Comparing with the us sports is tough for several reasons:<p>The American sports have no relegation system, but on the contrary have a loser-to-winner system of drafting. You even hear about potential conspiracies to come last when a guy like (no pun) Luck is available.<p>In Europe there&#x27;s also no salary cap. When my team played Barcelona a few years ago pretty much all their players had a market value exceeding my whole team. That doesn&#x27;t happen in the us sports because of the cap, and so when you look at various halls of fame you find a nicely spread set of clubs that the best players played at. This also makes the patriots quite a special franchise.<p>So why Leicester? Without having the stats available, I can see a couple of things.<p>First, the premier league pays huge salaries. That means even middling clubs are big fish on the European market. But while there&#x27;s plenty of stats to say who is good at playing, it isn&#x27;t easy to put a value on the relative merits of players. So you may think Raheem Sterling is a great player, but how much more should you pay for him than a Mahrez? Hard to say. And you also have the brand recognition problem. You buy Mahrez for 1M, he bombs, you lose your job. Or you buy Sterling for 50, he bombs, people think he had an off season or they think of some other excuse.<p>Second, even very good players are wary of competing for spots. Leicester are not a team of amateurs. They are full time professionals, many with national team experience. Perhaps the prior probability of 1 in 5000 needs revision. It may have made sense back in the days where some teams were playing local boys vs international stars, but not in the pro era. I remember years ago one of the teams in the Danish league went bust and had to field amateurs. They were caned every match.<p>Third, it&#x27;s not easy to go from individual performance stats to a team plan. It&#x27;s actually incredibly hard to build a model of how they&#x27;ll all work together.