Summary
Untold UK: Jamie Vardy doesn’t provide an illuminating or in-depth portrait of its subject, but that’s kind of the point.
Leicester City winning the English Premier League in the 2015-16 season is one of the greatest underdog stories in the history of sports, a 5000/1 upset that rattled the foundations of English football and built legends, one of them being a most unlikely sort: Jamie Vardy. The subject of Netflix’s first UK-centric spin-off of their Untold series of sports documentaries, Vardy’s meteoric rise from non-league football to record-breaking Premier League winner happened in record time, and almost, at least according to this feature from Jesse Vile, in spite of his own controversies and peculiarities.
Vardy’s seeming indifference to his own accomplishments is what gives this film a unique texture among sports documentaries. Even while his family, friends, and teammates regale the camera with a string of buzzwords about his finer qualities, Vardy sees through the puff piece this might have been intended as. He sees himself exactly how he appears – as a troublemaking, heavy-drinking, instinct-driven wind-up merchant who just so happened to be almost preternaturally gifted at scoring goals.
All the interesting stuff lives in this weird overlap between lager lout and elite sportsman. We see regular snippets of truly remarkable sporting accomplishments, such as Vardy breaking the record – which he still holds a decade later – for most consecutive Premier League matches scored in, but they’re all filtered through the vessel of a Sheffield party-boy who was mostly interested in winding up opposition fans and getting back to the boozer with his oddball mates, who as a collective call themselves “The Inbetweeners” for what quickly become obvious reasons.
The eternal Jamie Vardy mystery, one which Untold UK doesn’t manage to solve, is how this guy can be as successful as he has been.
This isn’t intended as a criticism. Vardy’s a uniquely complex character, in part because he’s so id-oriented that the idea of him being complex seems farcical. But he must be. Loads of heavy drinkers like a kick-about, but precisely one has ever scored in 11 Premier League matches in a row. He’s famed for 36-hour benders just as much as he’s famed for being the lynchpin – along with, it must be said, Riyad Mahrez – of a campaign that remains to this day one of the great aberrations in footballing history. He shook the beautiful game’s foundations, but perhaps because he staggered into them while drunk. He believes, wholeheartedly, that dumping a bag of Skittles into a bottle of Belvedere creates a beverage that tastes like Skittles, and not, as an ex-teammate later claims, “horrific”. There’s a fine line between genius and madness, and it’s a line that, given half a chance, Jamie Vardy might try and snort, at least according to the popular chant that would often echo around the King Power Stadium in 2015: “Jamie Vardy’s having a party, bring your vodka and some Charlie!”
(Side note: Drugs, at least the class-A variety, aren’t something that Vardy has ever been meaningfully associated with. His performance-boosting tipples tended to be cans of Red Bull and nicotine pouches.)
Vardy’s wife, Rebekah, becomes a kind of translation mechanism for Untold UK: Jamie Vardy, someone who has always seen through the bluster and nurtured the innate talent that allowed Vardy – and thus Leicester City – to excel. She appears frequently as a voice of reason and a kind of domestic manager, although the extent to which her involvement is its own kind of PR exercise, given her own personal embarrassment and scandals, is impossible to determine. Either way, it remains undeniable that Leicester fans have a lot to thank her for, since Vardy’s marriage is one of the few things that has kept him from thoroughly torpedoing his career and squandering his potential, even if she can’t quite keep him on the straight and narrow entirely.
But who can? A large part of Vardy’s appeal is that even he doesn’t know what he’s doing most of the time. He can’t provide anything even remotely illuminating about the whole “Chat shit get banged” fiasco, and his justification for a racism scandal is so weak that the fact it’s moved on from so quickly almost plays out as a joke. The more you interrogate Vardy, the less sense you get. At some point, you just have to accept him for who he is. In the context of an everyday guy who likes a drink with his mates and all too often gets carried away, his accomplishments are arguably even more impressive.
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