Jamie Vardy: From Factory Floors to Premier League Champion
Jamie Vardy has spent a career tearing up scripts. Non-league to Premier League champion. Ankle tag to England caps. Now he is pulling back the curtain on the chaos behind the fairytale – and the woman who dragged him out of it – in a new Netflix documentary, Untold: Jamie Vardy, released on May 12.
The former England striker, now 39 and playing in Serie A with Cremonese, sits in front of the cameras with a beer in hand, visibly uneasy talking about anything that isn’t football. When asked to describe himself in one word, others offer “loyal”, “legend”, “goals”. Vardy goes with something else entirely.
“Tw*t.”
The joke lands, the mask slips, and then the real story begins.
From Zimmer Frames to the King Power
Before the title parades and Golden Boots, Vardy was clocking in at a factory, making crutches and Zimmer frames, living with his parents and playing semi-professional football for Stocksbridge Park Steels. Sheffield Wednesday, his boyhood club, had already told him he wasn’t good enough.
His weekends were a blur of booze and bravado. He and his mates called themselves “The Inbetweeners”; they called him “Sicknote” because, as Vardy freely admits, he was “good at getting Mondays off”.
One night, the drinking turned serious. A row erupted when someone mocked a deaf friend. Vardy stepped in, it escalated, and he ended up charged with assault. The result: six months with an ankle tag and a strict curfew.
That, he says in the film, was the jolt he needed.
“The mindset going forward was, ‘Don’t be a d*ck and do it again’.”
From there, the climb began. Halifax Town in the Northern Premier League. Fleetwood Town in the Conference Premier. Then the leap: a £1 million move to Leicester City, then a Championship club, in a record deal for a non-league player.
It should have been liftoff. Instead, he found another way to spiral.
Enter Rebekah – and the Night That Changed Them
Shortly after joining Leicester, Vardy met the woman who would redefine his life – though it did not look that way at first.
Rebekah, then working in a Sheffield nightclub and raising her young son after a bad relationship, was asked to organise a birthday party. The client: Jamie Vardy.
Her reaction? “What’s the big deal?” She didn’t even know who he was. When she learned he was a professional footballer, her instinct was to run the other way. “There’s this preconception that they’re all idiots, they are all a**holes,” she says in the documentary.
On the night itself, Vardy arrived “absolutely steaming”, propped up by friends. His mates were soon on the dancefloor, spraying champagne over strangers. Rebekah watched the carnage and mentally checked out. “I’m actually f***ing over this now,” she recalls. “They’re like yobs.”
Vardy laughs in the film. “That sounds like my mates.”
He was eventually carried out of the club. Rebekah felt relief. One down. Then her phone buzzed. A message from Vardy: “I really want to see you.” Her first instinct was simple: delete.
He did not go away. “I weren’t letting it go, there was no chance of that happening,” he says.
Relentless calls. Relentless texts. She finally relented. “Oh f*** it, just go and meet him and that would be the end of it,” she thought.
It wasn’t the end. It was the start.
Across a couple of dates, the caricature of the wild, drink-fuelled striker fell away. She found someone kind, someone who listened, someone who could actually talk. The partyboy had a softer side.
Then came a shock: Rebekah fell pregnant. Both were stunned, but they chose to keep the baby and build a life together. They would go on to have two more children.
And that’s when she decided the old Jamie Vardy had to go.
You Are Going to Screw Up Everything
One episode in particular stands out. Ahead of a baby scan, Vardy went missing. Rebekah tracked him down – in a bar, drinking with his mates.
She stormed in.
“You, me, conversation, now.”
What followed, she explains, was the first time he truly opened up. Vardy admitted the pressure was suffocating him. Leicester had paid big money. He didn’t think he could live up to it.
“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.
Why did he doubt himself so much? Years of rejection. Years of being told he wasn’t good enough. That kind of message eventually seeps in.
Rebekah 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. She wasn’t demanding sobriety. Just control. “I’m not telling you to stop drinking, just rein it in.”
For Vardy, it landed.
“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.”
The change, he insists, was almost instant. Leicester captain Wes Morgan saw it too.
“Jamie pre- and post-Becky is like two different people,” Morgan says. “Having that stability and calmness in his life reflected in his performance.”
The lad who once staggered out of nightclubs now started terrorising defenders again. He helped fire Leicester into the Premier League in 2013/14. The following season, he was key in dragging them away from relegation under Nigel Pearson, the manager he had watched as a kid at Sheffield Wednesday. That summer brought his first England call-up.
Then came the miracle.
The Underdog Who Refused to Blink
Under Claudio Ranieri, Leicester City produced the most improbable title win English football has ever seen. Vardy was the spearhead, scoring in a record 11 consecutive Premier League games as 5,000-1 outsiders ripped up the established order.
He has since added an FA Cup to his story and stacked up milestones that still sound almost unreal.
“Only player to score 100 Premier League goals after the age of 30? And the oldest player to win the Premier League Golden Boot?” he says in the documentary.
“I’m not normal. It’s good to be different. If every footballer was the same, it’d be a conveyor belt of robots.”
No one can take it away from him. “It happened,” he says. “Should it have happened? Probably not. But it did.”
Life in Lombardy and the Wagatha Shadow
The Vardy story is not finished with Netflix. A second documentary, The Vardys, is coming on ITV1, following the family’s move to a villa by Lake Garda after his switch to Cremonese.
Cameras will track their new life in Lombardy – and, crucially, Rebekah’s side of the Wagatha saga that exploded into the public domain.
She lost her 2022 libel case against Coleen Rooney, who had accused her of leaking stories to the press. The fallout was brutal, the rivalry entrenched. The Rooneys have their own Disney+ documentary in the works. The Vardys will offer their version first.
For a couple already used to scrutiny, it is another step into the spotlight, another chapter in a life that long ago stopped being simple.
A Family Fractured
Not all of Vardy’s story is triumph and redemption. The film also confronts a deep personal rift that still scars him: his estrangement from his parents over the identity of his biological father.
Vardy says he grew up with rumours swirling. People would approach him claiming they knew his dad, though they were from completely different areas. He brushed it off. “I used to just bat it off, I didn’t want to know,” he says.
Then a news outlet revealed that a labourer named Richard Gill was his father. Vardy confronted his mother, Lisa, furious that he had not heard it from his family first. He had taken the surname of his stepdad, Phil, the man who had raised him. Now he felt blindsided.
“I did have a pop at my mum, I should have been told if it was true,” he says.
The fallout was severe. He no longer speaks to his mother or stepfather. “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,” he explains.
“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.”
As for his biological father’s side, Vardy says letters started arriving at the club. “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’.” His response is blunt. “No, not for me.”
From a tagged teenager on a curfew to a Premier League icon, from nightclub chaos to family man on the shores of Lake Garda, Jamie Vardy has built a career and a life out of defying odds and expectations.
Now the cameras are rolling again. The question is no longer whether his story is remarkable. It’s how many more twists it has left.
