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Jamie Vardy’s meteoric rise from non-league footballer to Premier League record breaker

By on November 9, 2015

It was a sunny English afternoon in Bury on a mild day in early October 2009. The Stocksbridge Park Steels were facing FC United of Manchester in an Evo-Stik Premier League match at Gigg Lane, home of Bury FC, based twenty minutes outside of Manchester. FC United were also renting out the space for the season whilst their brand new stadium was under construction. Gigg Lane is a comfortable little stadium, seating just over 11,000 spectators, perfectly suited for a great atmosphere that League One stalwarts Bury usually feature.

For non-league football, however, the stadium is unnecessarily large — only 1,888 turned out for the Saturday match. There’s a picture (number 43) of Jamie Vardy, Stockbridge’s star man up front, chasing down an opposition player during that game. Not a single person sits in the stands in the background. But don’t be mistaken, the support of FC United, a small, fan-owned club run by Manchester United fans unhappy with the Glazer family’s reign at the club, is voracious and the stands are adorned with banners. They were treated to an incredible spectacle, as FC United defeated Stocksbridge 4-3 in an impressive comeback win.

They also witnessed Vardy, a star in the making, score an incredible goal at the end of one of his trademark solo runs, showcasing his blistering speed down the wing. In the twenty-seventh minute, the twenty-three-year-old receives the ball inside his own half from the clearance of a long-throw in. He then put his head down and ran; past one, then two and three defenders. “He needs to play it left,” the commentator, who didn’t immediately recognize Vardy, says, noticing a hulking No3 barreling down the left. But Vardy bolted all the way into FC United’s box and didn’t need to lift an eyebrow to tuck a cool finish across goal and in off the right-hand post.

FC United v Stocksbridge Park Steels, NPL, 03/10/09 – Goals from FCUM TV on Vimeo.

Vary’s goal at 1:20

Later that night, when all was done and dusted, Vardy was returning home to Sheffield, where Stocksbridge were based. “It used to be a nightmare! Teams got relegated or promoted and the line between North and South used to change every year. One year we might be Evo-stik North then the next year Evo-stik South. We travelled up to Whitburn and down to Quorn,” Vardy said in a fascinating interview with The Telegraph.

Their travels were further complicated by the fact that they never stayed in a city overnight. The club simply couldn’t afford it. “We played cards and music on the coach, have a quiz on sport,” said Vardy. The young Englishman also had a 6:30pm curfew after he was convicted of assault for an incident outside a nightclub, in which he claims he was sticking up for a friend. “Luckily it didn’t stop me playing football,” said Vardy. “Being put on a tag I could have lost playing football again. It made me want to work even harder with the time I had on the pitch to further my career. It was hard for my family because I was stuck in the house, not allowed to leave.”

Vardy would return home to his hometown of Sheffield, where had lived his entire life. As a teenager, he played for Sheffield Wednesday’s academy, only to be released at the age of fifteen on the basis that he was too small. A month later he had a growth spurt, he says. “As soon as that happened I never thought I would play football again,” he said, per the BBC. “It was a real heartache as a kid.”

He took a break from football before signing for a youth academy in Rotherham. From there, he joined Stocksbridge, a small club on the outskirts of Sheffield, in 2007, aged twenty. “We changed in little stone buildings with showers – luckily,” he said. “Hot water in most, except in Stocksbridge where the hot water used to run out all the time. You needed to be first in otherwise you’d have the coldest shower ever. We paid for our own tracksuit, which I had to clean myself. When I was playing for the reserves, if you got a call-up you got a straight £30. I’d never been paid for football!”

Yet his wage has hardly enough to live on and Vardy spent the majority of his day in a factory making carbon-fibre splints, back-breaking labor. He would train two days a-week and then play on the weekend. In three years at Stocksbridge, he scored sixty-six goals in just over a hundred matches, earning him a move to Halifax Town in 2010, for £15,000. Despite feeling increasing strain from his day-job, he scored twenty-nine more goals in an explosive season at Halifax.

“Jamie was quite clearly talented and it was incredible that he hadn’t been spotted sooner,” David Bosomworth, chairman of Halifax told The Mirror Online. “Clubs were watching him and couldn’t make a decision. It was as if they thought there must be some catch.”

In the summer of 2011, Vardy committed to football full-time with a move to Fleetwood. He signed on Friday morning, August 26th, 2011, for £850-a-week. That same night Fleetwood hosted York, and Vardy started. He played again three days later, and on September first, he scored two goals in a 3-2 win over Kettering. Two more goals the following week and Vardy began a stunning run of form, in which he scored thirty-one goals in thirty-six Conference Premier matches, helping lead Fleetwood to promotion to the Football League.

It was then the suitors starting lining up for Vardy and The Mirror say that some twenty-five scouts might come to any given game to watch him play. Current England manager Roy Hodgson, then in charge of West Bromwich Albion, came to watch him play against Kidderminster Harriers and Leicester City manager Nigel Pearson had been watching him since Stocksbridge. In May of 2012, he took the plunge of £1m for Vardy, a record for a non-league player. In this second part of Vardy’s career he took a meteoric step up to the Championship.

Although he knew only one player Leicester, Charlie Adam, who had a similar rise from non-league football, he quickly meshed with Pearson’s squad. “In the changing room, I’m seen as one of the jokers,” he said. “I like to have a laugh, there are quite a few of us. That what helps make a good atmosphere in the changing-rooms. You’ve got to have a few jokers but obviously serious when the time comes. We have a little giggle with a few of the sports science lads. If they bring us the wrong drink, they might end up in the iced bath fully clothed. It’s just bringing the camaraderie together.”

But he admitted: “It was tough. I came into a dressing room with a lot of big names in and I wasn’t used to it whatsoever. It did take a lot to get used to.”

Hard work over the summer paid off in his Leicester debut, a trip to Middlesborough. He scored the deciding goal that day in August, 2013. Yet he scored just five more goals that season, by far his worst to date. “It was a big step up, fitness-wise, physically, positioning, pace. I lost faith in myself a few times,” he told the Telegraph. “The first season here I didn’t have the best of seasons. I had it in my head that I wasn’t good enough. I did ask if I could leave on loan. They were having none of it. I had a good long chat with the gaffer. He said: ‘You just knuckle down, you are good enough, we wouldn’t have signed you if you weren’t.’ That helped me a lot. That made me really want to stay.”

“Yes I did [nearly give up] to be honest with you,” he said in another interview.

The next season, he rose past the doubters and exploded onto the scene with sixteen goals in thirty-seven games, helping Leicester earn promotion to the Premier League. Over the summer, they went on a preseason tour of Thailand, home of Leicester’s owners. “The owners bring the monks over from Thailand and we get a blessing off them,” he said. “As we were getting changed before the United game, the monks came round. They dip the sticks in the holy water and then lash us on our legs and feet. It’s not too hard it’s just that you’re literally having a shower, there’s that much water going everywhere. It’s all over your gear you’ve just hung up. That’s the Thai culture and we are happy for them to do it.”

In Vardy’s first season in the Premier League, he only managed five goals, but one came in a 5-3 thrashing of Manchester United and two proved to be game-winners over West Brom and Burnley that helped steer Leicester miraculously clear of almost certain relegation.

It was also around this time that Vardy got his first England call up from Hodgson. “I went to one of my mates after shopping in Leicester, and I sat down shaking for an hour, trying to let it sink in but my phone was going absolutely mental with messages and phone-calls,” he said in an interview the following day. “I was quite happy when the battery died. I made sure I didn’t charge it up until I went to bed.”

At the age of twenty-eight, Vardy is now at the peak of his career having scored in nine consecutive Premier League games and counting this season, helping bring Leicester into the top four. One more would tie Thierry Henry’s all-time record. In three years, Vardy’s 163 goals have taken him from freezing cold showers in Stocksbridge to Thailand and all the way back to Newcastle, where he hopes to break Premier League records on Saturday.

Homepage photo credit: By Pioeb (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.