Who Is Actually Going To Watch The Jamie Vardy Film?

When it comes to declining marketing potential, nothing quite matches Leicester's Premier League title. While winning the league would usually see a club fired into the economic stratosphere, hurtling like a cannonball through the financial firmament, Leicester seem to have been fired out of a handheld slingshot which long ago lost its elastic strength. No sooner had they secured their place at the pinnacle of the league than they were falling back to earth, dragged down by the gravitational burden of a discomforting title defence, their dissipating form and a run of five league wins between August and February. The towering romance of their achievement crumbled with the businesslike sacking of Claudio Ranieri, and so after a fleeting moment in the sun the club fell from the skies with a dull thud.

This is not to diminish the significance of Leicester's first ever league title, which is no less a historic triumph in defiance of all logic and the limits of the possible, an event which embarrassed the national punditocracy as they struggled to articulate what was happening before their eyes. Still, it is hard not to feel that the dreamlike aura of the 2015-16 season has dissolved away to nothing, the surreal brilliance of Ranieri and co. replaced by the cold reality of a resurgent Chelsea and an unceremonious return to the status quo. The sudden death of the Leicester fairytale has hit nobody harder than Jamie Vardy, the former non-league outcast and Stocksbridge Park Steels star who miraculously earned himself a place in the pantheon of Premier League champions, scoring 24 goals in the process and breaking a series of longstanding records. Over the course of the 2015-16 campaign, his rags-to-riches story captured the collective imagination, but now he has unfortunately been reduced to rags again, or at least the footballing equivalent of the men's range at Jacamo.

Come the summer of 2016, Vardy was the jutting, angular face of Leicester's title heroics, the closest thing to a celebrity to come out of a squad which was profoundly unsuited to the limelight. He courted the tabloids, nabbed himself a HELLO! magazine wedding and even attracted the attention of a semi-professional doppelganger who, lest we forget, he labelled "an absolute full-kit wanker" and publicly spurned on Twitter and Instagram. Vardy was also mooted for a role in a reality television programme called 'Jamie Vardy's Having An Academy', a show which was doomed by a title made up by someone with an exceptional inaptitude for wordplay. There seemed to be more substance to the suggestion that his life was to be the subject of a Hollywood film, however, with initial reports suggesting that Vinnie Jones could play Nigel Pearson leaving cinema goers simultaneously curious and appalled.

Now, in light of the season just gone, the idea of making a film about Jamie Vardy seems like a wild anachronism. This season he has scored 15 goals in all competitions and Leicester look set to finish in the lower half of the table, making this – barring a few exciting nights in the Champions League – a relatively unexceptional campaign. With the romance of last season stripped away, Vardy's image as an inspiring overachiever has reverted to that of a mid-table footballer with a history of unsavoury behaviour. It seems unlikely that the makers of the Jamie Vardy film intended to give 'The Racist Casino Scene' particular prominence, but it now feels like the dramatic denouement in an on-screen narrative which is rapidly ebbing away.

This begs the question, then: who is actually going to watch the Jamie Vardy film, and who is its intended audience? Just as Hollywood are unlikely to invest in the Chris Sutton film, the Tim Sherwood film or the Lee Bowyer film – true crime masterpiece though that might be – the idea of dedicating several hours of cinema to Jamie Vardy seems increasingly bizarre. Rather than a man who is pushing the limits of what is plausible in football, he now seems like a gobby Englishman known mainly for being a bit of a snide, more suited to a guest appearance on the next edition of Bradley Walsh's Soccer Shockers than a starring role in a feature-length biopic. In a recent statement to confirm that the Vardy film would be going ahead despite Leicester's disappointing title defence, the producers said: "Leicester City's success of 2016 and the remarkable rise to stardom of Jamie Vardy is an inspirational and universal story that simply must get told… the exceptional cannot be tarnished by failing to repeat it." The problem is that, while Leicester's success remains unparalleled, Jamie Vardy's grasp on stardom seems to have been ephemeral at best.

Scoring 15 goals in a difficult season for Leicester is no mean feat, of course, but even die-hard supporters must admit it would make for a disappointing ending to a Hollywood movie. Darren Huckerby scored 15 goals for Coventry City over the course of the 1997-98 season, and few of us would fork out the Everyman entrance fee to watch something which concluded with his highlights reel. The reality is that, in a cruel twist of fate, Jamie Vardy has gone the way of his doppelganger in terms of his popular appeal, at least beyond the limits of Leicester. In fact, an extremely dark comedy about his lookalike would probably make for better film material than his life story at this point. There's a parable on the fleeting gratification of fame in there somewhere, and the fickle nature of modern celebrity. Get Ken Loach in as director, and it would probably win the Palme d'Or.