Former England striker Jamie Vardy has opened up about his marriage to scandal-hit Wag Rebekah in a new Netflix show.
Jamie Vardy tells how he defied the odds by climbing eight tiers of English football in just six years — rising from a £120-a-week factory worker to a Premier League champion with 5,000-1 outsiders Leicester City.
And he says his unlikely success might not have been possible had Rebekah not stepped in and curbed his partying ways.
In the documentary — the first of two coming out this year about the couple — Jamie, 39, reveals he was besotted with Rebekah from the start.
He says: “She was good-looking and had an aura about her. I legitimately thought, ‘That’s the one’.”
Speaking about non-football matters doesn’t come naturally to the Sheffield-born footballer.
The striker, capped 26 times by England, needed a giant swig of beer before speaking on camera, having awkwardly asked a member of the production crew to fetch him a bottle opener — which happened to be in the shape of a “giant wooden cock” — from his kitchen.
In the first question, he is asked to describe himself in “one word”.
While other talking heads sum him up with “loyal”, “legend”, “goals”, Jamie’s response was simply “twat”.
He then gets serious, telling how he worked in a factory making crutches and Zimmer Frames while living with his parents in his late teens and early 20s, playing semi-professional football for Yorkshire side Stocksbridge Park Steels, having been let go by boyhood team Sheffield Wednesday.
His Saturday and Sunday nights would consist of major booze benders with close pals he dubbed “The Inbetweeners”, who nicknamed him Sicknote because, as Jamie admits, “I was good at getting Mondays off.”
But during one of those sessions, Jamie got involved in a fight after a fellow reveller mocked a deaf pal.
It led to the striker being charged with assault, having to wear an ankle tag for six months and adhere to a curfew.
His arrest was a turning point in his career, he tells the Netflix documentary, which is out on May 12.
Jamie reveals: “The mindset going forward was, ‘Don’t be a dick and do it again’.”
Jamie joined Northern Premier League club Halifax Town, then moved to Conference Premier side Fleetwood Town before sealing a £1million switch to Leicester City, then in the Championship. It was a record fee for a non-league player.
Shortly after his transfer, he met his future wife, who was working in a Sheffield nightclub.
Jamie was having a rare barren run on the pitch and was using booze to hide his struggles — he was “absolutely steaming” when they first laid eyes on each other.
Rebekah, 44, who also appears in the documentary, recalls: “I’d just come out of a not-great relationship, had a little boy and was working at a nightclub.
“I had a call from someone who said ‘I’ve got a birthday party I want you to organise, can’t tell you who it is at the minute’.
“I find out it was Jamie Vardy, and I’m like. ‘What’s the big deal?’
“I don’t even know who he was, but when I learned that Jamie was a professional sports player it made me want to run in the other direction.
“There’s this preconception that they’re all idiots, they are all a**holes.”
She continues: “Jamie’s birthday came round and sure enough he rocks in s**tfaced — he had one friend on each side holding him up and I’m thinking ‘Oh my god’.
“The next thing I see are his mates all ordering big bottles of champagne, they’re now out on the dance floor pouring them over members of the public.
“I’m actually f***ing over this now. This group of lads are not a normal group of lads, they’re like mental cases, they’re like yobs.”
Jamie adds: “That sounds like my mates.”
Rebekah continues: “The next thing I see is Jamie being carried out of the club by two of his friends and I was like, ‘Thank god for that, at least that is one down.’
“Later that evening I get a text message from Jamie saying, ‘I really want to see you’, I’m like, ‘Delete!’ ”
But Jamie was persistent. “I weren’t letting it go, there was no chance of that happening,” he says.
So after giving in to Jamie’s “relentless” calls and texts, she agreed to meet up with him — and fell for his softer side.
Rebekah explains: “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’.
“And the more I sat with him, the more I realised, actually, 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.”
Rebekah got pregnant shortly after, much to the pair’s shock, but they decided to keep the baby and forge a future together. (They went on to have two more kids.)
It was then she helped Jamie rid his partyboy image — when she stormed into a bar to find him boozing with pals after going missing ahead of a baby scan.
She explains: “I said, ‘You, me, conversation, now’. I said, ‘What’s your deal? What is going on?’
“He started opening up about why he behaved like he did.
“He was like, ‘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’.
“I’m like, ‘Why do you doubt yourself so much? You have an incredible opportunity to do something really special. How do you feel about that?’.
“And he was like, ‘Probably never going to work’.
“He said he’d always been rejected and told he wasn’t good enough, so naturally we start to believe that’s true.
“But I said to him, ‘You are going to screw up everything you’ve worked so bloody hard for if you don’t change your lifestyle choices. I’m not telling you to stop drinking, just rein it in’.”
Jamie adds: “I knew I could tell her anything and it was never too much for her.
“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.”
Change was almost instant for Jamie. And Rebekah’s influence was not lost on his teammates, including Leicester skipper Wes Morgan.
Wes said: “Jamie pre- and post-Becky is like two different people.
“Having that stability and calmness in his life reflected in his performance.”
The striker rediscovered the form that made him the hottest property in non-league football and helped Leicester secure promotion to the Premier League in the 2013/14 season.
The following year, Jamie helped keep Leicester up when the club were staring relegation in the face under manager Nigel Pearson — one of Jamie’s idols from watching Sheffield Wednesday as a boy. That summer, Jamie earned his first England call-up.
But it was the following season the Jamie Vardy story really exploded, when he fired Leicester to the unlikeliest of league titles under new manager Claudio Ranieri, scoring in a record-breaking 11 straight games en route.
Reflecting on what is regarded as the greatest underdog story in football history and his own remarkable football career — which also included an FA Cup win — Jamie says: “The main thing is no one can take it away.
“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.”
The couple’s relationship will also be under the spotlight in ITV1 show The Vardys — which follows them as they settle into life in Lombardy, Italy.
The family moved to a villa by Lake Garda after Jamie signed for local team, US Cremonese.
During that fly-on-the-wall documentary, Rebekah is expected to give her side of the Wagatha clash between her and arch rival Coleen Rooney.
It saw Rebekah lose her 2022 libel case against Coleen, who had accused her of leaking stories to the press.
JAMIE reveals he is still estranged from his parents over a bitter feud about his biological father.
The striker, who now plays for Italian Serie A side Cremonese, is upset his folks never confirmed his real dad’s identity before a news publication made it public.
Jamie said: “I had a slight inkling when I was younger, had people coming on to me saying, ‘We know your dad’ but we’re from completely different areas. I used to just bat it off, I didn’t want to know.”
But after it was revealed labourer Richard Gill was his father, Jamie admits he had “a pop” at his mum Lisa for not telling him, and no longer speaks to her and stepdad Phil, who raised him and whose surname he adopted.
Jamie said: “I did have a pop at my mum, I should have been told if it was true.
“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.”