Rebekah Vardy’s wake-up call to Jamie which changed his life and career forever

Jamie and Rebekah Vardy have spoke about how they met and how their lives changed forever afterwards, after their first meeting which also changed Jamie’s career

Jamie Vardy would never have won the Premier League with Leicester City if he hadn’t met his wife. In a new interview, 39-year-old Vardy admits he was struggling to cope with the pressure of playing for the big club and was drinking too much until then-girlfriend Rebekah told him to “rein it in” or else.

She was pregnant at the time, and the wake-up call curbed his partying, and he became more disciplined and focused, which helped him become a lethal striker and shoot Leicester to the title.

Looking back, footballer Vardy admits: “I knew I could tell her anything, and it was never too much for her. What she was saying was right, it[drinking] needed to stop. It really did. I needed to hear it.”

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It’s now ten years since Leicester lifted the title and later this month a new documentary profiling Vardy looks back on this and other key moments in his incredible career. The Netflix 90-minute film shows his rags-to-riches story, which saw him climb eight divisions in five years, still playing non-league football aged 22 and working in a factory to make ends meet.

Wife Rebekah, who famously lost her High Court libel battle with Coleen Rooney in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ trial in 2022, also tells the documentary she had no interest in dating Jamie when she first met him in 2014.

She helped arrange a 27th-birthday bash for him, but he arrived drunk and was carried out by his pals, only to wake up the next day and start texting her to ask her out. Vardy says: “One of the first things I did as soon as I woke up was message her. She was good-looking. She had this aura about her. I legitimately thought ‘that’s the one’. I weren’t letting it go. There was no chance that was gonna happen.”

And Rebekah, who was an event organiser in a nightclub at the time, recalls: “Jamie keeps messaging me, and it was relentless. Then it was calling. I’d responded a couple of times going, ‘Look, just forget about it’. But he just would not leave me alone.”

However, she eventually agreed to a date and was shocked at Jamie’s personality and how different he was sober. She said: “It got to the point where I was like, oh, f**k it. Just respond, go meet him, and then that’ll be the end of it. And the more I sat with him, the more I realised that actually behind this crazy, alcohol loving, wild party boy, was actually a guy that was really kind, was really good at listening, and he was really good to talk to.”

The pair began dating and Rebekah soon became pregnant, but this coincided with a time when Vardy had joined Leicester but was still struggling for confidence and goals. He was also still drinking a lot, so Rebekah took matters into her own hands. She says: “It wasn’t planned(pregnancy), but we decided that, you know, we were gonna give it a real go, but he kept getting really, really drunk every weekend, disappearing. I had a scan coming up, and couldn’t get hold of him, nowhere to be seen.”

With the help of his agent, she eventually tracked him down to a session in a pub and stormed in, Rebekah adds: “I went ‘you, me conversation now’. I just said to him, ‘What is your deal? What is going on?’.

“He really started to open up then about why he behaved the way he did. He was like, I’ve got all this pressure on me now because, you know, they’ve[Leicester] spent all this money, and I just don’t think I can live up to those expectations. And I’m like, Why do you doubt yourself so much? You have an incredible opportunity to do something really special. He said he’d always been rejected and been told he wasn’t good enough. And so naturally you do start to believe that’s true.

“But I said to him, you are gonna screw everything up that you’ve worked so bloody hard for if you don’t change your lifestyle choices. I’m not telling you to stop drinking. I’m just telling you to rein it in. We talked for hours and hours, and it was like therapy for him. And it was at that point that things really, really did turn around in quite a short space of time.”

Leicester then got promoted to the Premier League six months later in 2014 and within two seasons they were champions in the ultimate underdog story, with Vardy the figurehead of the team. Looking back Vardy says: “I couldn’t tell you how I did it, how it happened, why it happened. It is crazy. But I know full well that working hard, never giving up, and having the right people supporting you…I come home, you’ve got a family that loves you, wants you to be the best that you can be. You become what you believe. I’m definitely proof of that.”

Both Jamie and Rebekah are now set to star in a new reality series for ITV called The Vardys which will focus on him leaving Leicester City after 13 years and moving to Italy with four kids to play for US Cremonese.

* UNTOLD UK: Jamie Vardy is released on Netflix on May 12.

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