The Conte effect, Fraudiola and five other talking points from the Premier League season

Dilly-ding, dilly-dong…wait, hang on, this is 2017. Perhaps nothing will topple last season’s Cinderella Story of the idiosyncratic Claudio Ranieri and his Foxes. They thrilled us and they exhilarated us. Above all, they provided unadulterated joy and assaulted all footballing cliches and dogmas. The 25th season of the Premier League rarely thrilled and neither did champions Chelsea. Here are seven talking points.

1. A disappointing season

This was to be a la-di-da celebration of high-end English football, a silver coronation of the world’s best league, but what transpired was much more mundane. Where was the hors d’oeuvre, the champagne and the firecrackers? The entree never arrived, qualitative games were rare. Chelsea’s supremacy made for a monochrome ten months, a prolonged collective subjugation to Conte-ism, defined as ruthless 3-4-3 football.

The indictment of English football came in the European Cup, where British clubs were castigated as an irrelevance to be ridiculed and to be sniggered with. They failed again when facing with the European elite. Winning the Champions League is still the highest good in the club game and trumps the Premier League. Ask Chelsea – the club had long been driven by an obsession to win the European Cup. They gave it their all and when they finally won it in dramatic fashion in 2012, on penalties, it was a triumph and fulfilment. Ever since, Premier League clubs have played an insignificant role in the latter stages of the competition. This season, Leicester was the lone flag bearer in the quarter-finals.

2. Conte a brilliant coach and interloper

Was it ever a contest? Back in September, Antonio Conte altered his system to a 3-4-3 in the midst of a 3-0 thumping by Arsenal. It was an audacious move, but from then on, Chelsea never looked like relinquishing the top spot. Yet this had not been the script, the hysterical and spasmodic Italian, with his frenzied touchlines celebrations that had paramedics in constant state of panic, was never supposed to win the league.

Plenty of petro-dollars and Glazer bucks had reserved the right to monopolise the Premier League to Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola, who at opposite ends of Manchester were anointed overlords of a supposedly new order. They carried lofty ambitions and wild dreams.

But amid the hullabaloo, it was Conte who proved to be the classic coach, the quintessential manager. He managed and coached his players, cajoling and coaxing the Hazards and Kantes into a streamlined monolithic bloc of granite, efficiency and a sprinkling of stardust.

3. Guardiola, the purist, not the coach

So what did Mourinho and Guardiola do? The Spaniard became Fraudiola and the Portuguese, the king of draws, ever relishing his petulant antagonism. Guardiola’s case is a curious one. He was confronted with a different environment, but refused to forego his beatific vision of the game, convulsing at the idea of a Tony Pulis style of football.

At Bayern Munich, he demonstrated his tactical flexibility, playing with many variations of a 4-3-3 system. In England, his purism surfaced again. He is not a manager in the plenitude of the word. Guardiola is not Antonio Conte, who adapted his system to his players as the Italian recognised both the strengths and weaknesses of his squad. Without the required players, Guardiola still tried to impose his philosophy. He did opt for rotation, different tactics, but those were but mechanic modifications to his methods and management. Not even Guardiola can teach limited players the virtues of Catalan football and so City’s season remained a dream of what could be.

4. The end of the Wengerocracy?

Perhaps the footballing gods were displaying a sense of irony towards Arsene Wenger when Laurent Koscielny was sent off against Everton, an act which slowly dismantled the Arsenal defence and relegated the Londoners to a historic fifth place – and so an archetypical Arsenal season, but without the annual Champions League ticket, came to an end.

And yet, in North London, revolt is nigh. The Arsenal cosmos is in stagnation. Once the epitome of avant-garde football, Arsenal were often farcical this season, with plenty of carbon copy capitulations, frighteningly identical reproduction of puzzling defeats with a stubborn manager, who refused to alter his ways until a last minute resort to a three men back line, and a team of soft ballerinas, who had little personality and no backbone.

Every season Arsenal proffer the promise of a footballing renaissance, a revisit to Arsenal’s heydays, but this season the despair and exasperation revealed an existential malaise and little of a constructive future. Not even a FA Cup final win against Chelsea may be enough to save the Wengerocracy.

5. Crass “sportainment”

Is the English league “sportainment”? Perhaps not just yet, but there are signposts for a moribund future, an era of WWE football. Leicester City’s Thai owners pursued their heart-breaking defenestration of Ranieri, they committed regicide and perhaps crossed an intangible, moral boundary – the Premier League at the age of 25 is a wretched business, derailed by the investment of global “capital” and consumed by the ever-growing entertainment market, perpetually proclaiming, with much aplomb and success, to be the best league in the world.

The English league is a worldwide commercial spectacle, with sanitised stadiums, middle-class consumers, armies of marketers and bored billionaires, long since transformed from what was once a declining working-class game, steeped in an old football culture with a thick web of morals, values and identities.

6. Le Petit Prince

Eden Hazard has his merits at Chelsea. The brilliant Belgian’s suave movements and forward drives galvanized the champions. He was a beacon of creativity in the final third. Conte rejuvenated Hazard after a lacklustre season under Mourinho. He is now on the galactic radar of Florentino Perez.

But the best player on the British Isles was N’Golo Kante. His dominance across English fields is almost freakish. He hustles and bustles. Opponents fear him. They sense the little giant from France may appear at any moment behind them, weaving and spinning his tangled web from whence one can’t escape.

First, he excelled at Leicester City in that story of stardust and sensation, and this season he was the cog of Chelsea’s midfield. Here is the catch with Kante: under Antonio Conte, he has become an even better midfielder. The long-busting energetic player is both a number six and a number eight. He defends and recovers possession, but he also enables Chelsea to attack.

7. Sunderland, doomed at last

Forgive us for the cheek – Sunderland come bottom of this listicle. This was one season too many for the Black Cats. There was to be no great escape from Sunderland, no drama on the last day of the season, no happy ending to the flirtation. This time Sunderland were truly relegated to the Championship. It was but the logical ending of protracted struggle at Wearside as a combination of insufficient investment, bad ownership and poor management led to the club’s decline.

David Moyes never succeeded in offering Sunderland any stability or profound hopes of remaining in the topflight. As early as the second or third match day, he spoke of a relegation battle. The Scot’s spending budget was also limited, but his choices and tactics were often questioned. But Sunderland’s problems run deeper. It may be quite some time before the Black Cats return to the Premier League.