They were good times at Leicester City back in those days when a slightly unfashionable, unheralded team started playing football, under Martin O’Neill’s expert tutelage, with a streak of independence that was so invigorating the people of the city, much like now, could have been forgiven for wondering whether it could ever get any better.

Leicester were the first team I covered on a regular basis and it always felt slightly incongruous that the chairman, Martin George, landed in a helicopter on the first day O’Neill set about his restoration work. Overall, it was an unpretentious place. The celebrity fans were Rustie Lee and the chap who plays Roy Cropper on Coronation Street. They were still using those clunky old rotary-dial phones in the press box and, though Filbert Street wasn’t the worst ground by any means, one stand was so much smaller than the others it was possible to get a free view from the nearby tower blocks and, in one game against Aston Villa, the away fans started pointing at the roof and chanting: “What the effing hell is this?”

It was when the move to the new stadium came about and the staff started shifting some of the furniture that they realised the place was infested with rodents. All those Walkers crisps, presumably.

But what a spirit of togetherness that band of brothers fostered. There were four top-10 finishes, after winning promotion with virtually the final kick of O’Neill’s first season. That team went to Anfield four times, won three and drew the other. They reached three League Cup finals, winning two, to parade their first silverware since 1964.

Everyone remembers Dennis Bergkamp’s improvisational brilliance for his hat-trick goal at Filbert Street on the night in August 1997 when the Dutchman has never looked more imperious. What they tend to forget is that it came in the third minute of stoppage time but Leicester still found the time to summon up the final goal of a wild, eccentric 3-3 draw.

Leicester won at Old Trafford and Elland Road in the days when beating Leeds meant something. They did not bend for anybody and Chelsea were reminded of that after another rumbustious occasion at the old ground. O’Neill’s verdict that night was a belter. Ken Bates, he said, was a “footballing cretin”.

For those of us who followed that side, it is certainly easy to recognise the qualities that have been passed down to the modern-day Leicester. Its essence comes in the fact they have retrieved more points from losing positions this season than any other Premier League team. Yet there is so much more to this side than sheer force of personality.

Leicester have been operating with a high level of skill that has confounded opponents. They boast arguably the two exceptional players of the season so far, even if it is difficult to determine who should go first: Jamie Vardy or Riyad Mahrez? The manager, Claudio Ranieri, has forced English football to reassess his qualities and, whatever you might think about the gimmickry of those hand-out plastic clappers, it is some din they create in that sweeping ground beside the river Soar. Nowhere in the division has a better atmosphere right now.

More than anything, there is something delightfully absurd about studying the league table and realising, almost implausibly, Leicester have spent more days on top (17) than Manchester United (10) since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement two and a half years ago. Ranieri’s team could be back there again on Monday if they beat his old club, Chelsea, and in the following three games they face Everton, Liverpool and Manchester City. By that stage, we will have reached the halfway point of the season and if the bubble still hasn’t burst perhaps it will be time to accept it is made out of something more substantial than soap and water.

Could it really be that we are having this discussion about a team that started the season as 2,000-1 to win the league and high among the favourites to fall down a division? Well, let’s not get too carried away just yet, other than to say they probably deserve a sheepish apology from those of us who saw nothing for them other than a long struggle to prevent the fingers of relegation closing round their neck.

This is, however, a glimpse perhaps of what the top division can expect in the coming years and it is not such a bad thing to see the bigger clubs getting their noses tweaked more often than they are accustomed to.

The football landscape certainly seems to be changing, even if the shift is only subtle. A leading executive from one of the Premier League’s traditional big four told me a few days ago that he expects there to be a sustained challenge to that quartet now the new television deal is in force. Every club in the top flight is now rich or super‑rich. Nobody is skint in the way of old and, for the middle-ranking clubs, that means one important difference: they no longer have to sell their better players. They can say no and actually mean it, as Chelsea found out last season when they virtually camped on Everton’s lawn to try to prise away John Stones, and Manchester United with Sadio Mané at Southampton.

Everton are the prime example. Already, they have the nucleus of a fine side with Stones, Ross Barkley, Romelu Lukaku, Leighton Baines and Gerard Deulofeu. If they dig in their heels again next summer – and United’s interest in Stones is genuine – is it ludicrous to think that by adding a couple of new signings they can have realistic ambitions of making the top four? West Ham have been identified as another club who might challenge in the next few years. Southampton, too. It might take some getting used to, but the gap is closing and it will be intriguing to see just how ambitious Leicester are over the next couple of transfer windows.

The key question is what happens at the end of the season when other clubs inevitably start trying to cherry-pick their best players. How do Leicester react if, say, a £25m offer comes in for Mahrez or someone is so enamoured with Vardy there is a huge bid for the player who has just won back-to-back Premier League player-of-the-month awards? Equally, it is difficult not to think Kasper Schmeichel must have plenty of admirers, having developed into a goalkeeper of some distinction, or that some of the more unsung heroes – N’Golo Kanté and Daniel Drinkwater, to cite but two – are attracting attention.

In O’Neill’s day, there was a teenage striker by the name of Emile Heskey who seemed painfully shy at times but on the pitch had a wonderful mix of raw aggression and blistering pace coupled with the instinctive desire, whenever he got the ball, to set off straight towards goal, regardless of who was in the way. Heskey frightened the life out of defenders in a way that made it perplexing to see the player he became later in his career. But Leicester could not keep him. Tottenham and Leeds both tried to flex their financial muscle. Liverpool eventually came forward with a club-record £11m bid and in those days there was no chance Leicester could turn down that kind of money.

It’s different now, and this is the issue for Leicester: how ambitious are they? They are already the season’s success story, but do they want more and how serious are they are about it? And, on that front, it would certainly be a clear message if, come the start of next season, they had resisted any of the old urges to trade in the players who had elevated them to this position. Lots of clubs have one-off seasons where they exceed expectations. The trickier part is making it feel like the norm, rather than the exception, and that has to be Leicester’s next step, once they have discovered how far their current adventure takes them.

Port Vale pandered over Hasselbaink

Norman Smurthwaite is an old estate agent with a name that sounds like a villager from Last of the Summer Wine. He is actually Port Vale’s owner and, having put the club up for sale, it is doubtful the sport will miss him greatly judging by his explanation why he turned down the chance to appoint Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink as manager last year.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, Smurthwaite might genuinely have good intentions when he says it was because he did not want to put Hasselbaink in a position where he might be subjected to racist abuse after a run of bad results.

It doesn’t say a lot for his opinion of the club’s supporters but, yes, he is correct to point out there was an investigation into some racist chanting during a home game against Bradford City in February 2013, even if that was a good 18 months before Hasselbaink was recommended to him. Five men were arrested and charged but all were acquitted in court.

“I didn’t take him [Hasselbaink] because of the racial issue the club had got,” Smurthwaite said. “I didn’t think it was fair on him. Can you imagine the poor bloke getting abuse, along with the normal abuse if results were going against him? He would have been right for the club, without doubt, but I don’t think the club would have been right for him.”

What he does not seem to comprehend is how impotent it looks to pander to what he describes as “a very small minority”, or that he has in effect given a tiny clique of dunderheads what they want: a white manager and now a level of publicity that leaves the impression this is a club where skin colour matters. Smurthwaite has employed black players and not worried, apparently, about how the crowd might react. But a black manager? Too risky.

Smurthwaite has issued an apology of sorts “if any Port Vale fan feels I have labelled them as being either a racist or thug”. Yet there is a wider issue here. When the debate comes around about the low number of black managers in football, there are still people who think it cannot be true, in 2015, that a chairman would discriminate against someone for being black. Now we have an admission. Plus a flaky explanation that it was for Hasselbaink’s own good.

Smurthwaite, accepting that “99% of our fans are excellent”, had his chance to appoint one of the game’s bright young managers and, in the process, deliver a message to the small element that might or might not be among the crowd. He had the opportunity to make a difference and it doesn’t say much for him that he doesn’t seem to grasp this part.

Fergie far from winning with fans

There was a point last week when a group of us football writers found ourselves at the next table to Sir Alex Ferguson and three of his associates as they had a drink in the bar of their hotel before Manchester United’s Champions League tie in Wolfsburg.

In the following 20 minutes, there were two occasions when locals tried to say hello, presumably in the hope that they might get a few words, a smile or possibly even an autograph. Just the usual: something small, yet big enough to last a lifetime.

Neither had the chance to get that far into the conversation. Ferguson, wearing his club blazer and paid close to £3m a year as the club’s “global ambassador”, sent them packing, with the irritation clear in his voice and the first guy getting a dismissive wave of the hand.

He was a wonderful football manager and, often, a great football man. But he could be deeply unpleasant, Fergie.