Everyone loves a good underdog story. It’s what drives us through the day-to-day monotony of life, and what drove the ’90s movie industry. In real life, though, underdog tales are few and far between: Bank CEOs make more money; Superman keeps making bad movies; Duke wins.

It’s been the same way in the English Premier League for years. Money talks, history talks, and no one wins except for Manchester United, Manchester City, and Chelsea. Nobody else even comes close.

That is, until this year. Out of nowhere, slowly but surely, an incredible, unbelievable upset has been happening. With just three games remaining in the season, 5000-1 outsiders Leicester City are still at the top of the Premier League. They’ve created enough separation from second-place Tottenham that a win versus Manchester United this Sunday will clinch the title. This is astounding and unprecedented. (To put their 5000-1 odds in context, the Philadelphia 76ers—who were Vegas’s pick to finish dead last in the NBA this year—were still only 350-1 outsiders. And in 2013, bookmakers thought Bono had a 1000-1 chance of being the next Pope.) Without exaggeration, Leicester’s season spent leading the league is one of the unlikeliest, most shocking events in the history of sports. So let’s take a look at what this team is and who they consist of, before this ridiculous nine-month-long Cinderella story gets bastardized into a feel-good movie starring Frankie Muniz and Shia LaBeouf.

How do you pronounce this crazy team’s name?

You just say it like “Lester”—forget all those other weird letters. Lester City.

Talk about the Premier League some more.

I’d love to! The Premier League (or “EPL,” as Americans insist on calling it) is just like any other sports league you know and love. The only difference is there are no playoffs at the end. Every team plays each other once at home and once away, and whichever of the 20 teams is at the top of the table after 38 games wins it all. This means a team can potentially win weeks before the end of the season, if they’ve been good enough.

Without exaggeration, it’s already one of the unlikeliest, most shocking events in the history of sports.

Sounds boring.

It’s not. There are all kinds of added mini-battles going on within the league. For instance, the top four teams automatically qualify for the Champions League, where they can compete in a tournament with Europe’s most elite clubs, like Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Real Madrid. There’s also relegation, which sees the three worst teams in the league suffer the ultimate humiliation and get sent down to the second tier (like baseball’s Triple A) of English football. Which is confusingly and ironically called the “Championship.”

So no Premier League season features the same 20 teams?

Exactly.

Okay, so what’s up with this season? What makes it so iNsAnE ?

The best way to describe it is to list the winners of the past 20 years of the Premier League:

Manchester United Manchester United Arsenal Manchester United Manchester United Manchester United Arsenal Manchester United Arsenal Chelsea Chelsea Manchester United Manchester United Manchester United Chelsea Manchester United Manchester City Manchester United Manchester City Chelsea

So there you have it: four winners in the past two decades, and only three in the past twelve years. Not a lot of variety. It’s common wisdom that, should a team ever grow to compete with the Premier League elite, it would take a huge cash injection, a high international profile, and years (yes, years) of constructing a team that can perform alongside the mainstays.

Except, it didn’t.

You mean to tell me no one saw this coming?

It’s important to understand that Leicester wasn’t one of the teams directly below the top four, threatening to break out at any minute. In fact, up until around a year ago, they were, in a word: shit. They were coming to the end of their first season back in the Premier League and looked a sure bet for relegation. They survived by the skin of their teeth, but as the 2015–16 season began, many assumed they still didn’t have the pace and depth of squad to compete. Worse still, Claudio Ranieri, their new manager (their old one left after several extremely, extremely, extremely bad and bizarre circumstances), was the managerial equivalent of a B-grade journeyman who’d hopped from club to club for decades. His last job as coach of the Greek national team was cut short when they lost at home to the Faroe Islands. (Population 49,000.)