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The odds were 5,000 to 1. That is what bookmakers offered in the summer of 2015 to anyone willing to bet on Leicester City becoming English champions. On May 2, 2016, the title was theirs – with two matches still to play. Several newspapers called it the biggest upset in sporting history. To understand how it happened, you have to go back a year, to the bottom of the table. An example of the Team Principle of Confidence.
The Escape of Spring 2015
Situation
In the 2014–15 season, Leicester was in last place after 29 matches, with 19 points. The team then won seven of its last nine matches and finished fourteenth with 41 points. It was only the third team in Premier League history to be bottom at Christmas and still avoid relegation.
Connection to the team principle
The Team Principle of Confidence describes the shared belief “We can do this.” That belief grows above all out of a team’s own experience. The players who went into the new season in the summer of 2015 had just learned that they could climb out of an almost hopeless position. Nobody had talked them into this confidence. They had earned it on the field.
A Manager Who Kept Expectations Low
Situation
On July 13, 2015, the Italian Claudio Ranieri took over as manager. According to the CIES Football Observatory, the squad had cost £52.8 million in transfer fees; Manchester City’s had cost £411 million. Jamie Vardy had joined in 2012 from the non-league club Fleetwood Town, Riyad Mahrez in 2014 from Le Havre, and N’Golo Kanté on August 3, 2015, from Caen for £5.6 million. By most accounts, Ranieri’s initial target for the season was simply to avoid relegation – 40 points. He promised the team pizza for its first shutout. At Christmas he gave every player a small bell – a nod to the wake-up call he used in training.
Connection to the team principle
Ranieri did not ask his team to believe in the title. He set goals the players felt they could reach, and he made it visible whenever they reached one. A pizza is hardly a big incentive. It is a signal: we have done what we set out to do. In this way, confidence grew step by step with the results instead of running ahead of them.
The Upward Spiral
Situation
Leicester opened the season on August 8, 2015, with a 4–2 win over Sunderland. The first defeat came at the end of September, a 5–2 loss to Arsenal. The team did not fall apart afterward. In November, Vardy scored in his eleventh consecutive league match, breaking Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record. In February 2016, Leicester won 3–1 away at Manchester City. The final tally: 23 wins, 12 draws and only 3 defeats, 81 points and a ten-point lead – with an average of 44.8% possession. On May 16, 2016, more than 240,000 people celebrated in the streets of the city.
Connection to the team principle
Here you can see the second half of the principle: success feeds confidence. Every win made the next one easier to imagine. A heavy defeat like the one against Arsenal can reverse a spiral like this. By then, Leicester had gathered enough evidence to treat it as a blip. Research describes this link in sober terms. A 2002 meta-analysis by Stanley M. Gully, Kara A. Incalcaterra, Aparna Joshi and J. Matthew Beaubien pooled 67 studies and found a moderate relationship between a team’s confidence in its own abilities (team efficacy) and its performance. The relationship is stronger when members depend closely on one another – as they do in a soccer team.
What Confidence Does Not Explain
Situation
The title also had tangible causes: the weakness of the big clubs that season, good scouting, the right tactics and hardly any injuries. And the story did not end there. In 2017 Leicester reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League but found itself in a relegation battle in the league. On February 23, 2017, Ranieri was fired. In 2023 the club was relegated.
Connection to the team principle
The core statement “A team achieves what it believes it can achieve” does not hold as a rule without exceptions. Research shows a moderate relationship, not an automatic one. Confidence is no substitute for ability or resources, and part of the relationship exists because past success shapes both. That confidence played a role at Leicester is an interpretation, not a measurement. The following season also shows that the same team, under the same manager, can lose its confidence again. The spiral runs in both directions.
Key takeaways
Key Lessons
- Set goals your team believes it can reach today, and raise them as the results come in. A goal that is too big at the outset breeds doubt instead of confidence.
- Make milestones visible once they are reached, even with small gestures. Your team should notice that it has achieved what it set out to do.
- Remind your team of situations it has already fought its way out of. A team’s own experience is the strongest source of confidence.
- Put setbacks in perspective before they turn into a downward spiral. A defeat is a result, not a verdict on the team.
- Don’t mistake confidence for the cause of success. Always ask what resources, skills and circumstances were also part of it.
Summary
Leicester City escaped from last place in the spring of 2015 and became English champions a year later. Survival gave the team a confidence that grew with every win. Claudio Ranieri deliberately kept expectations low and made progress visible. The example shows the upward spiral of confidence and success – and, in the following season, its reversal as well. Confidence was one factor among several, not the whole explanation.