The novel begins in June 2015 with Sophie, a thirty-something woman living in London, attending a barbecue for her father’s seventieth birthday. Sophie is educated, bookish and politically liberal, works at the underfunded EJS Centre helping refugees and struggling families, and has almost no interest in football. Her long-running joke with her uncle Keith is to ask him how Leicester City are doing and then pretend to listen to his deliberately over-detailed answer. Keith, her father’s less educated but considerably more prosperous brother, owns an industrial-cleaning business and is a devoted Leicester supporter. At the barbecue he tells Sophie that Leicester have just completed an extraordinary escape from relegation. He had even won £1,100 profit after betting £100 on them to stay up. Sophie is fascinated less by the football than by the idea that a sensible person can gamble occasionally, win money and walk away unharmed. This matters because she and her boyfriend Max are in serious financial trouble. Max is a gardener who is perpetually “between jobs” and continually dreams up business schemes that consume money rather than produce it. Sophie initially mistook his lack of conventional ambition for spiritual independence, but has gradually realized that Max desperately wants money and possessions while having no realistic idea how to obtain them. They own a flat together, but every time money becomes available Max borrows against it again. Their relationship is also intellectually and sexually dead. In August, Keith contacts Sophie with a surprise: inspired by her joke that his optimistic betting helped Leicester survive, he has placed two £50 bets on Leicester winning the Premier League, one for himself and one for her, at odds of 5,000–1. If Leicester somehow win, Sophie will receive roughly a quarter of a million pounds. Both of them regard this as essentially a lottery ticket because Leicester have never won the league and are expected to finish far below England’s richest clubs.
Sophie almost forgets about the bet until November, when she overhears Eddie and Chris, two football coaches at the EJS Centre, talking about Leicester. To her astonishment, Leicester are at the top of the league, driven by players such as Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kanté. Keith tells her that the bookmaker is already offering roughly £2,500 to cash out her £50 bet. He advises her not to take it. Sophie begins following Leicester, initially because of the money but rapidly because the unfolding season gives her something her life has lacked: anticipation. When Mahrez scores a hat-trick against Swansea, she receives goal alerts while shopping in Dulwich and involuntarily cheers in a boutique where she has been admiring a beautiful turquoise dress costing £350. She cannot afford the dress, but she decides that whatever happens she will eventually cash out before the bet falls below £350. The dress becomes a symbol of the small amount of freedom and luxury she thinks she wants. At the same time Max’s financial irresponsibility reaches grotesque levels. He buys a pickup truck with money borrowed from his father, only for Sophie to discover that he never actually paid the owner: he used the loan to repay money connected with an earlier landscaping job he accepted despite not being a landscaper. The truck breaks down and sits uselessly outside their home while its unpaid owner demands his money.
Football increasingly pulls Sophie into a new social world. Eddie and Chris begin treating her as one of them, and even the refugee children at the centre identify her as the Leicester supporter who must be “having the time of her life.” In December she goes alone to a pub to watch Leicester play Chelsea and meets Neil, another Leicester supporter. Neil is forty-three, originally from Leicester, divorced, and works as a portfolio manager for wealthy clients. He is composed, knowledgeable, well dressed, financially secure and intellectually curious: almost everything Max is not. Leicester win 2–1, and Sophie and Neil exchange numbers. They begin watching games together. During Leicester’s away game at Everton they find a shabby pub illegally showing the match, Leicester win, and Keith texts Sophie that her cash-out value has risen to £22,000. Shaken by the amount, Sophie finally tells Neil about the bet. He does not simply tell her to take the money. Instead, he asks what £22,000 would actually change. It would mainly fill the financial hole created by Max without fixing the relationship responsible for the hole. Neil tells Sophie that Leicester’s victory has forced her to confront what she wants from her life. Their conversation continues over curry, and Sophie’s attraction to him intensifies. She subsequently refuses to accompany Max to his parents for Christmas. After spending Christmas alone, obsessively following Leicester and suffering badly when they lose to Liverpool, she finally tells Max that their relationship is over. Because neither can immediately afford separate housing, however, they remain in the same flat as “flatmates,” with Sophie moving into the miserable spare room.
