Leicester City’s Premier League-winning squad will go down in history as one of the most extraordinary in all of football, with Marc Albrighton a big part of the team.
The former Aston Villa attacker had joined the Foxes a year earlier as Albrighton played a crucial role in keeping Leicester in the Premier League under Nigel Pearson, with the left-sided winger becoming even more influential with Claudio Ranieri at the helm.
With Albrighton scoring Leicester’s first-ever UEFA Champions League goal, the Tamworth-born winger will forever be remembered as a legend at the King Power Stadium, having spent ten years with the East Midlands side before retiring last year.
And the former Leicester man has now shared quite the surprising revelation about the Foxes’ run to the Premier League title in 2016.
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Leicester players ‘weren’t taking’ Premier League title win ‘seriously’
Speaking on Tea with Timbsy, Albrighton admitted that the Leicester squad weren’t taking the Premier League winning season that seriously until the final weeks of the campaign, with the former attacker saying that the group at the time made the entire year an incredible experience.
Albrighton said when asked about how Leicester players approached the historic season: “It sounds crazy to say, but we weren’t taking it seriously because of the group of lads, we were going out for champagne, doing pizza-making classes with Ranieri.
“I would not have wanted to experience that with another group of lads, that dressing room was just incredible, we’d just laugh about it like: ‘We’re top of the league at Christmas!’ But obviously, as it got closer, we started going: ‘Hold on, we could be playing Champions League next season,’ and then you start ticking things off.
“We’ve qualified for Champions League, now we’re in a title race, then we started looking at dates like when could we win the league, we were just on a high, it was so enjoyable to come off the pitch and thinking: ‘We’re winning this one.'”
Marc Albrighton almost wasn’t a part of Leicester’s title-winning team
Nearly ten years on from Leicester’s run to the Premier League title, it feels almost crazy to think of the squad and the main starting XI without Albrighton, who played as big a role in the squad as a Jamie Vardy or an N’Golo Kante.
Yet in an alternate timeline, there is a possibility that the winger was not part of the squad, with Albrighton once admitting that he considered leaving Leicester during the summer of 2015, just one year after signing for the Foxes.
As we know, though, Albrighton ended up staying and becoming one of the most important players in Ranieri’s system, with the winger then going on to become a modern-day Leicester legend after his achievements in Europe and beyond.