Nothing in sports compares to Leicester City, so stop trying

Sean Gentille

Nothing in sports compares to Leicester City, so stop trying image

A few years ago, in a conference room in Charlotte, I asked Dan Barker, one of Sporting News’ product guys, which soccer team he rooted for.

MORE: Top 10 Cinderella runs in World Cup history

The conversation went something like this:

Barker: You’ve never heard of it.

Me: I might’ve

Barker: Leicester.

Me: Oh. Nope.

Barker, who moved from England to North Carolina in high school, knew I grew up in Pittsburgh and said — I remember this — “It’s sort of like if the Pirates were a Double-A team.”

GOAL.com: Leicester's title greatest underdog story of all time

At the time, the Pirates were still abysmal; they’d lost 105 games in 2010. Leicester wasn’t even part of the EPL. That was part of the joke: Think of how awful your team is, then shrink the stakes. Add irrelevance. It’s not enough to suck — it needs to be literally impossible to win.

And now Barker’s team, somehow, just won the Premier League. It’s not an easy concept for the soccer-dumb among us. There’s no analog. The baseball comparison is a good start, but it still loses something in translation, because there’s no way for a Double-A squad to graduate, stay a 5,000:1 underdog, and win anything of consequence.

If the Durham Bulls somehow wound up in the big leagues tomorrow, they’d still have Rays prospects, and they’d still be a better bet to win than 5,000:1, because those sort of odds don’t exist in American leagues. Give them another season to add actual MLB players, and their odds would improve, still.

The Foxes play for the same city and the same fans as they did five years ago, in a system that’s self-contained in a way that minor league baseball is not. Leicester City, heretofore, hasn’t been a cool team to root for. It wasn’t one that, say, an American picking up professional soccer later in life would choose. Why be that stupid? Why willfully hitch your wagon to a team that, literally, does not have a shot at winning anything?

MORE: Leicester players watch at Vardy's place

That, more than anything, is what makes this story so great; the overwhelming majority of the people paying attention today can only really enjoy it secondhand. We can marvel at the sheer unlikelihood of it all, then try to come up with comparisons that inevitably fall short. There are none.

We should all just stop trying, and enjoy this for what it is — the sort of thing that won't happen again in our lifetime, didn't happen in our grandparents' lifetimes and won't happen in our grandchildren's lifetimes. What true Leicester City fans are dealing with right now is, literally, a unique human experience.

In the meantime, I will spend the rest of the day wishing I'd have bet $100 on my friend's favorite team.

Sean Gentille