Will Leicester City Regret Keeping Vardy?

In June, word leaked that Jamie Vardy had turned down the opportunity to move to Arsenal. The England international instead chose to sign a new contract and stay with his Premier League-winning pals in Leicester, signing his second contract extension in about six months. His original deal, signed in February at £80,000 per week, included a £22 million release clause that Arsenal triggered with their offer. This deal reportedly includes a pay bump to £100,000 per week and likely includes either a larger release clause or no clause at all.

It’s a victory for Leicester to keep one of their three key contributors from last year’s miracle. Along with Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kante, Vardy performed at the highest possible level last season, scoring 24 goals en route to being named Premier League player of the season. Leicester had no like-for-like replacement for the pacey striker in their team last year, and it was a small miracle that he stayed healthy for the vast majority of the season. It would cost £40m (if not more) to sign a striker who would be likely to perform at the level Vardy did last season.

We look at Vardy and think that he’s irreplaceable, that Leicester can’t possibly sell a player who was so integral to the team’s title run. At the same time, the sober observer in me thinks that it would have been far smarter for Leicester to sell high on their prized asset and let him leave for Arsenal. As painful as it might be to imagine, Leicester might be better off with Vardy wearing red and white next season.

Truthfully, as I think about it from Arsenal’s perspective, they might also be lucky that Vardy chose to stay.

It doesn’t help that, like many of his teammates, Vardy failed to impress during England’s disastrous Euro 2016 campaign. He did chip in the equalizer against Wales, but it was off a mishit by Wales defender Ashley Williams while Vardy was standing in an otherwise offside position.

Vardy turned down Arsenal’s offer and instead accepted an improved contract from Leicester; why would the Foxes have been wise to encourage Vardy to move to North London? Let’s run through the reasons.

It would be wrong to say that Jamie Vardy was necessarily lucky last season. Michael Caley calculates expected goals (xG) for each player in the Premier League based on Opta data and by those numbers, Vardy’s scoring figures were right in line with expectations given the positions he was in and the shots he took. In 3,140 minutes, Vardy scored 19 goals from free play; a typical striker would have produced 18.8 xG from those same opportunities. He did get to attempt six penalties (converting five) — more than 16 other teams in the Premier League — but he wasn’t producing impossible or unsustainable finishes on a weekly basis.

At the same time, this is far more than Vardy’s ever produced. Last year, in 2,247 minutes over 34 matches, he scored just five goals and produced 8.0 xG. In Vardy’s two years in the Championship with Leicester, he scored 20 goals over a combined 63 matches. The last time he scored at this sort of rate, he was playing for Fleetwood Town in the Conference.

There was never a point where anybody thought he was a world-class striker until the 2015-16 season. That includes Leicester, which have repeatedly signed strikers and played them ahead of Vardy. They reportedly paid £1m for Vardy, a relatively large figure for a non-league player, and then subsequently signed the likes of Chris Wood (£1.25m) and Andrej Kramaric (£9m, a club record) in the hopes of finding a younger, more gifted poacher.

In the winter, Leicester were linked to speedy CSKA Moscow forward Ahmed Musa and this summer, they were able to complete a £16m deal for him. They’ve also spent serious sums of money on battering rams like Leonardo Ulloa (£8m) and Shinji Okazaki (£7m), who Leicester were more likely to use as lone strikers than Vardy under Nigel Pearson and who played alongside Vardy as target men in Claudio Ranieri’s 4-4-2 this past season. (A mooted £20m move for Watford forward Troy Deeney would give them another player in that style.)

Vardy was able to stay on the field for the vast majority of the season, which is difficult for any striker at the Premier League level. That’s not to say he avoided injuries altogether: he played on with a cracked wrist after injuring it in August against Aston Villa, and missed a match in January after undergoing groin surgery before being suspended for the end of Leicester’s remarkable title run after a red card.

That run of fitness is also unlikely to re-occur given his age.

As quickly as Vardy burst onto the scene as an elite striker, he’s not particularly young. By the time he made it to Leicester in 2012, he was already 25; he will turn 30 halfway through the upcoming season.

That’s what makes it so difficult to believe that Vardy established a new level of performance that will be likely to stick in the years to come. Aging curves in soccer are still an inexact science, but research by Caley suggests that Premier League footballers tend to peak around 26, with a drop-off and notable decline for attacking players coming around 28. Vardy just took a dramatic leap forward at 29. Aging curves are best fits and don’t explain any one player’s arc, but in terms of setting future expectations, having a breakout season at 29 is different than having one at 22.

There are strikers in England, especially in the past, who were able to score regularly into their thirties. Rickie Lambert had 12 and 14 goals for Southampton during his age-30 and age-31 seasons. Yakubu scored 17 times the year he turned 30. Didier Drogba led the league with 29 goals during his age-31 campaign. Mark Viduka chipped in with 15 goals as he turned 31. Those examples are few and far between, though, and there’s a key difference between most of those players and Vardy.