In the closing weeks of last season, Match of the Day’s recent custom of dutifully displaying the post-match tweets of Premier League footballers included a refreshingly playful gem sent from the phone of Leicester centre-back Robert Huth.

“Yes! Champions League guaranteed!” he wrote. “Better start practicing my Rabonas.” The joke (which was eagerly retweeted by BBC Sport’s own account as though it somehow vindicated a practice which ordinarily yields insights ranging from the irritatingly smug to the downright banal) proved irresistible to many who relished the suggestion of mesmerising feet and technical dexterity in a player normally admired for going about his footballing business as a quietly massive, pacifically muscular presence. In many ways, Huth plays his football in the same manner with which a suited security guard might show an abusive pensioner out of a crowded museum.

But Huth’s tweet was not the first from a Leicester player to be disseminated with delight during those final few weeks. Rather, it was the much-pastiched and often sneered-at Jamie Vardy who has continued this season to stand alone as Leicester’s social media pioneer – his infamous “Chat shit, get banged” warning from 2011 has been quoted with such frequency and relish in the nation’s internet spaces that it has taken on a certain axiomatic quality. Often shared alongside doctored pictures of the striker holding crates of WKD, that four-word phrase now holds pride of place as the central dictum of popular Vardyism.

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The enormous popularity of that phrase – which does certainly correspond with a discernibly snarling aggression in Vardy’s appearance – all sharp, wolfish features beneath an invariably furrowed brow – is more fundamentally tied to its satisfying congruence with his approach to football itself. While pundits and fans alike gush over the talents of Mesut Özil and David Silva, whose skills are astonishing both in their geometrical precision and seductive creativity, here is a player who seems – on the surface, at least – to abandon all that faff, to return the art of English forward play to its doggedly combative, brutalist origins.

This time last November, it had come as no surprise that Vardy was the league’s second-hardest-working striker, charging around at an average of 10.37km per match, or even that he had, in perhaps his most frenetically dizzying moment, clocked a record speed of 35.4kph. Indeed, so exhilaratingly direct was Vardy’s chasing and pressing that it almost comes as a surprise not to find him bounding on all fours, pupils dilating and nostrils flaring.

The caveat that Vardy is in truth a superbly rounded footballer with far more to his game than primitive tenacity and speed is, by now, well worn; that Leicester were eventually made bookmakers’ favourites to march to an unprecedented Premier League title in early February says the same about his club. And yet part of Leicester’s irresistible charm last season was that, despite their apparently unassailable march to being formally confirmed as the best football team in England, they appeared more than happy to maintain some pretence of ordinariness.

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After a commanding 2-1 win over Chelsea in December, which saw Leicester top the table at the season’s halfway point, Claudio Ranieri insisted to his players that they still needed “another five points” to avoid relegation, a suggestion greeted by a number of audible chortles when relayed to listening journalists. Four months later, after a 2-0 defeat of Sunderland opened up a seven-point lead at the table’s summit, he was the one smiling wryly, but his insistence that “we have achieved nothing yet” prolonged Leicester’s playful refusal to admit their own excellence.

Technically speaking, this façade of the unremarkable was maintained by Ranieri’s trust in a fairly conventional 4-4-2 formation, a system which for many had become emblematic of a sort of tactical obstinacy and archaism. It was as recently as the 2014 World Cup, after all, that England’s shape was roundly ridiculed (most publicly by Leicester supporter Gary Lineker) for being too similar to a 4-4-2, as though that alone constituted evidence of strategic stubbornness and regression by default. It was as if Roy Hodgson – by virtue of his devotion to it – had become the coaching equivalent of an obdurate landowner refusing to budge from his porch, arms resolutely folded over a pot belly, as bulldozers levelled the surrounding land to accommodate a new shopping centre.

What this tactical renaissance and outward modesty circumscribed, though, was that last season’s Leicester were a manifestly excellent football team who remained more than content for people to think otherwise. As two Manchester clubs childishly squabbled over labels like Noisy Neighbours and The Biggest Club in the World, Huth’s tweet was another refreshing example of their new approach to navigating the PR jungle of elite modern football: a willingness to self-ironise which only emphasised further the genuine confidence pervading Leicester’s squad and staff.

And it is at this point that we return to Jamie Vardy: the emblem of this brilliantly doubled approach to footballing culture. Vardy was – and this season, seemingly continues to be – consistently outstanding while somehow rarely seeming to be so, resulting in a kind of confusion and disorientation not experienced by Premier League supporters since Andy Carroll was at his barnstorming best for Newcastle United. Every time Carroll’s sausage-pendulum of a left leg sent a ball roaring into the net, it seemed so wanting for technique and composure that one was tempted to write it off as a strange accident, only being convinced otherwise by the sheer frequency of such freakish luck.

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Vardy and Carroll’s styles could hardly be more disparate, but at his best Vardy exposes a similar kind of footballing prejudice, a detectable snobbery among fans and pundits alike. While such onlookers continue to amuse themselves by recalling his time at non-League Stocksbridge Park in 2008, where early substitutions were necessitated by a court-enforced curfew and a fitted electronic tag, Vardy has simply followed his own advice and allowed them to chat their shit, quietly going about scoring sublime back-heeled flicks for England.

Ultimately, it was Riyad Mahrez who eventually won last season’s Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year award, an accolade of which he was not undeserving. He was an obviously talented player, but his mischievous invention and spiderish flair are not new to the Premier League. Vardy, in contrast, was the true emblem of Leicester’s success last season insofar as his skills were more veiled, half disguised by his almost contrived performance as the one-dimensional, aggressive speed merchant.

Who knows, perhaps Huth’s joke was less jovial than it seemed; perhaps the much-relished Rabona will gain the most unlikely of exponents next season, as Leicester begin their brilliantly won foray into European football.