Winning the Premier League in 2016 will forever go down as Leicester City’s greatest achievements.
Thanks to the brilliance of Claudio Ranieri, who used promises of pizza for earning clean sheets, to masterminding wins against Chelsea, Manchester City and more meant they defied odds of 5000/1 to win the Premier League.
Jose Mourinho named Ranieri ahead of Premier League legends Pep Guardiola and Sir Alex Ferguson as a better manager due to his achievements.
It wasn’t just Ranieri though as a team built up of players rejected by big six clubs and signed for cheap fees proved a point and wrote themselves into the history books.
Jamie Vardy, N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez, to name a few, played a huge role and as a congratulations, the Leicester owners decided to reward them with an incredible gift.
Leicester City title winners received £100k car as gift in 2016
The late Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was extremely generous when it came to treating his players and staff.
As well as the £6.5m bonus shared between the squad for winning the league, Khun Vichai also decided to purchase 19 BMW i8’s in the Leicester blue as a thank you.
Marc Albrighton was one of the lucky 19 to receive a car and he recalled the surprise he and his teammates got when being told what the owner had done for them.
During an appearance on the No Tippy Tappy Football podcast in August 2024, Albrighton said: “We were all told ‘right, you all need to make your way to the stadium after training’.
“We drove from the training ground to the stadium and as we pulled into the car park there were 25 BMW i8’s lined up.
“It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen.”
Albrighton then joked that due to all of the cars being the same colour, the players would get confused with which car belonged to which player.
Which Leicester City players didn’t receive BMW i8 in title-winning season?
Sadly, for some Leicester players, not all of them were fortunate enough to receive the gift of the car.
Four first-team stars who turned out for the Foxes that season were ineligible to claim the car as a gift.
Joe Dodoo, Yohan Benalouane, Andrej Kramaric and surprisingly N’Golo Kante were the unlucky four.
Dodoo had joined Rangers whereas Benalouane and Kramaric hadn’t played enough to be given one.
Kante was the biggest shock of the lot to miss out, however, he had joined Chelsea by the time which meant he wasn’t present.