Super-chickens, Leicester City and the rise of the Premier League's middle class

Margaret Heffernan is a former CEO of five businesses, who now talks to companies about how to run their business efficiently. One of her favourite stories is about an evolutionary biologist called William Muir. He was interested in productivity and so, back in 1981, he devised a study of chickens, assuming they would be easy to measure as you could just count their eggs.

Chickens live in groups and so he left one group of chickens for six generations and monitored their productivity. He then created a second group, taking only the most productive chickens from the first group. He called the second group a “super-flock”. He waited another six generations, and then compared the results.

The first group was getting along just fine. The chickens were plump and feathered and their egg production was up. The second group, the one with the ‘super-chickens’, was not so good: only three were alive. They had suppressed the productivity of the others and pecked them to death.

When Heffernan tells this story to some businesses, they say: “That’s my company!” As she put it in a fascinating TED talk: “Most organisations and societies are run along the super-chicken model. We’ve thought success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest… in the room and giving them all the power. The result has been exactly the same in Muir’s experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste.”

It was hard not to think of Heffernan while watching Leicester players celebrate winning the Premier League title on Monday night. There was Leonardo Ulloa, who confessed he has had to get used to a new status as bench-warmer but still managed to do a fine job deputizing for Jamie Vardy in the last two games, rubbing his eyes in disbelief; there was Marcin Wasilewski front and centre of the celebrations, despite only making one league start this season; and captain Wes Morgan being dragged around Vardy’s kitchen by his ankles.

When you think that Riyad Mahrez gave up his penalty-kick duties against Watford back in November to allow Vardy to score in a ninth successive game – he would go on to break Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record and score in 11 straight – you think of the super-chickens.

As Chelsea battled to a 2-2 draw with Spurs, the super-chickens were in my mind as well. Where had this Chelsea side been all season? Perhaps the biggest super-chicken of all, Jose Mourinho, had pecked his players too much. Muir’s words – “aggression, dysfunction, waste” – also sprang to mind.

This is a triumph of the collective over the individual, of Claudio Ranieri’s if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it style of management. Earlier this season the Italian told Gazzetta dello Sport, “I always thought the most important thing a good coach must do is build the team around the characteristics of his players. So I told the players that I trusted them and would speak very little of tactics.”

Ranieri and his team share an office with the performance analysts at Leicester, which allows for ideas to be shared and aired in an informal setting.

“The coaches, along with the players, are our primary audiences, so sharing an office with them makes a huge difference,” first-team analyst Pete Clark told Opta Sports. “It means with just the turn of a shoulder we can discuss ideas and talk things through. And it’s the same with the recruitment team.”

Ah yes, the recruitment. This is where Leicester really made the difference. They signed three world-class players before they became world-class, before they reached the status at which they would never consider joining a club like Leicester.

That’s not to say that Mahrez, Vardy and N’Golo Kante are super-chickens; their team ethic and behaviour this season proves that. Some have poached staff from Leicester – Ben Wrigglesworth moved to Arsenal and Rob McKenzie to Spurs – to bring that recruitment rigour to their clubs; others are still looking for the edge in how to spot a top talent before it emerges.

We all know that this season, the teams with the greatest financial resources are not as dominant as usual. It may be a one-off, but Soccernomics author Stefan Szymanski has suggested that it could be part of a new era of competitiveness. [I'll declare an interest at this point: I work for Soccernomics consultancy, which advises clubs on transfer strategy with a success rate well above the 45-50 per cent average.]

When Blackburn won the Premier League in 1994-95, it had the fourth highest wage-bill in the division. Since then, only teams with the top three wage-bills have topped the table. Since wage-bill data is not yet available for Leicester, Szymanski estimated that Leicester’s total transfer value is twelfth in the league.

This season, he writes in this post on the Soccernomics website, the team with higher transfer value has won 45 per cent of games, down from the usual 48 per cent. What is significant is that the smaller teams are winning away from home more often – 12.5 per cent compared to 8.6 per cent – and the bigger teams are winning less at home: 24 per cent compared to 29 per cent.

Szymanski put this down to the rise in the middle-class clubs, because “the value of overseas broadcast rights for the EPL have grown faster than the domestic rights… Overseas revenues are split equally, while the domestic split tends to favour the already rich clubs.”

This shift allows the middle-class clubs to have better choices and become more competitive. Aston Villa has shown that one bad summer of recruitment can have a devastating effect on a team. Leicester has shown the opposite.

As teams start to look for an edge in their summer moves, the true legacy of this stunning win may be a move away from the super-chicken hierarchy of management.