You can work on the factory floor when you're 23, and play in the fifth division when you're 25. If you are the one who chases the hopeless balls, you could still be top scorer and play for your country a few years later. The proof is Jamie Vardy.

The last year there has been a topic that Arsène Wenger has returned to when he's been out and rumbling about the problems of today's football. Strikers are no longer being made. Not in all of Europe, and especially not in England. - If you look at the world football, South America is the only continent that produces strikers. At least 80 percent of them come from South America. Why? Wenger is convinced that something has been lost in the convenience and comfort among the elite academies all golf green pitches.

"If you're a 10-year old playing street football with 15-year-olds, you need to be smart and show that you are good, you need to fight and win impossible balls. But in our culture, street football is gone. If you go back 30, 40 years in time, life in was England much more difficult. Today we have all become much softer and more protective."

Arsène Wenger's theory building is sweeping, but interesting. According to him, the European talent development generates an excess of technical, creative number 10 types. But the kind that runs through a stone wall to score goals, to win games? No. Not here. Not any longer. - Nowadays it is player such as Alexis Sánchez that remind me of the first generation of English players I had; Dixon, Bould, Adams, Winterburn, Keown. Players who are simply ready for battle, for war.

Jamie Vardy stopped playing football when he was 16 years old. His childhood club Sheffield Wednesday estimated that he was too small to succeed, and poked him out of the academy.

It wasn't that Vardy wasn't passionate about football, but rather that he cared too much. He was too young to handle the disappointment, too hurt to just brush it off and continue.

It took eight months before he even tried to lace on a pair of cleats again, and when he did, he did it just to play a sunday league match down in the park.
Vardy couldn't stay away from football, but in his late teens it went from being his only dream to become his most enjoyable hobby. Life outside side of the pitch was the real life, he needed to figure it out and get on course. An attempt to study was no success, instead it was factory work that called for the crane maintenance son. The job at the prosthetic factory consisted mostly of budging the heavy carbon fiber pieces in large ovens, and regularly broke backs before they even had grown completely. It had to be like that anyway. Jamie Vardy did not live to work, but was working to live. Get through the week, then go out in Sheffield's nightlife on the weekend evenings. The pub with the boys, who then lost each other inside the nightclub thump down the street. Reassembly at the kebab shop afterwards, waiting for the night bus home. Sometimes there was a fight, sometimes not.

During a period of time, Vardy couldn't participate in away matches. He played with an ankle monitor - given to him after a barfight - and had a curfew after six o'clock in the evening. On Saturdays, he played with a decent amateur team, on Sundays with a team from the local pub. After the final signal they had another few beers together, to fire the Monday morning punch clock a little further away in the thought. Time passed, and suddenly Jamie Vardy had become 23 years old. Guys in the same age like Aaron Lennon and Joe Hart, went to South Africa to play the World Cup. Jamie Vardy sat at the pub in Sheffield and watched. He was no closer to the English football team than any other of the overweight regulars there.

The last few seasons it's been possible to outline an unexpected pattern in the Premier League pyramid. Amidst the multi-million imports in the top scorer table, it has been penetrated by one or a few really odd birds. The first season was the warehouse worker Grant Holt who scored 15 goals for Norwich. The second was the beetroot packer Rickie Lambert putting 15 in the net for Southampton. And the third was the bricklayer Charlie Austin pressing 18 balls in for QPR. Jamie Vardy comes with the same kind of history, though extended in both cubed and squared. Even later breakthrough, even more Premier League goals.

The most successful players have a phase when they quickly climb up the ladder, but then it usually means being on loan at a second division club at age 19 and then debut in the A-squad two years later. When Jamie Vardy was 25 years old he still had never played higher up than in the fifth division. His footballing life consisted of small victory bonuses in brown envelopes, showers with not enough hot water and workout clothes to wash himself. One prank was to drape a teammate's car in foil, disciplinary punishments meant to run a few laps around the pitch naked.

But then - a transfer, a promotion and two years later the 27-year-old Jamie Vardy bolted in Premier League goals against Manchester United. Another six months, he was part of the English national team. He himself was just as surprised as anyone. - I won't lie, this wasn't even on the world map for me. I never even thought that I would reach the Premier League. This is unreal, I have to go around pinching myself all day to understand that it's not a dream.

After a typical full-front effort against Chelsea, Jose Mourinho just shook his head when he ran into Jamie Vardy in the players tunnel. - Do you ever stop fucking running? No, Jamie Vardy never stops. He has run too far to slow down now. - I had to find my own way, and the best thing about football is that there will always be new opportunities to accomplish things and to realize your talent. Personally, I don't want to replace anything, it's my experience that made me who I am. If I also had place in a great academy perhaps none of this had happened.

More than 15 years have passed since an Englishman won the top scorer award in the Premier League. Then it was Kevin Phillips, who himself played in the seventh division football at 21. Unlikely enough, Jamie Vardy has now gone off sharply at the top of the goalscorers top. In total he has already run in twelve league goals, and in his last nine Premier League matches he has scored in every single one.

He's still not quite housebroken - he continues to be in controversy on and off the pitch - but that is also where the point is located. Jamie Vardy is not like others. He puts himself in situations that others avoid, he chases balls others have given up on. Leicester's Danish national team goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel confirms: - From the first day he arrived, I am the greatest Jamie Vardy supporter you can find. He embodies everything I love about football; His aggressiveness, his mentality, his way of working for the team.

Essentially Kasper Schmeichel agrees in everything in the Arsène Wenger-thesis, the extinction of the European striker. He thinks that the top football has become far too controlled and static, and that is exactly where Jamie Vardy comes in as trendbreaker. - International football can be very tactical and predictable, but he chases everything and never gives up and is totally unpredictable. For me he is the best striker in the Premier League right now, and he is exactly what international football needs.