Leicester’s Wout Faes: ‘Chelsea called me but I never really thought to go’

Wout Faes is in full flow, his appetite for the Premier League clear as he reflects on his first few weeks at Leicester City. “For me to be here now is a dream,” he says. “Everything that I thought the Premier League would be, it is. The most-viewed, everything around it … also on the pitch, the intensity is something I quite like. They [officials] let the game play a little longer than I was used to. I like it because you can go 100% in every duel. You have to, actually, because otherwise you lose it. Every time I step on the pitch, I’m like: ‘OK, yeah, this is the real proper football.’”

Faes has quickly become a popular character in the dressing room since arriving from Reims on deadline day in September and, with an unmistakable mop of hair, something of a cult hero among supporters. Brendan Rodgers stressed that his only outfield signing this summer could not be expected to invigorate an entire squad but his initiation song, John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads at the team hotel before Leicester played Brighton certainly proved a crowd-pleaser. “Everybody knows Country Roads so they were singing along a little bit,” Faes says, tapping the table.

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Faes is warm company at Leicester’s vast Seagrave training complex, as he discusses facing Paris Saint-Germain in Ligue 1, playing alongside an 18-year-old Martin Ødegaard on loan at Heerenveen, pike fishing with his uncle in Belgium, and growing up in Mol, the town in which the cyclist Tom Boonen was born. “He is a legend,” Faes says. “It is a very small place. When I was young and signed for Anderlecht [at the age of 14] people were like ‘wow’ but I