- 4 hours ago
How did Leicester City win the Premier League in 2015/16?This video explains the tactics behind the greatest shock in Premier League history. Adam Clery breaks down the formation Leicester actually used, how Claudio Ranieri set the team up defensively and in transition, and why their system consistently outperformed teams with far bigger budgets.Leicester’s 4-4-2 structure, the roles of Kanté, Drinkwater, Mahrez and Vardy, and how their compact shape, counter-attacking threat, and defensive discipline caught the entire league off guard.
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00:00Hello, ho, ho, everybody! Because we're putting it out at Christmas, aren't we? So, Santa.
00:06Although, yes, you're right, that won't make a lot of sense if you're watching in March.
00:09Anyway, sorry, welcome to the Adam Cleary Football Channel.
00:13And today, by your special request, we are looking at the Leicester City team that won the Premier League.
00:20Yes, I'll keep this relatively brief, right?
00:22We asked you, the subscribers, for suggestions for a special Christmas video.
00:27Then we put the full best to the members so that they could vote on it.
00:31And they, quite fittingly, in my opinion, chose Claudio Ranieri's title winners.
00:36Now, the miracle on Filbert Street might seem like a bit of an odd pick.
00:40But to quote environmental activist and champion of financial reform, Hans Gruber,
00:46It's Christmas, Theo. It's the time of miracles. So be of good cheer and watch this video.
00:54All right, so, first fucks, how in a season that included Wenger's Arsenal, Klopp's Liverpool,
01:00Pellegrini's Man City and that Tottenham side did rank 5,000 to 1 outsiders
01:06with a bloke from Sunday League up front win the Premier League?
01:10Well, to start with, season reviews are quite tricky to show you a proper 11 in
01:15because, obviously, it's a squad game, isn't it?
01:16You'll have people coming in and out. But out of this Leicester team that you remember
01:22winning the Premier League, only Shinji Okazaki started less than 30 matches in the league.
01:29It was the most consistently selected Premier League winning team ever.
01:35In fact, there were only 33 changes to the starting 11 across the entire season,
01:42which, given Ranieri's nickname at Chelsea was the Tinkerman because he had this weird,
01:47crazy, foreign notion of rotation, is especially mad.
01:51Now, we are, at the end of the video, going to talk about how that consistency
01:55and also the scheduling played a massive part in seeing them over the line.
01:59But now that we have highlighted this 11, I just want to start by saying that, for me,
02:05this team is pretty much 4-4-2's last great hurrah.
02:11Now, yes, it does exceedingly look more like a 4-4-1-1, and quite often you would get one
02:16of the
02:16forwards dropping into the midfield to stop these two getting overloaded.
02:21But, crucially, it functioned almost exactly as you would imagine two banks of four and two forwards too.
02:29Like, for example, both the fullbacks were primarily defenders.
02:33They didn't really look to push too far up the pitch.
02:36And both the wingers, despite being on their wrong foot, still stayed wide.
02:40They very rarely looked to get into the centre of the pitch.
02:44And this isn't to condescend to it or to talk down to it, but it was just so beautifully simple
02:49that it really defied a lot of what the established thinking was at the time.
02:54Like, there was no real onus for fullbacks to overlap like everyone else was doing,
02:58and there was no real onus to load the centre of the pitch with three players like everyone else was
03:03doing.
03:03But one of the main reasons it worked so well for Leicester was possession, and the fact that they pretty
03:10much didn't have any.
03:12Like, the thing you have to remember about this period in football history, right, was that 4-4-2 had
03:17recently gone from being what pretty much everybody was playing
03:21to falling out of favour almost completely.
03:24And that's because the game was getting a lot more technical, a lot more possession-based.
03:28So any team that had three bodies in the middle of the pitch, be that a 4-3-3, a
03:324-2-3-1, a 3-5-2, whatever,
03:35if they outnumbered you in there, they could both control games when they had the ball and play through you
03:41when they didn't.
03:41So of the few teams left that did still play a 4-4-2, you really needed one of these
03:46forwards to be more of a 10
03:49so they could drop in and stop you getting overloaded here.
03:52But Ranieri's very clever solution to the additional space in the midfield was to simply stop there being any space
04:01at all.
04:02They sat home and away, regardless of the opposition, incredibly deep and compact,
04:07and then looked to play direct into any of their four forward players when they turned the ball over.
04:14They ended up having the third lowest possession in the league that season,
04:19but were joint second for goals conceded and second outright for goals scored.
04:25Or to put that another way, they barely saw the ball, but when they did, they were really effective at
04:31using it,
04:32and when they didn't, teams found it really difficult to hurt them.
04:35In terms of their play style, they ranked second bottom in the league for the number of short passes
04:40and second top for the number of long passes.
04:44Beaten in both categories, and this is no shade for me by the way, I think it's extremely funny,
04:50by Tony Pulis' West Bromwich Albion.
04:53So, stylistically, two very similar teams, but one is considered one of the worst footballing sides we've ever seen,
05:01and the other was crowned Premier League champions.
05:04But, of course, football is so weird, isn't it?
05:07Pulis actually ends up outlasting Ranieri in these two respective jobs.
05:13Com si, com sa.
05:14Anyway, though, away from the numbers, let's have a look at how this actually worked in reality,
05:19which is where we live.
05:20So, this is early on in the season against Tottenham,
05:22before they've really settled on that 11.
05:25Like, that's fucking Gokhan Inler, of all people, and Andy King in midfield.
05:29So, yes, very early, but as well as the shape being immediately obvious, look at the arms.
05:34If you have played football at any level, you will know what those arms mean.
05:39They mean that goes.
05:41And in today's football, 100 times out of 100,
05:45your composed ball-playing centre-back splits the opposition press with this ball into king,
05:51but Leicester were not about that at all.
05:55If they had time on the ball at the back, it went forward into feet, onto heads, into space,
06:02whatever was an available option.
06:04And the reason they end up going out to the right here is because Vardy and Mahrez
06:08have bunched up to target Ben Davies.
06:11And if you recall, Tottenham, at the time, you've got Vertonghen and Alderweireld,
06:15who are very strong, dominant in the air,
06:17and Kyle Walker, who's very quick, excellent recovery pace.
06:21So Ben Davies, good player though he is, is physically the weak link there.
06:25They win the header, they attack the space,
06:27and you'll notice Mahrez coming in field, not to leave space for an overlap,
06:32but to attack the goal directly.
06:34And you'll have to trust me on this one,
06:36but I've been back through for this video and watched every goal Leicester scored that season.
06:41And the number of times you are expecting to see someone bombing down the outside into space,
06:48and nobody appears, is, um, well, it's a lot.
06:53Anyway, this is a few weeks later against Arsenal.
06:55They get the ball back and Drinkwater has no interest in calming things down or holding onto the ball.
07:01He just knows that Vardy and Okazaki will be attacking the space,
07:05so he goes over the top with the ball.
07:08And as happened so many times that season, Vardy is onto it, he collects the pass,
07:14he comes in field and he attacks the goal directly.
07:17And Leicester are so direct and so quick with this,
07:20from the moment he gets that ball to the moment he scores,
07:24Arsenal don't get one single challenge in.
07:27And I can't stress enough just how baked in this idea of not messing around with the ball at the
07:33back
07:34was to Leicester City.
07:35Like, I'll show you this.
07:37You're going to have to squint, or just take my word for some of it, right?
07:39But this is the top 50 players in the league that season by completed passes.
07:45And if we highlight all the centre-backs in this list,
07:50you will see that that is just the position where, on average, you saw more of the ball.
07:56Like, centre-back is just the most common position on this list.
08:00It's not even close with anything else.
08:02But interestingly, even the low-possession sides are in there,
08:06because that is just what football was slash is.
08:11But this Leicester team, right,
08:13despite the fact Huth and Morgan started a combined 73 out of 76 Premier League games,
08:21only missed three between them,
08:22they completed less passes than every single other player here, bar one.
08:29Like, literally only Jamie Vardy,
08:32whose brain is just a looped video of a monkey crashing cymbals together
08:37and screaming,
08:38shoot,
08:39had less passes.
08:40However,
08:41however, however, however, right,
08:43to say this was just two banks of four and long ball football
08:47does Leicester an enormous disservice.
08:49Because if that is all it had been,
08:51it would have got figured out really quickly.
08:54Like, yes,
08:54they had a preferred style of route to goal.
08:57Like, the Liverpool one is just the purest distillation of this system imaginable.
09:02Like, you're defensively solid, first and foremost.
09:04That's your back four.
09:05That's your midfield four.
09:06Then, bang,
09:07long.
09:08Jamie Vardy's too quick,
09:09and he doesn't have one single thought in his head beyond,
09:13goal, please.
09:13And he makes Mignolet look a tit.
09:15It is quite literally just chat shit,
09:17get banged,
09:18but presented as football tactics.
09:20But within this seemingly very simple approach,
09:24it was the nuances and the quality of the individuals
09:28that wound up winning Leicester the league.
09:31Like, for starters,
09:32both of these wingers are technically inverted.
09:35They're on the wrong side of the pitch relative to their strong foot,
09:39which means their job is not to attack the byline
09:42and beat a full back and put a cross in that way,
09:44but to actually attack closer to the centre of the pitch,
09:48which obviously means it's easier for them to shoot on their strong foot.
09:51But also, when they cross the ball,
09:53those are in swinging.
09:55And that was a deliberate choice for Ranieri,
09:57because when you've got someone as good at beating the offside trap as Jamie Vardy is,
10:02that type of delivery suits him much better.
10:05But also, because the big four of this system is the fact you're light in midfield,
10:09it meant they were never actually too far away from the action.
10:12And if you didn't need to move somebody into those areas to help out,
10:16you could do that.
10:17It meant Okazaki didn't permanently need to be running back and forward to help there.
10:21So it had that benefit too.
10:23And likewise, the full backs,
10:25their job was not to get on the overlap and provide an attacking threat.
10:29But if you'll remember,
10:30Christian Fuchs was a lot better in the opposition half than Danny Simpson was.
10:35Like that Jamie Vardy Man United goal.
10:37You've definitely forgotten this.
10:38That comes from Christian Fuchs on the wrong side of the pitch,
10:41doing an outside of the foot pass in behind the defence,
10:45which is mental.
10:47And what he offered you was if Albrighton moved into the middle of the pitch,
10:50which he did more than Mahrez,
10:52because he's obviously not as creative,
10:54but he's a little bit better in possession,
10:56Fuchs was better suited to just pushing up
10:58and offering a little bit of support there when he could.
11:00And what that tended to mean was on the rare occasions
11:03where Leicester did see a lot of the ball,
11:05where they were on top,
11:06they tended to be structured a little bit more like this,
11:10which made playing the ball down the left side of the pitch a lot easier for them,
11:14which meant the teams pushed over to defend that.
11:17And Mahrez was better able to isolate full backs on the right.
11:21You'd have both Danny Drinkwater and Mark Albright
11:24and look to switch the play to him
11:25when they overloaded the left-hand side.
11:28And he absolutely thrived in those wide open areas.
11:31Like, I know this Leicester City team has all the same vibes as Landfill Indy,
11:37but when you start pulling it apart and looking underneath,
11:40there's a symphony there as well, you know.
11:42And the man orchestrating all that, of course,
11:46see what I did there,
11:47was N'Golo Kante.
11:49Like, if Christian Fuchs did push up,
11:51he would always cover over into that space
11:52so they were never exposed.
11:54If they did just have two in the middle,
11:56he would do enough running so it felt like they were three.
11:59If they overloaded that left-hand side,
12:01he was capable of finding Mahrez as well.
12:03He might well be still the greatest value transfer
12:07in the history of the Premier League.
12:10And Danny Drinkwater does not get sort of the credit
12:14I really think he's due for his role in this team,
12:17but the way he sort of dovetailed and complimented Kante
12:19is sort of what made this side tick.
12:22In possession, he would go beyond him
12:24to help try and create in the final third,
12:26but out of possession,
12:27he would cover behind him
12:29as Kante aggressively red passing lanes
12:31and tried to stop chances before they could develop.
12:34So the way you want to think of it
12:36is they had alternating responsibilities
12:38in and out of possession,
12:39which was actually quite forward-thinking for the time.
12:42And Danny Simpson as well.
12:44Like, the way I'm describing this team,
12:46he probably feels like a little bit of a passenger,
12:49but it was actually that conservatism,
12:51that reluctance to go over the halfway line
12:54that enabled Riyad Mahrez to do whatever he wanted.
12:58If he took a player on, went outside, went inside,
13:00went looking for the ball,
13:01whatever it was,
13:02he knew there was cover behind him.
13:05His freedom was never going to be something
13:07that other teams could exploit.
13:09Every single one of these players
13:11had a really important, really specific role.
13:13And ultimately, that is why the consistency of the selection,
13:18going with almost the exact same 11
13:20every single week was so, so important.
13:23And honestly, I think if this is still seen
13:26as some kind of like freak underdog story
13:28that's never going to be repeated again,
13:30I actually think its impact on football
13:33is still being felt today.
13:35The 4-4-2 formation was dead in 2015,
13:38but it's now pretty much every single team's
13:40preferred defensive structure.
13:42And I think part of that is because Leicester City
13:45showed that if you sit deep enough
13:47that the numerical advantage cannot possibly count,
13:50it's incredibly solid
13:52and allows you to launch forward really well
13:54in transition when you do get the ball back.
13:56You may call me crazy if that makes you happy,
13:59but when I see the biggest teams in Europe
14:01low-blocking 4-4-2s out of possession
14:04and then trying to hit the space,
14:06I also see in the back of my head
14:09Jamie Vardy smashing a Red Bull.
14:11But if it is so gloriously simple in its simplicity,
14:16why have we not seen another Leicester City since?
14:20Well, because, as we mentioned at the start,
14:22the consistency, right?
14:24Of the 3,420 minutes it's possible to play
14:28in the Premier League,
14:28because for some reason they don't count extra time,
14:31because that's too fiddly,
14:32seven of these players clocked in over 3,000 minutes.
14:37And they were able to do that
14:39and subsequently go and win the league
14:42because the league was all they had to focus on.
14:46Third round exit in the FA Cup,
14:48fourth round exit in the Capital Cup,
14:50and both with heavily rotated lineups.
14:53If I've said it once, I've said it a million times,
14:55there is simply too much football for players now.
14:59If you want to win a league,
15:01your best bet is to forget about anything else.
15:04And I do think that is important to point out
15:06because I have heard over the years
15:07people dismissing this as a total freak result
15:10because so many of the big clubs had very bad years.
15:14And that is true to an extent
15:15you only needed 72 points to win the league this season
15:18when in the years since we've seen Liverpool
15:21get 97 and come second.
15:23So yeah, okay, the door was about as wide open
15:27as it has possibly ever been.
15:28But that does not diminish it for me at all.
15:32Like, yes, it may be the second lowest points total
15:34any champions have ever had in the Premier League.
15:37But Man United won it with 80 once.
15:40Liverpool were unbelievable parts last season
15:43and only got 84.
15:45So it isn't some glaring statistical anomaly
15:48like they thoroughly, thoroughly deserved it.
15:50And whatever had been going on that season,
15:52they would have been in the conversation.
15:54So the thing for me that is really stopping
15:57this ever happening again
15:59is their transfer window.
16:01You look at the outlay
16:02on some of their most important players here
16:04and it is just mind-bending.
16:073 million for Robert Huth.
16:09Albrighton on a free.
16:10Mahrez for what some players are paid in a week.
16:14Vardy came from Fleetwood.
16:15They paid a million for Morgan.
16:17A million for Schmeichel.
16:18And I know the transfer fees have gone
16:20even more insane in recent seasons.
16:23But this summer, you saw De Bruyne and Sterling
16:26go for 50 million.
16:28Benteke and Firmino for 30.
16:30Sterling for 45.
16:31I think so.
16:32Big money was being spent back then
16:35to try and guarantee anything.
16:37And yet Leicester just found themselves
16:38with three of the best players
16:40to ever play in the Premier League
16:42for next to nothing
16:43and a near-perfect supporting cast
16:46for next to next to nothing.
16:48I am reliably-ish informed
16:51that people literally lost their jobs
16:53at Arsenal this year
16:54over somehow missing N'Golo Kante.
16:57So, yeah, just a perfect storm
17:00of unbelievable recruitment,
17:02several transitional seasons going on above you,
17:05and then a system which took
17:07so many undervalued players
17:09and platformed them in an elite way
17:12in this division.
17:14And not only just the last great achievement
17:16of the 4-4-2 system,
17:18but something that wound up preserving it
17:21in tactical thinking
17:22for the next 10, probably 15 or 20 years.
17:25So, yes, there you go, ho-ho.
17:27That's that joke from the start of the video.
17:29That is how Leicester City
17:31somehow won the Premier League,
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18:09So, yes, this was a pre-record.
18:11So, as you watch it,
18:13I'm almost certainly having, like,
18:14leftover turkey sandwich,
18:16whatever's left in the roses tin,
18:18just watching some kind of television,
18:21stone heavier.
18:22And I hope you are, too.
18:23We'll be back just before the New Year, I think.
18:27We'll not go away for too long
18:28because football never stops, does it?
18:30But if you are watching this
18:31in that sort of, like, gooch area
18:34between Christmas and the New Year,
18:35I hope you have a wonderful one.
18:36I hope you had a very nice Christmas.
18:37It's been an absolutely insane 2025
18:40here on this channel.
18:41Who'd have thought it, etc.
18:43And we're hoping for an even bigger 2026.
18:46So we'd like you to join us for that.
18:49I feel like I should have more to say.
18:51It's probably the last video
18:52you might watch of ours this year.
18:53But I don't
18:55because I'm recording it
18:55much earlier in December.
18:57The magic of television.
18:58Anyway, love you.
18:59Have a lovely New Year.
19:01I'll see you in 2026.
19:03Goodbye.
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