Claudio Ranieri's perfect finale awaits, 12 years after last trip to Stamford Bridge

Twelve years ago, Claudio Ranieri walked slowly around the pitch at Stamford Bridge, tears welling in his eyes as he bade farewell to fans who seemed to concur with the general perception: he was likable enough but probably not cut out for football at the very highest level. There’ll probably be tears again for Ranieri at Stamford Bridge on the final day of the season as he takes his Leicester City side there as the most improbable champions in English history.

Chelsea fans will salute him, and not just because Leicester prevented Tottenham from winning the title. Ranieri remained popular with them even as the acceptance grew that he might not quite be tough enough for the job. That lack of toughness, that niceness, is part of what has made English football as a whole warm to him.

With his blinking smile and his idiosyncratic English he can appear more like a slightly dotty uncle than a football manager. He turns up at birthday parties on the wrong day, he describes Jamie Vardy as being “a fantastic horse”, he evokes the feeling of qualifying for the Champions League with the phrase “dilly ding, dilly dong.” And there is an obvious humanity to him. This season, as Leicester’s rise began to draw the big beasts of the tabloid game to the KingPower, he saw an old foe from his Chelsea days at one of his press conferences. Others might have blanked him or made some cutting comment, but Ranieri hugged him. “You are the big shark,” he beamed, “but this is your job.”

It’s hard to imagine anybody dislikes him, and that’s one of the things that makes the first league title of his career so special. The other is that it has been so long in coming. He got Cagliari, Fiorentina and Monaco promoted. He won cups with Fiorentina and Valencia. He finished second in the league with Juventus, Roma and Monaco. But he never won the league. The runners-up spot with his hometown club Roma was the most painful: he had them top of the table with four games remaining, but they were overhauled by Jose Mourinho’s Internazionale. Mourinho had replaced him at Chelsea and taunted Ranieri after his Serie A success; a different personality to Ranieri might have made more of the fact that it was after a defeat to his Leicester this season that Mourinho was sacked by Chelsea.

“Past experiences have spurred him on and made him even more determined to succeed,” said Tor-Kristian Karlsen, who was CEO at Monaco when Ranieri was appointed. “Especially losing the Serie A title with AS Roma, the team he supported as a boy, must've been extremely hard for him to stomach. But being bitter isn't his thing, he moves on and focuses fully on what's ahead.”

That hints at a toughness that is often hidden behind the fluffy exterior. There were suggestions even in his Chelsea days that training-ground Ranieri was a far harder figure than press-conference Ranieri, something Karlsen backs up.

“Ranieri has a very high level of social intelligence,” he said. “He knows exactly what buttons to press to make anyone tick. And by anyone I mean players, colleagues and even board members. Some players hate playing for him as he's very demanding and the training sessions can be repetitive, but those who are committed and focused will find no better man to push them on in their careers. Behind the smile there's certainly a very firm edge. He's by no means a soft touch.”

There’s also a flexibility and adaptability, which have been key to his success at Leicester. Others might have arrived and laid down their philosophy, but Ranieri is no fundamentalist. He recognised the situation, the fact the players still felt a loyalty to the sacked Nigel Pearson and that they had ended the season with a remarkable run of form to escape relegation.

“At our pre-season camp in Austria,” said the full-back Christian Fuchs, “he was more or less looking and supervising, learning how things were. Then he gave us some hints, some ideas of his philosophy that made our game even better, more stable. He is Italian, he loves to defend.”

The impact of that is clear. Leicester failed to keep a clean sheet in any of their first nine games of the season, but they’ve kept them in 12 of their last 17 matches. Typically, Ranieri deflected from his work by offering his players pizza if they kept the opposition out – and then turned the reward into a team-bonding exercise by having them actually make the pizzas first.

That ability to organise a defence is one of the attributes that attracted Monaco. “We were aware of his structured approach to coaching and tactics,” said Karlsen. “We knew we weren't going to get out of Ligue 2 playing like Barcelona, so we were focused on finding someone able to get the team properly organised and, through discipline and hard work, get the best out of each and every player.”

Almost imperceptibly, this has become Ranieri’s team. There has been no revolution but, after the initial switch from back three to back four, he has slowly shaped the team in his image. Gone is the tinkering of his Chelsea days and instead his Leicester look like making fewer changes than any Premier League champion other than Manchester United in 1992-93. He, too, perhaps has changed since his time at Stamford Bridge.

It’s appropriate, though, that the season should end there. There will be a sense of completion, of the narrative finding a fitting conclusion. Roman Abramovich, perhaps, will wonder what might have been had he kept Ranieri on for another season, although not for too long: the Mourinho era was the most successful in the club’s history.

Perhaps the view back then wasn’t so wrong. Perhaps Ranieri isn’t the right man to handle the egos of a superclub. Perhaps he’s not even that good at tinkering. But at Leicester, where he has been able to pick almost the same team all season, where his players have had no cause to doubt him, he has been the perfect fit.