EXCLUSIVEThe mad world of Jamie Vardy: Insiders and friends lift the lid on reluctant superstar who sleeps two hours a night away from home with his career held together by ‘glue’ Rebekah – and why a Saudi move looks unlikely

Not long after Jamie Vardy joined Leicester City from Fleetwood in 2012, he asked to go back to non-league football. Briefly he considered being a nightclub rep in Ibiza.

When he was first called up for England three years later, he asked Leicester to invent an injury so that he didn’t have to go. He has also said that playing football under an assumed name would suit him.

It’s always been football without the fuss for Vardy but it’s hard to pull all that off when you score goals like he does.

On Sunday at the King Power the 38-year-old will play his 500th and final game for the club with whom he won the Premier League nine years ago. With any luck, he will score his 200th Leicester goal.

Vardy is a rather reluctant star in his own show. When he posed for an exit picture recently with all his medals and trophies, one friend said: ‘I was just amazed he could find them all.’

But this is and has always been Vardy, a player who rose through the pyramid on the back of talent, work and a refusal to yield in terms of who he was.

Those close to him say there has always been a trace of imposter syndrome. Is this what prevented him joining Arsenal in 2016? He says it’s not but some suspect otherwise.

Equally there has never been enough doubt to make him change. Vardy leaves Leicester as he arrived. Real and unvarnished. At the same time he has managed to change a football club for ever.

During Leicester’s recent home win over Southampton, referee David Webb fell to the floor after a collision. Vardy bent down, reached for the official’s whistle and blew it in a bid to stop a Southampton breakaway developing. It worked.

A friend was watching and recalls: ‘There is nothing more Vardy than that. Inside he would have found it incredibly funny.

‘It’s not for other people’s laughs but for his own. He does his thing then leaves the scene. Classic.’

Vardy can be abrasive. A ‘loud cocky s***’ are his own words. When Leicester’s title winning manager Claudio Ranieri presented him with a shirt after scoring 100 goals, it had an uncomplimentary word on the back.

But his importance to Leicester has been fundamental. Just as he was for Stocksbridge Park Steels in Sheffield and Halifax and then Fleetwood, Vardy has been a leader, a player to gel a dressing room in good days and bad.

Vardy is not a great talker. It makes him uncomfortable. One-liners are more this thing. Short, sharp impact in the dressing room and penalty area.

Part of him remains a non-league player at heart. Snus – a Swedish tobacco product – has been his habit since he was introduced to it by his old Leicester mate Ritchie de Laet. The Red Bull trick – three cans on a match day morning – pre-dates that.

Vardy has always decried the nutritionists but longevity has also come on the back of oxygen tents, compression boots and a cryotherapy chamber at home in which he tends to fall asleep.

His scoring statistics, pre-season numbers, six percent body fat and consistent weight – always between 11st 3lb and 11st 6.5lb – are testimony to his ability to hold back time.

In terms of his view of it all, another associate puts it well. ‘He does care but in a quite complicated way’.

Asked recently to have a look at some of his best goals posted on the Leicester website, he said he had forgotten his log-in. Back in 2016, he was overlooked for the BBC SPOTY list and expressed relief because he didn’t wish to wear a suit.

It all plays to the theme. So does the Arsenal decision, even if the reasons for turning down Arsene Wenger are still not known to anyone outside his immediate circle.

What doesn’t fit is the fact goosebumps sprang up on his arms while watching film of a great goal against Liverpool not long ago. Nor the fact that in that Southampton game he started to take direct free-kicks. He needs that one goal for the double century, you see.

This is the slight contradiction of a man who can intimidate yet draw people together almost at the same time. A man who cares while not always seeming to.

‘How much is bravado and how much is real?’ as someone at the FA put it this week.

‘I am not sure we ever knew.’

When he arrived for his first pre-season at the club’s old training ground almost 13 years ago, Vardy’s wrist was bandaged after coming off worse against one of those test your strength punchbags in Magaluf.

Nine years on, he celebrated Leicester’s FA Cup win by drinking Desperado beer and having a McDonald’s for breakfast. That night he slept with his medal round his neck.

‘If you want it done, ask Becky.’

The route to the centre of Vardy’s world is through his wife Rebekah.

Mrs Vardy has become something of a celebrity in her own right which some suspect is what she always wanted.

More prosaically, Rebekah – the mother of three of Vardy’s four children – is credited by many as being the glue who has held her husband’s career together.

‘Without Becky, it’s hard to say what may have happened,’ says a source who knows them.

‘Before they met, Jamie was living pretty loose at Leicester. He wanted to go back to Fleetwood and was kind of living as though he was still there.

‘He desperately needed that stability around him and he did change.’

Rebekah jokes that her husband can be emotionless and cold. She brings the warmth.

‘It’s all p*** takes and banter with her,’ adds the source.

‘She tells it as it is. She’s ambitious for him but loves him and is ultra protective.

‘Out and about, everyone thinks they are Jamie’s mate and he has struggled with that chaos sometimes.

‘She is open and genuine. She relieves that pressure.’

Vardy and Wayne Rooney got on well on England duty, even if the FA found Rebekah ‘high maintenance’. After Euro 2016, Rooney left with a Vardy shirt for one of his sons.

So the court case between the two wives – after Coleen accused Rebekah of leaking stories about her to the Sun – was challenging.

Chants about his wife have subsequently followed Vardy around. It has, sources say, affected him and bothered him.

After a goal at home to Bristol City last season, Vardy ran the length of the field to celebrate in front of a vocal away support. It was pre-meditated.

Having moved from the house that hosted the infamous party the night the Premier League title was sealed in 2016, the Vardys now live on a gated community in Lincolnshire. Most of their socialising and entertaining takes place behind those doors.

Covid lockdown saw Vardy develop a love of growing vegetables. A far cry from his famous vodka and skittles habit. He also has a gift for mental arithmetic that goes far beyond counting up his goals.

‘Ask him anything and he will do it in is head,’ former team-mate Marc Albrighton has said.

‘It’s incredible.’

Having recently been told his wife is to pay Coleen Rooney’s £1.4m legal costs, Vardy will have done the maths on that one.

And while her husband is considering his next move in the game, Rebekah is unlikely to fade quietly to grey.

If there is to be a film about his life, Rebekah will be at the heart of the negotiations. She knows her husband’s worth and how to play it.

Vardy, for example, says in his own book that he can’t recall even posting the ‘Chat S*** Get Banged’ Facebook message in 2011 that has followed him around since somebody dug it up years later. If anything, he has sometimes sounded a little embarrassed about it.

But while he was winning the FA Cup with his club at Wembley in 2021, his wife was in the crowd wearing a sweatshirt with his catch phrase emblazoned right across it.

An England plane on the way back from a game in Dublin in June 2015 and manager Roy Hodgson has allowed his players a couple of beers. Standing up in the aisle is the newest member of the squad.

‘Vards was the loudest on the plane and he was the one with the best banter,’ recalls an eye witness.

‘He had only been with us two minutes but already seemed utterly comfortable. And that was him. I have never come across anybody like him in an England camp. He was utterly unique.’

Vardy and international football was an unlikely fit. Periods of time away. Time to kill. Not easy for a bloke who can’t sleep for more than two hours if the bed isn’t his own.

When he was first called up, he didn’t believe it. Then he asked Nigel Pearson if he could invent an injury for him. Pearson – his favourite Leicester manager – told him to go so he went.

On his first day he was heard saying – complete with exaggerated puff of the cheeks – that there were ‘only five days to go’ but underneath it all he loved it and England managers loved him too. When he called it a day after the Russia Word Cup it was to everybody’s regret. Had he been available he would have been in the squad for Euro 2021.

Vardy had always been invested in the national team. When England lost to Germany in 2010 in South Africa, Vardy threw his drink at the TV in his Sheffield local.

So when he walked into the dining hall on day one of his debut call-up, he took a deep breath and sat down with the senior pros. Rooney, Joe Hart, James Milner.

He didn’t feel he belonged – not by a million miles – but he wasn’t going to let that show.

‘In a way he was a leader for us but in a different way,’ adds Mail Sport’s source.

‘Outwardly, he never seemed that bothered about being there. Never jumping for joy. Got on with it. Did what was asked of him.

‘But he was entirely himself. Never changed through all the time he was with us. He had a confidence and a knowledge of exactly who he was that you could only admire.

‘Did his snus. Drank his Red Bull. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t do breakfast. But when it came to training he would be at the front, one of the fittest. Totally unique.’

Ultimately Harry Kane did for Vardy’s England career. The older man was an understudy at that level and that wasn’t for him. After being given only eight minutes to try and save Gareth Southgate’s team in extra-time against Croatia in the 2018 World Cup semi-final, Vardy’s post-match countenance spoke volumes.

‘I had rarely seen him so p***** off,’ reveals a witness.

At 7am the morning after England had lost a third-placed game a few days later, Vardy sat on the floor of the team hotel and announced with a smile that he was quitting after 26 caps.

He was, probably quite predictably and understandably, holding a bottle of Corona beer.

Vardy has played for eight permanent managers at Leicester and hasn’t got on perfectly with all of them.

Eighteen months with Claude Puel between 2017 and 2019 was perhaps a low. Puel described his star striker’s need for attention as childlike and was seemingly trying to phase Vardy out. It was a battle the Frenchman would lose.

Vardy’s influence at the King Power has long been a discussion point. The extent of it varies, depending on who you talk to.

One player source who knows him well says it’s “just not in his nature” to elevate opinions to boardroom or executive level. ‘He is just not made that way, not Machiavellian,’ they say. ‘Quiet but audible remarks in training are more his style’.

Others call it differently, saying there is hardly a football decision mooted at Leicester without the same question soon following.

What will Vards make of it? 

It’s always been a powerful dressing room at Leicester. Puel certainly felt that. So did Steve Cooper. So has Ruud van Nistelrooy this season. Brendan Rogers did better until results tailed off towards the end.

This season has been particularly difficult. One reliable source has described a Leicester first team pool “ruined by four or five really bad pros” but Cooper – sacked last November – has said privately that Vardy was exactly the opposite.

Some say his tactic was to massage Vardy’s ego and Rogers certainly did some of that too. Regardless, Vardy rang Cooper the day after he was fired to apologise for not producing more for him on the field.

Vardy could always moan, for sure. Equally, he could unite a group of players like almost no other.

Ranieri once described Vardy as a like an out of tune radio – constant noise – but has privately offered this testimony.

‘Everyone thinks he is some kind of scallywag and they are completely wrong,’ he said.

‘This is a man who has never ever forgotten how close he came to not being a footballer.

‘His attitude to playing and looking after himself is almost Italian.’

Those responsible for clearing Vardy’s rental house in Fleetwood of pizza boxes and the odd vodka bottle would doubtless prick up their ears.

But their man has grown since then and the manner in which Vardy has been able to dictate the manner of his farewell this week points at a level of influence rarely held by a player at a Premier League club.

Inside Leicester, they feel this is the right time. A new kind of Leicester somehow needs to emerge from the wreckage of this season and it may just be best that the most influential man in town is no longer on the property.

Vardy earned £8,000 a week when he pitched up from Fleetwood. He thought it too much. He leaves with the club describing him as the best player in their history.

Where next remains a mystery. Not to the Championship, is the brief. Doesn’t fancy it. Saudi? It’s alcohol free and he would have to stay two years to get the tax benefits. The American MLS? It’s no longer the lucrative retirement home it once was.

But what about the Premier League? Vardy has managed to score eight top flight goals in a very bad team this season and his body has allowed him to start 34 of 36 league games.

An impact sub on a free transfer? There will be worse deals done this summer.

But Jamie Vardy is finally done with Leicester and one of the great sporting stories of our time is over.

Interviewed this week on the Men in Blazers podcast, Vardy – a player who the great Erling Haaland admits to studying – was asked what he would tell his 16-year-old self.

‘I would tell him not to doubt himself,’ said Vardy.

It’s been a long time since anybody has done that.