Every now and then — particularly in sports — we see things that haven’t been seen in a long, long time. For example, I’m sure there were people in Chicago that were alive and at the age of remembrance in 1917 who lived to see the White Sox win the World Series in 2005. Same with the Red Sox the year before — folks around in 1918 who got to see the World Series championship in 2004. Those were long droughts; other teams also have long ones that are current, though none that are quite that long. Pretty much any team that’s close to or over a century old in American sports has won a championship in, say, the last half century or so. The Chicago Cubs are the most famous exception, and the Cleveland Indians, Cleveland Browns, Sacramento Kings, and Toronto Maple Leafs are getting pretty nervous at their long title-less streaks; yet, they’ve all won before.
So, today, in England, we got to see something unique. Leicester City won their first top flight championship in 132 years of existence. Not only is this their only big league championship; previously they’d finished second in the top level only one time. Due to the relegation and promotion system in European soccer (and other places, of course), the chance of something like this happening is increased, as you can get teams that have never had a chance at the top level or really only competed 100 years ago, back when the leagues were young. Even among these, this is a huge upset.
The Premier League is notoriously unbalanced — there are five or so teams at the top that spend whatever they have to in order to win, and everyone else is more or less fighting to stay up in the top level so that they can get a cut of that lucrative TV contract or put together a great year and make the Champions or Europa Leagues if one of the big guys is under-performing. Nobody — including Leicester fans — expected a small club like Leicester to actually win the league. The odds at major bookmakers were at 5000-1 before the season started (the sports books really took a bath on this one), as Leicester barely avoided relegation last year after needing a great last nine weeks of the season (seven wins in their last nine) after a pretty-bad first 29 weeks. A new manager and a few new players later (and yet no huge stars — the team still isn’t a big-spending group), they’re at the top of the league. It’s pretty amazing, really.
In some ways, Leicester City represents hope. I think a lot of us sports fans forget that, or we take our team’s success (or failure) for granted. In one of the most unbalanced leagues in any major sport on the planet, one of the smallest teams actually won — that’s an inspiration to those of us who are waiting for our teams to finally win one or win another one.