CHAPTER 10Willpower as a Team Sport
“Ranieri, Ranieri, he came from Italy, to manage the City.”
—Leicester City football chant sung to the tune of “Volare”
No matter how you feel about soccer (or “football” for two of the book's three authors), it's difficult to come up with a more inspiring sports team than the 2015–2016 Leicester City Football Club (Leicester City FC).
Leicester City FC, founded in the East Midlands of England in 1884, spent the majority of its existence as a lower league team. The English Football League pyramid is an interconnected hierarchy of divisions in which teams advance or decline in rank based on their performance in their division. If a team in the Premier League (the top division) fails to beat a Championship League team (the second-highest level), it can fall from the Premier League. Leicester City, sitting solidly in the second tier Championship League, was at risk of being relegated down to the Third Division in the early 1990s—but in the 1995–1996 Football League playoffs, the team managed to move up to the top league and by the 2014–2015 season, it was ranked 14th out of the top 20 Premier League teams.
In 2015, Claudio Ranieri, as the newly appointed manager of Leicester City, had put together a team of ragtag underdogs. Altogether, his starting players cost just £23 million ($29 million). The team's top opponent, Chelsea, was spending almost 10× that on their players. Other Premier League teams, like Manchester City and Manchester United, ...
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