Champions: Tigers fluked it, Leicester a minor miracle

Leicester City, English Premier League champions 2015-16 – amazing, isn’t it.

Well, I have done my research and I can tell you that in a football competition without a salary cap, as is the EPL, clubs like Leicester are likely to win the competition every 1,000 years – or 2,000.

No kidding.

Being a patriotic Australian soccer fan I don’t closely follow the EPL or any other foreign league, so I don’t know exactly how much Leicester’s roster was worth.

All I know is that it was a drop in the ocean compared with the billionaire clubs that always win that contest.

And I accept that it is a wonderful story, but only in that it points out the bleeding obvious: the EPL and indeed most soccer competitions in Europe and elsewhere either introduce a salary cap or eventually will fail because of loss of interest.

But let’s do the comparisons between competitions such as EPL, where it’s open slather and the richest club owner usually wins, to our NRL and the American gridiron which finds an annual champion through its massively popular Super Bowl.

I looked at the champions of each competition in the past 10 years and the record speaks for itself:

Super Bowl: (starting from 2016 and working backwards) Denver Broncos, New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, Baltimore Ravens, New York Giants, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints, Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Giants, Indianapolis Colts.

Only the New York Giants figure twice, so all up nine different clubs across the mighty US of A won that competition in the past 10 years.

NRL: (2015 and again working backwards) Cowboys, Souths, Roosters, Melbourne, Manly, St George, Melbourne*, Manly, Melbourne*, Brisbane, Wests Tigers.

The *asterisks are for Melbourne in 2007 and 2009, and of course they were later stripped of those titles for cheating on the salary cap.

Eight different club won the NRL over that period, which is brilliant because the fans of every club start every season believing it could be their turn.

Not so in the Mother Country and the EPL:

The winners were (working backwards again): Leicester, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester United, Manchester United, Chelsea, Chelsea.

Sad, isn’t it. Leicester improved the figures by 25 per cent, being the fourth club to win the EPL in the past 10 years.

But it gets worse and one wonders why would the fans of all the other clubs bother turning up when they know their club can’t win, not for a 1,000 years anyway.

While 48 clubs have competed since the inception of the Premier League in 1992, only six have won the title: Manchester United (13), Chelsea (4), Arsenal (3), Manchester City (2), Blackburn Rovers (1) and Leicester City (1).

But Leicester City at least make our Top 5 of sport clubs which miraculously won a coveted title.

Number 1. Leicester City, who else?

Number 2. Greece. Their odds were only 500-1 when they won the European Nations Cup in 2004.

Number 3: Wests Tigers. Don’t know how they did it in’05 but thank you Benji and the gang, we’re still dining out on our massive fluke.

Number 4: James Buster Douglas was probably the biggest underdog in the history of boxing but went on to knock Mike Tyson onto the mat about 25 years ago.

Number 5: In cricket, Australia has often lost to teams it’s expected to smash, but the big one was going down to Zimbabwe by 13 runs in 1983. It was Zimbabwe’s first international one day match.