Jamie Vardy Netflix documentary: 'Luckily, I was just a little freak'

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The days of ‘Skittle vodka’ — the home-brewed concoction that Vardy came up with to take his mind away from the struggles that he experienced when he first joined Leicester City in 2012 — are gone. “He’d say it tastes unbelievable, just like Skittles. It didn’t, it tasted horrific,” Andy King, the former Leicester City midfielder, explains. Maybe his former team-mates will find common ground with something else that Vardy says on film. Asked to describe himself in one word, Vardy pauses for a long time. As we discover later on, he has called Premier League referees far worse four-letter words. This is Untold UK: Jamie Vardy, the Netflix documentary that tells the rags-to-riches story of the factory worker from Sheffield — “record-breaker, gamechanger, mischief-maker”, to borrow their description — who climbed all the way from the eighth tier of English football, where he was turning out for Stocksbridge Park Steels, to the Premier League, making his top-flight debut at the age of 27, winning the title the following season, and playing in a World Cup semi-final. It’s a crazy tale when you stop to think about it and it’s hard to imagine anything like that ever happening again. Could it? “Probably not, if I’m honest. It’s not the common way of doing things, is it?” Vardy says with a smile, shortly after pulling up a stool in a cinema room in the centre of London, where a small group of journalists have just finished watching a preview screening. “I think, luckily, I was just a little freak in the works,” he adds. In true Vardy style, he has not yet gotten around to watching the documentary himself, or at least he hadn’t when he was talking to us back in March. Hopefully, Netflix will give him a login, bearing in mind the difficulties Vardy ran into when Leicester put together a three-part series showing all of his Premier League goals, just prior to him hitting three figures, in 2020. “I tried clicking on it, to take me back in time, and it said I had to sign up to some LCFC TV thing,” Vardy told The Athletic. “I was like, ‘I’ve not got time for that’.” Love him or loathe him, Vardy is a one-off. As we are reminded in the documentary, at the age of 16, he was rejected by Sheffield Wednesday, the club he grew up supporting, and in danger of losing his way in life, not just in football. Vardy got into a spot of bother with the law after an altercation outside a nightclub, where he says he was defending a friend who was being ridiculed for wearing a hearing aid. Found guilty but spared a custodial sentence, he had an electronic tag strapped around his ankle for the next six months. At that stage, Vardy was at a crossroads and could, he says, have ended up in prison but for football. Taking a job as a party rep in Ibiza was another alternative. Instead, he became a Leicester City legend. The documentary is a Jamie Vardy story, not a Leicester story, but the two are so entwined that it’s almost impossible to separate them. Vardy played 500 games for the club across 13 years, scoring 200 goals, and the photograph that accompanied the announcement that he was leaving last summer — in which he was surrounded by trophies, medals and awards of every description, including a Guinness World Records certificate for scoring in 11 successive Premier League matches — captured his legacy. Our greatest ever player, Jamie Vardy, will depart Leicester City this summer 💙 — Leicester City (@LCFC) April 24, 2025 Ultimately, though, everything always comes back to the 2015-16 season, a decade ago, when Leicester did the unthinkable and won the Premier League title at odds of 5,000-1. Cue memories — and friendships — that will last a lifetime. “We’re all still on a WhatsApp group,” Vardy says. “We’re always talking to each other, always keeping in touch, seeing what lads are doing. The bond we had back then was unbelievable. “The manager, Nige (Nigel Pearson), Walshy (Steve Walsh, joint assistant manager and head of recruitment) and Shakey (Craig Shakespeare, joint assistant manager) — God bless him — brought this unity in the squad. Walshy always seemed to sign players first and foremost on what type of person they were, not their ability, and that just made it easy to integrate straightaway.” It was, of course, Claudio Ranieri who was the manager in the title-winning season, with the Italian taking over after Pearson had pulled off what became known as ‘the great escape’ at the end of the previous campaign, when Leicester won seven out of their last nine Premier League matches to stay up. Asked about the fact that Ranieri isn’t mentioned much in the documentary, Vardy replies: “He obviously deserves credit for what was achieved. I’ve always said one of the main things from my point of view when he came in was, 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. There were just tiny tweaks that he put into, say, a training session to help us with how we were playing, to benefit us, and it obviously did. “A lot of the start of that with Nige was the foundations, to get into a place to go and kick on again. Do I think we could have done it if Nige was still there? We possibly could have because there wasn’t much different from what we were doing from the previous season.” Rewatching the footage of that title-winning season serves as a reminder that it was the closest thing to a real-life sporting fairytale. But you also find your mind drifting and wondering what on earth has happened to Leicester City now. “It’s tough,” Vardy says when asked about Leicester’s fall from grace. “I watch as many games as I physically can and it’s not nice to see.” That was Vardy talking six weeks ago, at a time when Leicester were sleepwalking towards a second successive relegation (from the Championship to League One) that has since been confirmed. The documentary brings home how Vardy’s career could easily have unravelled too, had he not had the right people around him at crucial points, including after turning professional. Pearson, who talks about Vardy’s personality having a “self-destruct button”, refused to sanction a return to Fleetwood Town, the club that Leicester signed him from for £1million in 2012 (a record fee for a non-League player), when things were going badly in his first season. There were also difficult moments for Vardy during the good times, including finding himself at the centre of a racism storm at the start of the title-winning season and discovering a few months later, via a story in a tabloid newspaper, that his biological father wasn’t the man he grew up calling “dad”. The documentary features plenty of laughter too, with Vardy’s four best friends from Sheffield often providing the comedy value. Nicknamed the Inbetweeners, they travel to watch Vardy everywhere and don’t feel the need to apply a filter when it comes to their feedback on his performances. Asked about them afterwards, Vardy laughs. “They’re great, aren’t they? Do you know what it is, they’re just no-nonsense. They’re in the (hospitality) box and I walk upstairs afterwards and they’ll tell me straight away if I’ve had a good game or a s*** game. They’re not bothered.” It sounds as though the four of them will be able to run a critical eye over Vardy for a while longer yet. Aged 39, he has spent the past season playing for Cremonese in Serie A and has no plans to retire. Just don’t tell Vardy that the reason he’s still going so strong is because he’s making up for lost time. “That’s the one that I always struggle to think about, because everyone always says, ‘Oh, you didn’t come in (to professional football) 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. “I’m just a freak, not normal!” Vardy says, laughing. ‘Untold UK: Jamie Vardy’ is available only on Netflix from May 12 Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms