King Richard III Is Miracle Soccer Team’s Most Valuable Player

When the English soccer season kicked off last fall, Leicester City was considered so hopeless that bookmakers put its odds of a title at 1 in 5,000.

Opposing fans sang about the team’s home city as a grim place hardly worth venturing to. Few soccer fans outside England even knew how to pronounce the name correctly (LESS-ter, not LIE-ches-ter).

Then, in one of the most stunning upsets in sports, the Foxes are in first place with just seven matches to play. The burning question in English soccer is: How did they do it?

Theories range from an injection of verve by Leicester’s new Italian manager to a sudden arrival of parity among English teams.

Or maybe the miracle arose from the bones of King Richard III, more than five centuries after he was struck down by multiple ax blows to the head at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

“The rational part of me, of course, doesn’t believe it,” Leicester Mayor Peter Soulsby, a lifelong fan of both town and team, says about the bones. “But it’s a very good story.”

After Richard’s grisly end in 1485, his body was handed over to a group of friars, who stuffed him in a short, shallow grave, the location of which was promptly forgotten for 527 years until archaeologists from the University of Leicester dug up the bones in 2012. Turns out he was under a parking lot.

“The odds of actually finding him were so slim,” says Richard Buckley, who managed the dig.

After scientists confirmed that the bones were indeed royal, they were reburied in March 2015 with fitting pomp and circumstance. Thousands of people turned out for the ceremony. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, a distant relative of Richard, recited a poem.

Then the impossible began to happen at King Power Stadium across town. Leicester City, which hadn’t won a Premier League game in more than two months and faced relegation to a lower division, won or tied eight of its next nine matches. The team crawled up to 14th place from dead last.

When the current season began in August, Leicester lost just once in the first 17 matches. Skeptics assumed they would fade by the fall.

When that didn’t happen, they predicted a winter collapse. But Leicester charged on, toppling traditional powerhouses Chelsea and Manchester City along the way.

Since Richard’s reburial, Leicester City has won 26 of 40 matches, lost just four times and is favored to win England’s top soccer championship for the first time despite a low-budget roster made up of misfits and castoffs. The team’s next match is against Southampton at home on April 3.

“All the city is behind us,” says team manager Claudio Ranieri, who refuses to look at the standings. “Now it is important to remain calm.”

Leicester City fans aren’t the first to tie their team’s performance to a phantasmagorical force. Baseball’s Boston Red Sox, who failed to win a World Series for 86 years, blamed their futility on a curse that befell the team in 1919 when the owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.

In Leicester City’s case, metaphysical logic seems to suggest that Richard, delighted with his new resting place, bestowed a supernatural blessing on the team. “It really does coincide,” says Ian Bason, chairman of the Leicester City Supporters’ Trust. “It’s a bit spooky.”

Mr. Soulsby, the mayor, adds: “There’s a small part of me that feels it might not be a coincidence.” Since the reburial, the city has shown “a self-confidence” that was “lacking over the decades.”

To those not inclined to believe in ghosts, there are several more sensible explanations. For example, all of England’s typical title contenders are having down seasons at the same time. Because Leicester isn’t committed to playing in any of the major annual European club competitions, players enjoy two full days off a week, leaving them fresher for Premier League matches.

The team’s owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, a Thai operator of duty-free shops, has also brought in Buddhist monks in recent seasons to bless the soccer field and players. “Maybe that’s helped a bit as well,” Mr. Bason says.

The city itself, which has a population of about 330,000 and was once known for its hosiery factories, has been chalking up other uniquely British victories for the past couple of years. Leicester produced a world snooker champion and a nationally televised reality-show winner. In 2014, the local band Kasabian headlined Glastonbury, Britain’s most famous music festival.

Yet Leicester’s reputation reached few tourists beyond the East Midlands before Richard’s reburial and the soccer team’s miraculous rise. Before a recent game, Leicester City convert Andrew Lucier of Los Angeles strode into the stadium shop looking to buy a jersey.

Mr. Lucier, 26 years old, said it was his first trip to England, which he paid for partly on winnings from betting on the team. “Leicester City’s won me the most money of any sports team,” he says. He was crestfallen when a shop clerk said the team had sold out of all jerseys smaller than size XXXL.

Mr. Soulsby says the mayor’s office has already held “informal discussions” with the soccer club about a celebration if it clinches the title in May.

When Leicester City earned a promotion to the Premier League in 2014, players rode through crowded streets in an open-top bus to a party in the central square. “The only thing I know is that if we do it,” the mayor says, “Town Hall Square isn’t going to be big enough.”

Arlo White, a Leicester native who is the lead English soccer play-by-play announcer for NBC, says winning the championship could do more for Leicester than just soccer. “If fans walk around Disneyland or Manhattan with their Leicester shirts on and people pronounce it correctly…I think that’ll be the great triumph,” Mr. White says.

Not that pronunciation would have mattered to Richard III. He was from the next county over.

Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

The Boston Red Sox went 86 years between world championships in 1918 and 2004. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated they had gone 89 years.