Call them The Unlikely Lads: the boys, along with their Italian manager, who are set to turn the national game topsy-turvy – to prick the balloon of football’s money-go-round – by bringing off the biggest shock in top-flight history.

Victory against Manchester United would make Leicester City the insolent fairy-tale champions of the richest league in the world, fielding a team which US business magazine Forbes described as “Premier League small change” – a team whose entire wage bill is less than that earned by some single players at United, Chelsea, Manchester City or Arsenal.

Leicester were bottom of the Premier League for 140 days last season, before “the great escape”, and they started this year’s campaign on odds of 5,000/1 to win the title. “It would be an incredible, unbelievable achievement in an era of football when this isn’t supposed to happen,” read a column in the Leicester Mercury.

“While the richer clubs are shopping and competing for the same price-tag players in Harrods, City have been looking for players clubs have discarded or haven’t had the vision to take a closer look at. City are the blue-collars … the working-class club that has shown the Premier League what can be achieved with honest, hard graft.”

“It’s like football used to be, when teams played as teams,” said leather-clad rocker Pete, leaning against the bar for a pint at the town’s Barley Mow pub. “For love of the game and the club, not just the money alone.”

Leicester’s King Power Stadium hardly reflects this yearning for days of yore: set in a no-man’s-land along the unconvincingly renamed Filbert Way, between Morrisons, an Odeon Cineplex, Toyota and Citroën dealers.

At the club shop, it seems as if the whole community is waiting in line to deck itself out for “Back-the-Blues” day, including those who made Leicester Europe’s first white-minority city, such as Afifa Usman, who chose a beanie-hat to wear over her hijab. Her favourite player is midfielder Danny Drinkwater: a salient choice, given he never made the grade at Man United, who sold him to Leicester in 2012. And he is not the only player to be recycled from United’s scrap heap for a return in Foxes blue to Old Trafford’s “Theatre of Dreams”. Matty James was a United academy player who was first loaned to Preston North End before moving to Leicester. Then there’s Danny Simpson, discarded by United for loans to Ipswich and Blackburn, before a free transfer to QPR.

Central Leicester was draped in blue before light show, the Victorian city hall was flying the Foxes’ flag atop its roof and four more flew above the ironwork entrance. Wedding guests make their way beneath them, among whom Des Wootton wears a buttonhole of blue flowers. His favourite player is Jamie Vardy, who misses game having shattered records and expectations this season.

At 16, Vardy was released by Sheffield Wednesday and joined Stocksbridge Park Steels, then Halifax. He was snapped up by Conference Premier League Fleetwood in 2011. He joined Leicester for a non-league record fee of £1m – one seventy-fifth of the figure reportedly offered for United’s Wayne Rooney last December. Upon joining Leicester, Vardy was unpopular with fans and considered leaving football altogether; this season he broke a Premier League record by scoring in 11 consecutive matches.

Robinson’s jewellers flies Leicester City flags above and outside its doors, wherein Sasha behind the counter says her favourite player is Marc Albrighton, who came to Leicester from Mile Oak Monarchs via Aston Villa – and whose mother-in-law, Sue Davey, was killed in the Tunisian beach attacks in June 2015. Albrighton put his finger on the mood when speaking to the Mercury about Leicester being applauded by fans whose teams they’ve just beaten. “It’s rare, very touching,” he said. “I think it’s a sign that they can relate to us. We’re hard-working people without airs or graces.” We just enjoy our game, enjoy our club, and fans can relate to that.”

Annie Kunis is locked in negotiations with the local authority about a certificate she needs for her cafe on Pocklington’s Walk but she is happy to discuss her favourite player. “Riyad!” she says. Riyad Mahrez, this season’s Professional Footballers’ Association players’ player of the year, came from the concrete slum-suburb of Sarcelles, outside Paris, before joining Le Havre in the French second division. He had never heard of Leicester City when he was spotted.

There’s a link here back to the recent roots of this heretical football story: the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, where minor nations caused tremors beneath all the monied bloating with modest but thrilling team football. Many forget that the ultimate champions, Germany, were very nearly dumped out of the tournament by fiery Algeria – and there, on the bench that night, was Mahrez, now the first African player to win the highest honour in English football. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he told the magazine Onze Mondial. “These guys are hungry like crazy, they let nothing go. It’s total desire. We’re fighters.”

We’re hard-working people without airs and graces. We just enjoy our game … and fans relate to that Marc Albrighton

Leaving his car at the Blue Peter garage, plumber Kevin Moore points out that Leicester’s players demonstrate not so much “the old days, but how it’s all gone ‘everyone everywhere’” – the modern game at its bonkers best rather than wealthy worst. Consider Jeff Schlupp, says Kevin, born in Hamburg, raised in Milton Keynes, plays for Ghana; Ben Hamer, from Chard in Somerset, who grew up in Germany but arrived via Exeter and Bristol; N’Golo Kanté, from Boulogne, arrived via Caen. There’s also Daniel Amartey, who started with International Allies FC of Ghana, and arrived in the Midlands via Djurgårdens of Stockholm, and Leonardo Ulloa, who began with Comisión de Actividades Infantiles in Rio Negro, Argentina, to become top scorer in the Spanish second division, and reached Leicester via Brighton.

In a corner of Nelson Mandela Park, in the shadow of Leicester’s prison walls, there’s a bizarre scene: two ladies in saris push a man called Fahad on a swing made with an oversized tyre. Fahad’s favourite players are captain Wes Morgan, who also skippers Jamaica, and Robert Huth, the German who was first brought west across what had been the Berlin Wall by current Leicester manager Claudio Ranieri when he was at Chelsea. Now, after ankle surgery at Middlesbrough and viral meningitis at Stoke, Huth is the wall – in Leicester’s defence.

The Barley Mow always was a rock’n’roll pub and it still is. Simon, behind the bar, has volunteered for a shift tonight, braced for “the party of a lifetime”. Asked to name a favourite, he replies: “There’s no single player. That’s the point. It’s the team, it’s Ranieri.” Of course, Simon is right – the key to all this is the manager himself.

It was Ranieri who laid the foundations for Chelsea’s great years, for which he was stabbed not in the back but in the gut by owner Roman Abramovich. I interviewed Ranieri at the Juventus training ground in 2008, where he was charged with turning around the then disgraced club.

A butcher’s son from Rome, he is charming but enigmatic, honest but careful, quietly funny, utterly engaging.

He talked then about “little things with which you win a game”, about his wife’s love for antique fairs across the north of England, and Lincolnshire sausages from Newark, now not far away. Back then, he wanted to bring his knowledge of English football to Italy, and it worked. Now it is the reverse. “I love the way players unleash themselves without restraint,” he said then of English football, before unleashing The Unlikely Lads who are on the verge of being the people’s champions.