After achieving the impossible, now the hard part for the Foxes

The reason the Yankees always win, declares Leonardo DiCaprio in “Catch Me If You Can”, is not star players. It’s because “the other teams can’t stop staring at those damn pinstripes”.

Leicester City’s eye-popping surge to the Premier League title offers ample illustration of this school of thought. They were crowned champions because they were fearless throughout the 2015-2016 league season, unfazed by the reputations of giants. Manchester City and Chelsea were swept aside. Manchester United were held at bay. They lost narrowly to Arsenal and pulled off a brilliant smash-and-grab against Liverpool. 

In hindsight, those feats were the easy part. The challenge now for the Foxes is how to handle their own reputation, which is assuming a formidable aura of its own. Can they continue to play like they have done these past eight months, with little regard for the shirts they were wearing and the team’s symbol on them? Make no mistake, logos make you proud. But they can also be a double-edged sword.

As pundits like to say, becoming a champion is hard, but harder still is staying at the top. The Foxes’ fearlessness is remarkable but it has also means the other teams fear them now. Which makes the situation a little tricky. When Leicester City win their next games, it will be harder to tell whether it’s through talent and determination or the “fear factor”.

Look at Liverpool or Manchester United. Many may have forgotten that those clubs came to dominate English football’s top flight because of fearlessness. Liverpool were once a struggling club and so were their regional arch-rivals. Manchester United began their domination of the Premier League era with a youthful team. Over two decades ago, boys fresh from the academy were ridiculed as having absolutely no chance of winning the league. But they quickly shoved the scorn back down critics’ throats.

The influence of big money on today’s game makes Leicester’s success more amazing. But don’t call it a “fairy tale” just yet. Wait until the end of next season. If Leicester can continue to fly high with the current squad, manager and financial approach, then the club can truly be considered a miracle in football world.

Some pundits say Leicester now need to “strengthen” – in other words spend the rewards of this season’s glory on great players. Yet the club only have to remember that the likes of Manchester City and Chelsea, who the Foxes brushed aside with ease on their way to the title, have been strengthening like crazy over the past few years.

Whatever made Leicester City the champions of England, it wasn’t money. Temptation to “buy success”, though, will grow. After all, with the astronomically expensive Lionel Messi, Neymar, Luis Suarez, Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale spearheading Barcelona and Real Madrid, how can you discredit the power of money?

It is undeniable that those players possess phenomenal talent. Yet the “pinstripe theory” could still apply. However hard they try, opponents can’t ignore the Barcelona and Real Madrid logos. Some go to Camp Nou or Santiago Bernabeu and just “roll over and die”. Put a player in a Barca jersey and he becomes impossible to dribble past; let him wear another team’s shirt and he becomes beatable.

Sportsmen have identified three stages in their transitions from unknowns to greats. First they put up a fight. Then comes the “belief”, after realising the gritty battling has paid off. The transition is complete when, full of confidence, they play with swagger. The Foxes are over the first stage and are now playing with belief, as demonstrated in their home game against Everton over the weekend. The trick is how to prolong this second stage, because, after the third stage, there is no way to go but down.

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight,” Dwight D Eisenhower famously remarked. “It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

People are calling Leicester City’s success a “miracle” and a “fairy tale”, which reflects bewilderment, amazement and adoration. Ironically for the Foxes, they must discard such labels if they want to stay at the top, because “miracle” and “fairy tale” imply their achievement was a one-off. All they need to do is convince themselves that the huge fight in them can bring sustained and genuine glory.

They played with little regard for the pinstripes before, and they can do it again.