Nigel Pearson is one of Leicester City’s all-time favourite managers.
Pearson was the Foxes manager across two separate spells in which he won the League One and Championship titles, as well as mastermind the great escape in the 14/15 Premier League season.
Even though he was sacked after that season, Kasper Schmeichel credited Pearson for laying the foundations for the Foxes’ future success.
Away from the pitch, the former Middlesbrough and Sheffield Wednesday lives a wild lifestyle but none come as strange as this incident from 2015.
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Nigel Pearson had to fight off pack of wolves on holiday
When he wasn’t in the dugout, Pearson loved to explore the wild and would often take solo holidays to less touristic locations.
On one occasion, the Leicester legend, who once called a journalist ‘an ostrich’, chose to ignore the warnings of the locals and go solo hiking in Romania.
There, Pearson encountered a pack of wolves and had a near-death experience. He told Sky Sports in 2015: “What they do is that one goes for you and the others circle around until one of them can bring you down. What they essentially do is rip the throat out. I backed myself against a tree – I thought ‘I don’t want to get attacked from behind’. I was absolutely goosed by this point.”
Stuart Pearce confirmed the story, adding that his friend was forced to defend himself. “Every summer [Pearson] used to go away on his own on a walking holiday,” he confirmed. “One year he went to Transylvania. Got the train and went out to Transylvania and was warned if he goes walking in the mountains there are wolves and bears that type of thing.
“He got surrounded by a pack of wolves, backed himself up to a hedge to stop them getting behind him and gouged one of their eyes out and broke another’s jaw and managed to get away. He said if they managed to get behind him they would have killed him.”
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Nigel Pearson’s record as Leicester manager
For the current generation of Leicester fans, the majority would argue that Pearson has a higher popularity rating than Claudio Ranieri and Brendan Rodgers – both of whom delivered success in historic fashion.
What separates the 61-year-old from the other two is his personality and understanding of the supporters.
In fairness to Ranieri, he did get it, just in a different way. With Pearson, he wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade and had no qualms in calling out anything that went wrong.
| Time in Charge | Games Managed | Won | Drawn | Lost | Win Percentage |
| 22 June 2008 – 29 June 2010 | 107 | 50 | 30 | 22 | 51.4% |
| 15 November 2011 – 30 June 2015 | 182 | 85 | 38 | 59 | 46.7% |
Across both spells, Pearson won almost half of his games in charge and still has the best win percentage of any manager from the club’s history, was responsible for signing the likes of Jamie Vardy and developing club hero Andy King, along with many others.
Whenever he returns to the King Power Stadium, it’s always with open arms.