For years football fans around the country have enjoyed chanting “Jamie Vardy’s having a party bring your …” Well, you know how it ends.
But little did they realise how close Leicester City footballer Jamie Vardy actually came to quitting the game because he was more interested in partying.
Speaking on the YouTube channel Undr the Cosh, Vardy’s former teammate Ben Marshall revealed that before winning the Premier League with Leicester, before the England caps and the Golden Boot award, Vardy seriously considered giving up football to be a club rep in Ibiza.
“I remember when he was saying he’s going to jack it in and go away,” said Marshall. “He had a job offer to go over to Ibiza and be a rep. He was all over that. He’ll tell you that himself.”
Unfortunately, we couldn’t verify Vardy’s unbelievable career move with the man himself. But the story of Vardy’s Ibiza dream has also been told by his former Leicester City manager Craig Shakespeare, who now works as a coach at Aston Villa.
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“Our job is to support players. Sometimes they do have self-doubt and Jamie would be the first to admit he was going through a rough patch,” Shakespeare said in 2017.
“Myself, Nigel [Pearson] and Steve [Walsh] were here to support him. All we did was told him about his attributes and that we thought he could go on.
“We even mentioned then about not only playing in the Premier League but also he had the attributes to play for the national team. We told him we wanted him and believed in him.
“Thankfully he didn’t go to Ibiza. I think he has made the right decision!”
With the support of his coaches, Vardy ultimately decided to stay at Leicester, turning his back on the prospect of working summers in Ibiza.
We’re thankful that he did because had he not the Premier League would have been robbed of one of its most prolific-ever strikers and Leicester City would have been deprived of a hitman who has to-date scored 143 goals in 329 games, but whatever career he had chosen, something tells us that people would have sung “Jamie Vardy’s having a party” either way.
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