Jamie Vardy says he would not choose to live his rise all over again, even as a new documentary marks the journey that took him from warehouse work to Premier League champion. Speaking at 39, the Cremonese striker looked back on the path that carried him from making walking frames and crutches to the game’s top level, and said plainly: “If you asked me to go and do it all again, I wouldn’t.”

The film comes as Vardy is still playing in Serie A for Cremonese, who need every point in their fight to stay up. He returned on Monday for their defeat by Lazio after injury had kept him out for much of the recent push, and said he will keep going “for as long as my legs allow.” The days when he was fuelled by Skittles vodka, he said, are long gone.

Vardy’s story has always sounded unlikely because it is. He said he started playing football when he was five years old and came into the Football League at 25, after years outside the traditional route to the top. In the documentary, he described himself in one word as “twat,” adding “joker” when asked again, before saying of his rise: “I was just a little freak in the works.”

That rise was built over years of graft, not one sudden leap, and Vardy made clear he still sees it that way. “Everyone always says: ‘Oh you didn’t come in [to the Football League] until 25.’ And I’m like: ‘I’ve still been playing football since I was five years old.’ It’s not like I’ve done anything different; I’m still training and playing on a weekend,” he said. “It’s not the common way of doing things, is it? I don’t think it will probably happen again, but it did happen for me and it was hard work. It really was tough, but all worth it.”

The 10-year anniversary of Leicester’s 2016 Premier League title has only sharpened the memory of what he achieved there. Vardy said that title is foremost among his accomplishments, and he still speaks about that team as a unit that never really broke apart. “We’re all still in a group on WhatsApp,” he said. “We’re always talking to each other, always keeping in touch, seeing what lads are doing. The bond we had back then was unbelievable.”

That bond, he said, was no accident. New players fitted in quickly, Nigel Pearson built the foundations and Claudio Ranieri kept the group intact long enough for the run to the title to finish in glory. “We never needed to do anything, [new players] were always bang, done, right in the group. Big Nigel was really good with the foundations, getting everything really close-knit, and that just carried on into the following season,” Vardy said. “He pulled us all together, said he’d watched the great escape the season before, and said he didn’t want to change hardly anything, which I think was right for the group that we had.”

He even suggested Leicester might have won the title with Pearson still in charge. “Do I think we could have done it if Nige was still there? We possibly could have because there wasn’t much different that we were doing from the previous season,” he said. The answer lands with the force of a player who knows exactly how rare that season was. At 39, still chasing minutes in Italy, Vardy sounds like someone who understands that the extraordinary part was never only the title. It was that it happened at all.