Leicester City’s Champions League win over Sevilla shows they’re the exception to all rules

Let us consider, as the dust settles from Leicester City’s comeback victory over Sevilla, exactly what is going on. Sure, it looks like a decent story at first blush: the unlikeliest champions ever continue their fairy tale; 15th in the Premier League overcomes third in La Liga; Samir Nasri makes a fool of himself. All good, all joyous.

But scrape away the surface: there’s something weirder underneath. Leicester may look as though they’re fumbling and stumbling their way through a second odd season on the back of a first. In fact, they’re engaged in a many-fronted, non-linear assault against everything that we think we know. There is common sense, there is careful thinking. And then there is Leicester. Leicester are winning.

Take the manager’s position. Received wisdom has it that a football team is managed by its manager, or at least coached by its head coach, and that some measure of continuity is desirable, either in style or in personnel. “Stability breeds success” is definitely something that somebody once said, and it wasn’t just the alliteration that made it sound sensible.

Leicester, so we thought, had demolished this already, demonstrating to the world that it’s perfectly possible to swing around wildly and find more success than was ever dreamed of. Out, at a racist sex tape’s notice, went Nigel Pearson, the PE teacher’s PE teacher. In came Claudio Ranieri, a Werther’s Original in human form. Along came the title.

Yet this second collapse and resurgence isn’t just a kick in the shins to old-fashioned concepts like “loyalty” and “being nice.” By sacking Ranieri, replacing him with his (and Pearson’s) assistant Craig Shakespeare, and immediately overturning Liverpool and Sevilla in highly amusing fashion, the club has neatly undermined the whole institution of management.

Imagine if they actually go on to win the Champions League, if Shakespeare pulls off the Full Roberto Di Matteo. We can finally throw away the concept of the trophy-winning manager forever. No more marches! No more planes! It just won’t matter!

And it’s no coincidence, except technically and literally, that Leicester’s latest venture into eye-rubbing weirdness came against against a Sevilla side coached by Jorge Sampaoli. That Sampaoli is a brilliant coach is not in question — he won the Copa America with Chile, has guided Sevilla right into the middle of the Spanish title race, and is being suggested in some places as the next Barcelona manager. Anybody who can manage all that while looking like Andre Agassi is not to be underestimated.

Sampaoli’s football descends from Argentine maven Marcelo Bielsa, and when it works, it is a beautiful, thrilling, and in some strange way extremely futuristic thing. A cavalcade of unexpected angles and bewildering movement with the ball, ultra-aggressive pressing without, all adding up to something hyperactive and overwhelming. It’s so intoxicating that even notionally sensible people start saying things like “vertical!” and “percussive!” and searching the internet for vintage Newell’s Old Boys shirts.

Leicester, obviously, turned it all over with a solid, old-fashioned 4-4-2. Quick man up top, couple of big men at the back, decent goalkeeper. Sorted. Stick your shiny future.

Stick your fairy tale, too. At some point, sport swallowed whole the Disneyfication of the word fairy tale: a hardscrabble underdog overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds, triumphs over a definite evil, and everybody sings their way into the sunset and the straight-to-video sequels. Such an approach invests the remarkable act of winning at 5,000-to-1 odds with a kind of moral authority, as though finishing 10 points ahead of Arsenal was in some way equivalent to beheading a dragon.

Leicester’s fairy tale, like the onceuponatimes of once upon a time, was always more complicated than that, and not just because it’s easy to imagine Vardy living wild in some dark Bavarian wood. There was plenty of money behind it, and there were a fair few explicitly unheroic personalities involved as well. And even the joy and delirium of last night has to be tempered by the knowledge that watching the game somewhere was an old Italian man, his eyes blurred with tears, his heart pulled apart with a strange mix of pride (“My boys, my boys …”) and betrayal (“... why couldn’t they do this for me?”).

While we’re on the subject of Vardy, we should also note with some approval his ongoing dirty protest against the ingrained concept of English moral superiority. Every time he tumbles to the floor at the slightest invitation, he shows the nation’s heaving hypocrisy for what it is. That is a diving foreigner, but this is a streetwise Englishman. Soon the cognitive dissonance will drive the whole island into the sea.

All taken together, it adds up to an assault on the safe, accepted structures of football. Of things being this way and not some other way: of managers being important; of football striding forwards into its glorious tactical future; of fairy tales being simple and easy to enjoy; of England being pure and noble. Nothing makes sense; nothing is supposed to make sense.

Leicester screaming up from relegation trouble to the title and back again, while simultaneously taking their place as one of in the eight best teams in Europe, tells us that sometimes, the only thing to do is just to give up and ride the waves of chaos as far as they will take you. This isn’t just more relaxing, as an approach. It also means that you don’t mind too much when, as we all must, you end up drowning.