Leicester City FC can secure an astonishing Premier League championship this weekend, with a victory at Manchester United. And if not then, by winning one of its final two matches.

English media have been doing celebratory Leicester stories (like this one and this one and this one), and even the New York Times has discovered the previously feckless east Midlands club.

As underdog success stories go, this one is hard to top. Leicester was “propping up the table” (as the British would say) midway through last season and seemed sure to be relegated, before engineering an escape with a strong finish. Still, Leicester was a 5,000-to-1 long shot in some betting establishments this season, which didn’t seem ridiculous — they would need a season of excellence to outstrip traditional powers like Chelsea and United, and they have never won the top flight nor an FA Cup, nor played in the Champions League.

And here they are.

Sports fans, in general, ought to be happy, at such an outrageous story. And most of the time, I am.

And then I think of Jamie Vardy *.

Vardy is the yob who leads Leicester in scoring, with 22 goals. He is not the club’s best player this season — that would be Riyad Mahrez — but Leicester are not on the edge of a championship without him.

And did we mention he is a yob? We did? How about a “lout”? How about a “yahoo”?

Vardy’s best-known moment as a boor occurred on videotape at a casino in Leicester shortly before the start of the current season. He was playing poker when he, apparently, thought someone behind him was looking at his cards.

The man, witnesses said, appeared to be of “East Asian origin” — though the person has never been identified in media.

In the video, Vardy is heard to say: “Jap. Yo, Jap. Walk on. Walk on. … Oi, walk on. Yeah, you … Jap. Walk on.”

“Jap” is considered a slur by most Japanese, which even someone as dimwitted as Vardy ought to know.

After the news of Vardy’s casino abuse broke, he issued an apology, through the club, which read: “I wholeheartedly apologize for any offense I’ve caused. It was a regrettable error in judgment. I take full responsibility and I accept my behavior was not up to what’s expected of me.”

(Which is one of those non-apology apologies … “you know, for the dainty people who took offense, and besides, I was drunk — when I’m an even bigger a-hole.”)

It led to a club “investigation” which yielded what Leicester called a “hefty fine”, without specifying it — and this is guy who makes about $65,000 a week. “Hefty” to you or me would be $1,000. Hefty to Vardy would need to be about $100,000.

Some suggested it demonstrated anew English soccer’s erratic stand against racism — punished when it is convenient, overlooked when it is not.

Wrote a contributor to fusion.net: “Vardy’s period of uninterrupted employment, in most other work environs, would likely be untenable because, increasingly, more employers, in 2015, don’t have the luxury of being seen as condoning that kind of disgusting public behavior.

“Casually dropping racial slurs on camera and expecting a limp apology and an assortment of other empty gestures to end the matter shouldn’t be standard operating procedure in a world where we pretend to have no tolerance for intolerance. Yet here we are, lying to ourselves once again.”

Also, the infamous casino incident carried on with Vardy abusing another person there, who had suggested that it’s not against rules for a bystander to look at someone’s poker hand — which led to more abuse from Vardy, toward the second person, and prompted a teammate to grab him ahead of what could have turned into a fight.

Vardy is the kind of idiot too often tolerated in sports, and perhaps in particular English soccer, where “boys will be boys and often particularly crude boys” seems still to be the explanation (with a smile and a shrug) to all sorts of bad behavior.

More Vardy.

He was convicted of assault for an incident outside a pub in 2007, when he was 20, and played for six months with “an electric tag” on his leg.

And, more recently, he was shown a red card for a ridiculous dive in Leicester’s match on April 17. Before he left the pitch he showered abuse on the referee — which led to a 10,000-pound fine as well as a two-game suspension — one for the red card, the second for the verbal abuse.

Vardy is the sour note in the Leicester victory March. The boor at the middle of the otherwise mostly upbeat Leicester story. The asterisk after what ought to be an exclamation point.

I find myself hoping that Leicester does win at Old Trafford on Sunday. At least the suspended Jamie Vardy won’t be on the field to celebrate it.