That’s changed now. Maresca may have stolen the headlines by calling Vardy “the best English striker of his generation” ahead of Kane and Wayne Rooney, but more interesting was his discussion of how Vardy learned to drop deeper and link play, conserving the sprint energy for when it made most sense.
And the pest will never die; Vardy plays football at peace with himself by playing war with everyone else.
The skill level is extraordinary and yet made to look simple: a knocked long ball, coming over the shoulder, with a defender in the way, on the weaker foot, taken on the volley in one sweeping movement and into the bottom corner. So fluid is the action that the run into celebration itself seems part of the same move.
The technique is unlikely to dissipate either. I have a good mate whose favourite Premier League goal is Vardy’s against West Brom at the Hawthorns in 2018. I’d never say this to his face (sorry, Dave) but I think that he might be right.
He’s also now playing the greatest hits of his style. Against Brighton, Leicester are poor for long periods of the game, unable to escape the press with the short passing triangles and serving up possession when forced to go long. With five minutes left of normal time, they trail 2-0, the away end is crowing and the home ends are emptying rapidly.
Vardy scores one and assists the other. The presence of mind to pass the ball across goal for the equaliser is enough to earn praise from Van Nistelrooy post-match, who hints that he might have tried to score in the same position.
Vardy has had 24 touches in 90 minutes and completed 10 passes, but who cares. The comeback is a mini-miracle; just another one around here. Brighton cannot work out what has happened. Ten minutes ago they were singing “Your wife is a grass” and now he’s broken them.
There are footballing lessons in the Jamie Vardy career arc: that being released from an academy need not be the end of the road; that the identification of talent at certain ages can allow potential brilliance to slip through the net; that the English pyramid contains potential wonder, lots of which gets missed; that strikers who foresee the need to change their games are typically better at coping; that committing to sticking what works for your game can be better than the best external advice.
But there are also no lessons at all, because so little of this ever made much sense. Vardy is a 1950s throwback footballer, who didn’t just mimic that anachronistic factory-to-football rise long after it had fallen from view but supercharged it.
In 2011 he was playing in the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League at the age of 24 and in 2015 he was playing for England. That can never be normalised because it is not normal.
“I didn’t ever sit down and plan all of this,” Vardy once said about his career. “It has just happened how it has happened.”
You get the point and can even see the logic: someone did what they had always done and things seemed to happen by grand design. But it’s also nonsense: rarely can you watch a footballer and see more obviously how they made things work. Vardy is almost 38 years old and it’s still happening.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via ourinteractive map*** and find every article (so far) here***