Why the Vardys are saying ciao to Italy after less than a year
You hear of people moving heaven and earth to make a loved one happy. In the case of Jamie and Rebekah Vardy, they transported a grand piano from Leicester all the way to Lake Garda in a bid to make their 12-year-old daughter Sofia feel at home in Italy.
But Jamie’s transfer to US Cremonese did not hit the high notes everyone hoped for and their plush home was even raided by burglars one evening. “When something like this happens it makes you question everything,” Rebekah is heard saying, before also asking Jamie if they should go home and leave him there alone.
To make matters worse, Jamie scored seven goals and provided three assists in 29 appearances, but it was not enough to save the Italian side from relegation. This week he has confirmed he has decided to leave Cremonese when his contract expires this summer.
The Vardys are now back home, with the children wondering where they might go next, and perhaps hoping their dad can find a club closer to home. ITV will next week profile the family’s time in Italy in three-part series The Vardys. Their new ITV documentary was supposed to celebrate a great new chapter in their life.
But whilst it had some highlights, it was not the Italian dream they hoped for and lasted less time than expected. Firstly Jamie managed to get a small muscle injury when he arrived, meaning when family and friends flew out to watch his first game, he was sat in the stands with them.
“You never want to be injured, it’s the worst thing ever, you want to be on the pitch helping,” he says with a grimace.
All the while ITV cameras show Rebecca struggling to find accommodation and schools for their children; Olivia, six, Finley, nine, Sofia 12, Taylor 16.
It took weeks and weeks, leaving Jamie alone in Italy to train and miss his family and his beloved dog.
“It’s the longest we have been apart except for when Jamie was playing for England. I am just trying to be positive,” Rebekah says.
After looking at some sub-standard property she thought looked “looked mouldy” and one with a dubious bedroom which “just needed a pole”, an anxious Rebekah said: “I thought it was gonna be hard but this is…hard.
“I’ve got the visas to sort, I can’t sort the visas until I’ve got a property, because of a fixed address, my brain is so fried. There are little kids involved who didn’t ask for this change. I need more than a drink, I need a bottle with a straw.”
She added: “I think Italy is an amazing country. We’ve just not been able to find the right accommodation, and I think we’re gonna have to start looking a bit further afield. It’s a very fortunate problem to have, but I’m not going to deny it’s f**king stressful. It was a literal wash out, but hopefully we’re going to have more luck with schools.”
Eventually things were sorted, and everything bar the kitchen sink, but including their piano, was brought to a lovely Lake Garda apartment.
“I promised her that she could take it,” Rebekah explains. “Soph’s one passion is playing the piano, so we decided that we would take the piano with us, because she’s the one that’s so kind of apprehensive about Italy, I think. If I can give her somewhere that she can go to do what she does here, that might just ease a bit of anxiety for her.”
Explaining the decision to move, she adds: “Some people would say it’s really drastic uprooting and moving all the kids when they’re so settled, and it’s only a two hour flight away, but the reality is we’re a family unit. You either keep the family together or you both live very different lives. Splitting up the family just was not an option for us.
“Uprooting and moving is probably subconsciously quite triggering for me. It takes me back to when I was younger, and my mum and dad split up. We ended up moving around quite a bit, ended up going to quite a few different schools, so I never really got attached to any one place, and it really, really made me incredibly insecure. And as a result of that, I always find it really hard to find a sense of belonging.”
The family flew over in a private jet, but eldest child Taylor opted to stay at home along with Rebekah’s dad Carlos who is very close to the kids. Sofia is worried about missing her friends, so her parents decide to give her a phone for her 12th birthday.
Rebecca says: “If we had been back in England, not in a million years would Sophia have ever had a phone. I would say don’t give them a phone till they’re at least 30! The main reason we gave her a phone was so she didn’t feel as isolated out here, so she still felt connected to all of her friends, granddad, and Meg’s back in the UK.”
Meanwhile Olivia asks to stay home from her school as kids in her age group don’t speak much or any English, making it hard for her to communicate with other little ones to make friends. Rebekah says: “Olivia’s main issue is the social side of school, because she’s such a social girl. Most of the kids in her school at the minute only speak Italian, and they’re very basic English, so she’s really struggling to communicate with friends, which I think she’s finding really hard, because they do try and talk to her, but she doesn’t understand what they’re saying. Bless her.
“She’s always been such a confident girl, but at the minute she just does not want to be at school. She’s got really clingy.”
Pondering what he has done, Jamie says: “It’s my choice. She’d happily go on, though. If I told her there was a flight in two hours, she’d be on it. I messaged this morning saying we can find another school, if it’s still the same after that, then I’m sending them back home.”
The kids like pizza but they also want simple home comforts like baked beans which shops in Lake Garda do not stock, as Rebekah finds out when she uses her basic Italian to try to find some. “I have been tasked by my little monsters to go and find some English home comforts. I think the Italian teacher thought I was mad. The kids have asked me to find, they want baked beans. It’s really hard to find.”
Later she tells friends: “You can’t buy gravy, you can’t buy squash.” Thankfully friends and family start to bring some over for them. But worse is still to come as when they are out they also are burgled which leaves Rebekah “on edge 24/7” and she then tells her husband on camera “maybe the best thing to do is take them back”. She later moans: “They’ve taken my f***ing watch.”
The family did manage to stick with Italy until the end of the season, and can be seen on instagram enjoying skiing back in March. Rebekah also insists the move has helped her step away from some of the media spotlight in the UK so she can “reset and move on” after famously losing the Agatha Christie court case against Coleen Rooney.
But it is fair to say the experiment playing in Italy could have gone better and with the season finished, 39-year-old Vardy has effectively left Cremonese and is now back looking for a new club again. One option appears to be to join Dutch side Feyenoord, and in the ITV show in what could be a clue, Rebekah says they almost “went to Holland” last season but Jamie “changed his mind” at the last minute.
A safer option would obviously be to try to find an English team, which could mean not having to move his family far, if at all from the family home in Leicester. Wherever he goes, Vardy is likely to want his family with him. He tells the programme: “They’re the ones that keep you really grounded. It is massive for me, having the family around. You need that normality.”
* The Vardys airs at 9pm on Tuesday June 2nd on ITV1 & ITVX. All three episodes will be immediately available to stream as a boxset online.
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