Jamie Vardy’s story is one of the most eventful in football history, earning a move to a Championship club from non-league football and going on to win the Premier League and win two Golden Boot awards for Leicester City.
Jamie Carragher has gone as far as to call his £1 million signing from Fleetwood Town the best signing in history, with the player now having made over 300 appearances for Leicester City and scoring 144 goals in the process.
Legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has revealed that he wanted to bring Vardy to the Emirates in 2016, when he starred in Leicester’s title winning campaign, finishing the season as the top scorer in the Premier League.
Wenger offered the Leicester striker ‘a lot of money’ to make the move to London, but as history would have it, the player ended up staying at the King Power Stadium.
‘I offered him a lot of money at the time,’ Wenger told beIN Sports.
‘Leicester had just won the championship in 2016, and [Vichai] Srivaddhanaprabha at the time, who unfortunately after had the helicopter accident, did absolutely not want to lose him and they offered him a longer contract and approximately the same money, if not more.’
He added: ‘We had more of the ball, yes, but still around the box, the timings of his runs, he finds the space.
‘When you see the big strikers, they’re on the move when others stand still in the box, and he has that.
‘You see they read (the game) earlier than others, they anticipate better, they understand quicker than other people what’s going on, and (he has) that quality of anticipation, that speed of understanding.’
