‘There’s an element of his personality which has a self-destruct button…’
Untold is a series of sports documentary films distributed on Netflix, which has recently branched out into English sports (only football, so far), having previously concentrated exclusively on American sports. The first three episodes of this new format focus on Leicester City talisman Jamie Vardy, Liverpool’s miraculous Champions League win of 2005, and football-turned-actor Vinnie Jones. I had some trepidation going into the first instalment, the Vardy episode, about the ability of an American TV show to capture the minutiae and idiosyncrasies that make up English football, but they actually do a pretty good job…
Covering Vardy’s rise from ninth-tier non-league side Stocksbridge Park Steels to record-breaking Premier League winner, this first episode of Untold UK has chosen one of English football’s most unlikely stories as its starting point. There are other examples of footballers who have risen through the ranks, but not in the modern era and not to the same extremes. This is real Roy of the Rovers stuff. At 21, Vardy was still working in a factory in his home town of Sheffield. Even while at Leicester, he was still out drinking with his mates every weekend (The Inbetweeners, as they call charmingly call themselves), something that was commonplace among top-level footballers in the ’90s but which had been all but eradicated by Vardy’s era. It was only when meeting his future wife, Rebekah, that Vardy seemed to settle down (a bit).
While the Wagatha Christie saga is sadly omitted here, we do hear Vardy’s take on the media storm around him using (fairly innocuously, in my opinion) a racial slur, as well as the saga around the Daily Mail finding Vardy’s birth father and paying for him to attend a game. As ever, the gutter press comes out of the whole affair much worse than any of the people they are writing about. Throughout it all, Vardy is a calm and affable presence. He’s not the most insightful or eloquent of interviewees, but he does at least seem genuine, and in a world in which footballers have never been more disconnected from the supporters who watch them from the terraces, Vardy’s authenticity is to be applauded.
The inaugural episode of Untold UK is compelling enough to keep me invested for the next two entries. To say how popular the Beautiful Game has become, there are still so many untold stories out there. If this new endeavour can tell just a small percentage of them, it’ll be on to something.
