Jamie Vardy: From Non-League to Premier League Glory
The first line hits like a tackle you don’t see coming.
“A raw, caged animal, drinking, partying and fighting.”
That’s how Netflix chooses to open its new film on Jamie Vardy. The player himself goes even stronger in the documentary, using a harsher word to describe the man he once was. At 39, now grinding through a relegation scrap with Cremonese in Serie A, he sits in Netflix’s London HQ trying, not entirely comfortably, to look back at the chaos that turned into a career.
“I don't have time to reflect, to be honest,” he says after the first screening of his Untold UK film. Rebekah Vardy, watching from a plush mini‑cinema room, stays mostly silent, breaking only to react to certain questions or her husband’s answers.
“At the minute, it's playing, the season finishes and I just want to forget about football. I need to mentally forget everything and get back to a normal place.”
The line lands with the weight of someone who has lived every rung of the ladder.
From factory shifts to the Premier League summit
Vardy knew exactly what he was walking into last summer when he chose Cremonese over Feyenoord. A survival fight, a squad braced for pain. Three games to go, they’re still in the drop zone. The grind hasn’t eased with age.
“Physically and mentally, football is a killer,” he says. “It's such a grind on your body and your mind, so I just want to completely forget about it.”
He quickly adds the qualifier that tells you why he’s still here.
“Of course I love it. If I didn't still love it, I wouldn't still be playing.”
Would he do it all again? The non‑league miles, the factory shifts, the ankle tag, the headlines, the pressure?
“If you asked me to go and do it all again, I wouldn't.”
Coming from a man who went from Stocksbridge Park Steels in the eighth tier to lifting the Premier League and playing for England, it sounds jarring. Then the film starts to fill in the gaps.
Released by Sheffield Wednesday for being too small, Vardy is shown tearing through defences for Stocksbridge, working days in a factory making medical splints and scoring for fun at the weekend. The goals look familiar: ruthless, direct, violent in their simplicity. The life around them does not.
By 2007, he says he had “no stability” in his life. Convicted of assault after a night out drinking, he spent six months wearing an ankle tag and living under a 6pm curfew that sometimes forced him to leave matches early. The future Premier League record‑breaker sprinting off before full-time to make sure he didn’t breach a court order: it’s the kind of detail that would sound fictional if it weren’t on camera.
A move to Halifax Town followed, where he met agent John Morris, the man who told him, back then, he’d one day play for England. Fleetwood Town came next. Then the £1m leap to Leicester City, still a Championship club and a world away from non‑league dressing rooms.
The Inbetweeners and the breaking point
Threaded through the film is the tight Sheffield crew Vardy calls “The Inbetweeners” – a small, all‑male group who have stayed with him from the early days to the present.
“If one of us is having a problem, then get it in the group,” he explains. “Might get abused for a bit but at least it's us lot keeping an eye on each other.”
They were needed. Former Leicester midfielder Andy King calls Vardy’s early days at the club a “culture shock”. Vardy himself admits he felt, at first, that he simply wasn’t good enough.
Physiotherapist Dave Rennie backs up the stories of a man wrestling with the step up and with his own habits. The film recalls Vardy “manufacturing his own Skittles vodka at home”, turning up to training hungover and, on one occasion, unreachable to Rebekah while she was pregnant.
There was a point when it looked like he might throw it all away. The documentary credits a “good psychologist”, Nigel Pearson’s patience and the birth of his daughter Ella as the forces that dragged him back from the brink and forced him to grow up.
The fame that followed brought a different kind of trouble. In 2015, a Sun on Sunday story published footage of Vardy using a racial slur towards a Japanese man in a casino. He would later call it “a massive, massive learning curve”, saying he had never been taught which terms were unacceptable.
Then came one of the more personal blows. During a team‑bonding trip to Helsinki, Vardy rushed home after learning a tabloid was about to publish a story revealing his secret biological father – a man he had never known existed. In the film, he calls it “one of the harder things” he has gone through.
Still, the football kept rising. He became the poster boy of Leicester’s 2015‑16 miracle, the relentless finisher who scored in 11 consecutive Premier League matches and turned a 5,000‑1 fantasy into a title. He lifted the FA Cup. He proved his agent right and pulled on an England shirt.
England glory, England strain
Could he have done more for his country after retiring from international duty in 2018?
“Possibly. We'll never know,” he says.
“I'll be honest, going away with England is unbelievable – you want to play for your country – but the mental side of it was tough. That changed when Gareth [Southgate] came in, but before that you were stuck in your room all day.
“You trained and then you were just back in your hotel room, pulling your hair out. There's only so much time you can spend on a PlayStation or speaking to the kids on video calls. You've already not seen them and now you're getting pulled away for another two weeks. It's tough.
“At the time, after the World Cup, I just wanted to protect [my legs] as much as possible, prolong my club career, and as I'm still going now, it was obviously the right decision.”
He still watches England, still watches almost everything.
“I watch as many games as I physically can and it's not nice to see,” he says of Leicester’s recent slide. He returned to the King Power last month and watched the club he helped transform tumble into League One.
Rebekah, reputation and what comes next
If the documentary is Vardy’s coming‑of‑age story, Rebekah is a constant presence in the background, shaping and steadying. There is no direct mention of the infamous “Wagatha Christie” legal saga with Coleen Rooney, but Rebekah features heavily as the couple navigate fame, scrutiny and the strain of it all.
She lingers after the screening, asking journalists for honest opinions of the film. On screen, Vardy appears hands‑on with his children, determined to give them a life that looks nothing like his own childhood.
“We bring them up as normally as possible,” he says. “They need to have a home life, be kids and enjoy it, but also do what I didn't and work hard at school.”
If there is a grand post‑career plan, it’s well hidden.
“Management? No. I've not really thought about it,” he shrugs. “I've not looked that far down the line.”
From the back of the room, Rebekah calls his lack of planning “infuriating”. It sounds less like a joke than a long‑running domestic argument.
For now, everything is narrowed down to the next training session, the next game, the next survival bid in Italy. Another year at Cremonese would take him into his 40s in a major European league.
“I wake up in the morning, train and go again – the same on matchdays,” he says. “I give as much as I can. I still love football or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.”
Then the question that has followed him for a decade: can another non‑league player really do what he did? Go from an ankle tag and a 6pm curfew to a Premier League title and England caps?
“I think, luckily, I was just a bit of a freak,” he replies. “I don't think it will probably happen again, no, but it happened for me and it was hard work.
“It really was tough, but all worth it.”
If this is the final act of Jamie Vardy the player, it is being played out like the rest of his career – at full tilt, on the edge, with no guarantee there will ever be another one like it.
