Jamie Vardy: From Factory Worker to Premier League Champion
Jamie Vardy has spent a career tearing up scripts. Now, in a new Netflix documentary, he pulls apart his own.
“Untold: Jamie Vardy” charts the 39-year-old’s improbable rise from £120-a-week factory shifts and non-league grounds to lifting the Premier League trophy with 5,000-1 outsiders Leicester City. But the film does something else, too. It drags into the light the chaos off the pitch – and the role Rebekah Vardy played in stopping him throwing it all away.
He admits it straight. Without her, the story might never have reached the top flight.
From ankle tag to title winner
Vardy has always been more comfortable letting his boots speak. So when the cameras roll and the first question lands – “Describe yourself in one word” – others call him “loyal”, “legend”, “goals”.
His own verdict? “Twat.”
It’s delivered with a laugh, but the documentary quickly rewinds to the years when that description wasn’t entirely a joke.
As a teenager and into his early 20s, Vardy was living with his parents and working in a factory making crutches and Zimmer frames. At weekends he turned out for Stocksbridge Park Steels, still stung by rejection from boyhood club Sheffield Wednesday. The football was serious. The lifestyle was anything but.
Nights with his close-knit group of friends – “The Inbetweeners” – became heavy drinking sessions. They called him “Sicknote” because, as he cheerfully admits, he was “good at getting Mondays off”.
The chaos caught up with him. During one night out, a row escalated when another drinker mocked a deaf friend. Vardy got involved, was charged with assault, and ended up wearing an ankle tag for six months, bound by a strict curfew.
He calls that arrest a turning point. The mindset from then on, he says, was blunt: “Don’t be a dick and do it again.”
From Halifax to Fleetwood, then Leicester City for a record £1million non-league fee, his climb through the divisions was relentless. But the habits that had nearly derailed him once were still lurking in the background.
Enter Rebekah
Shortly after joining Leicester, still in the Championship at the time, Vardy met the woman who would change his life – though not in the way either of them expected.
Rebekah, 44, was working in a Sheffield nightclub, a single mum who had just left what she calls a “not-great” relationship. She was asked to organise a birthday party. The client’s name meant nothing to her.
“I don’t even know who he was,” she recalls. When she learned he was a professional footballer, her instinct was to run. “There’s this preconception that they’re all idiots, they are all a**holes.”
Then the birthday boy arrived.
“Jamie’s birthday came round and sure enough he rocks in s**tfaced,” she says. One friend on each side, holding him up. His mates ordering big bottles of champagne, dousing strangers on the dancefloor. “I’m actually f***ing over this now,” she remembers thinking. “They’re like mental cases, they’re like yobs.”
Vardy listens to that description in the documentary and grins. “That sounds like my mates.”
Eventually, his friends carried him out. Rebekah felt relief. One less problem to manage. Then her phone buzzed.
“Later that evening I get a text message from Jamie saying, ‘I really want to see you’,” she says. Her reaction was instant: “Delete!”
But Vardy, on a barren run on the pitch and hiding from his own doubts in alcohol, refused to let it go. “I weren’t letting it go, there was no chance of that happening,” he says.
The soft centre behind the partyboy
Rebekah gave in, eventually, worn down by what she calls his “relentless” calls and messages.
“It got to a point where I was like, ‘Oh f* it, just go and meet him and that would be the end of it’,” she says. It wasn’t. Sitting with him, away from the nightclub madness, she saw something else.
“Behind this crazy, alcohol-loving wild partyboy was a guy that was really kind, really good at listening and he was really good to talk to. We decided to go on a couple of dates.”
Soon after, she fell pregnant. It shocked them both. They chose to keep the baby and build a future together. They would go on to have two more children.
That decision forced the next confrontation – the one that finally dragged Vardy away from the edge.
The ultimatum in a bar
On the eve of a baby scan, Vardy went missing. Rebekah found him in a bar, drinking with his mates.
She stormed in.
“I said, ‘You, me, conversation, now’,” she recalls. She demanded answers. “What’s your deal? What is going on?”
For once, the striker opened up. The £1million fee, the expectation at Leicester, the nagging belief he wasn’t good enough. “I’ve got all this pressure on me because they spent all this money and I don’t think I can live up to those expectations,” he told her.
Her response was direct. Why did he doubt himself so much? Did he understand the opportunity in front of him?
“He said he’d always been rejected and told he wasn’t good enough, so naturally we start to believe that’s true,” she explains.
She didn’t sugarcoat it. “You are going to screw up everything you’ve worked so bloody hard for if you don’t change your lifestyle choices,” she told him. “I’m not telling you to stop drinking, just rein it in.”
Vardy heard it. And this time, he acted.
“I knew I could tell her anything and it was never too much for her,” he says. “What she was saying was right, it needed to stop. It really did. I needed to hear it. She would always be pushing me to go in the right direction and it was 100 per cent what I needed.”
The transformation was swift enough for those inside the dressing room to notice.
“Jamie pre- and post-Becky is like two different people,” says former Leicester captain Wes Morgan. “Having that stability and calmness in his life reflected in his performance.”
From survival scrap to immortality
The numbers that followed are etched into Premier League folklore.
Vardy rediscovered the form that had made him the most coveted forward in non-league, helping Leicester win promotion in 2013/14. A year later he led the charge in a frantic survival scrap, Nigel Pearson’s side clinging on to their top-flight status when relegation loomed.
That summer brought his first England call-up. The season after that rewrote history.
Under Claudio Ranieri, Vardy scored in a record 11 consecutive Premier League games as Leicester surged to a title nobody believed possible. The former factory worker from Stocksbridge became a champion of England.
Looking back, he still sounds half amused, half defiant.
“The main thing is no one can take it away,” he says. “It happened. Should it have happened? Probably not. But it did.
“Only player to score 100 Premier League goals after the age of 30? And the oldest player to win the Premier League Golden Boot? I’m not normal. It’s good to be different. If every footballer was the same, it’d be a conveyor belt of robots.”
Family fractures and a life by Lake Garda
The documentary doesn’t stop at medals and goals. It also touches raw nerves.
Vardy reveals he remains estranged from his parents after a bitter dispute over his biological father. He says he had long heard whispers – people approaching him claiming to know his dad – but chose to ignore them.
The truth emerged not from his family, but from a news story naming labourer Richard Gill as his father. Vardy confronted his mum, Lisa, furious he hadn’t heard it from her first. He no longer speaks to her or his stepfather Phil, the man who raised him and whose surname he took.
“I did have a pop at my mum, I should have been told if it was true,” he says. “I’ve still not heard it from them, they’ve still not seen the kids – I’ve made the decision, I was done with it.
“I’ve got my wife, my children, we’re here, we’re happy. That’s all that matters to me, making sure they’re happy.”
Contact from his biological father’s side hasn’t changed his stance.
“I was then getting letters sent to the club by my so-called dad’s family saying, ‘If you do want to speak, I’m your auntie’,” he says. “No, not for me.”
The cameras will follow the Vardys again this year in an ITV1 series, “The Vardys”, charting their new life in Lombardy after his move to Serie A side US Cremonese. The family now live in a villa by Lake Garda.
That show is expected to give Rebekah’s perspective on the bitter “Wagatha” saga and her failed 2022 libel case against Coleen Rooney, who had accused her of leaking stories to the press. Rebekah lost in court; the rivalry has simmered ever since, with the Rooneys’ own Disney+ project still to come.
For now, though, Netflix has the floor.
“Untold: Jamie Vardy” lands on May 12, promising a closer look at a career that should never have happened, a marriage forged in the middle of the storm, and a striker still intent on proving he was never built for the conveyor belt.
