The moth had barely left Cristiano Ronaldo's face when thoughts turned to the Premier League. Football is an impatient master.
A dour 2016 European Championship tipped its hat at the transcending power of the collective over the individual, largely due to the absence of anything remotely spectacular or sexy. In essence it was the sporting equivalent of gushing earnestly at being served a vegetarian meal at a dinner party, while secretly craving steak.After the polite grey slab of football that was Euro 2016, the return of the Premier League should provide the perfect antidote. The gruel of international fare makes the gaudy yet comforting allure of Premier League football ever more appealing, like slipping into a T-shirt after a day in a suit.
Unapologetic in being bigger, bolder and brasher than ever before, English football has come out swinging haymakers after being told to sit in the corner by the Bundesliga and La Liga in recent years. It's a good job hipsters wear ironic glasses.
When Jose Mourinho signs Paul Pogba for Manchester United at a world-record fee, it's safe to say the Premier League has its swagger back.
The hype around a new Premier League season is traditionally so overwrought and wired, it is usually the case it has become a parody of itself before a ball has been kicked. The continued success of Sky Sports News owes a debt to its short-lived predecessor The Day Today.
With broadcasters like circus ringmasters on acid, whipping crowds into a frenzied state of open-mouthed wonderment before anything has even happened, is it any wonder that when the actual games kick off it's all a little underwhelming? An elephant lifting a man with its trunk is impressive, less so when it has been billed as the greatest stunt of all time.
Yet this season seems a little different. English football is operating in a slipstream of goodwill on the back of Leicester City's title-winning campaign. The Premier League is still a beast, but having been slain by little old Leicester, it feels a little friendlier, somehow less corporate. Of course it isn't, but it just goes to show how a little romance can thaw even the chilliest of hearts.
Let's not go soft just yet, it's far from completed its metamorphosis into the BFG, and it would be fallacious to the point of being fraudulent to label it a dream factory on the back of Leicester's fairytale alone. However, any league in which as many as seven of its 20 members could conceivably win it (albeit with a fair wind behind them), holds genuine appeal for players, managers, supporters and neutrals alike.
It's not unimaginable any of Leicester (although Claudio Ranieri has said of his side's chances of retaining the title, per the Guardian: "It's easier that ET comes to Piccadilly Circus"), Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool or Chelsea could be crowned champions in May.
If little old Jose and Manchester United can set themselves brave if "unrealistic targets" of the title, according to Sky Sports, daring to dream on the back of spending only around £400 million over the past three years, why can't other minnows?
This season it is likely to be a league of no single outstanding team, but numerous good ones in transition. And that's all the better for a diverse and open title race.
Ranieri has the rare luxury of being a manager allowed to tell his own supporters at the start of the season that it won't be as good as the last one. Several bookmakers have the champions as more likely to go down than retain the title.
Both Manchester clubs and Chelsea would struggle to be worse than last season, but given Leicester have only lost N'Golo Kante, seem to have bought well and, for now, have managed to keep hold of Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez, there's no reason why at least a top-six finish shouldn't be obtainable. Juggling domestic exertions with European ones will be Ranieri's biggest headache.
The confluence of trends coursing through the Premier League at present makes it irresistible. It has become the league of the Galactico coach. It has become the league of choice for Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and Chelsea boss Antonio Conte. It has become the league of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It has become the league of the world's most expensive player. It has become the league where a team can finish 14th one season and win it the next.
Maybe saying only seven teams can chase for the title is ungenerous?
Gone are the days when the title race was a two-horse race, and jockeying for a UEFA Champions League spot only ever involved four jockeys.
Talk of austerity has been banned in most boardrooms, with a good number of Premier League clubs spending their portion of an eye-watering television deal as though beholden to the same stipulations as those outlined in Brewster’s Millions. The film's premise is Brewster is challenged to either take $1 million upfront, or spend $30 million within 30 days to inherit $300 million.
It's unconfirmed at the time of going to press whether the chief executive who sanctioned a £28 million bid for Yannick Bolasie is in fact Richard Pryor. The game will be up when Sean Dyche announces he is to quit Burnley to run for Mayor of New York City.
West Ham United spent the summer bidding on half of Europe's eligible strikers, hell-bent on smashing their transfer record. Rumour has it they were so desperate that they knocked on Marco Boogers' caravan door, albeit to no avail. Eventually they got the record they were after, paying £20.5 million for Swansea City's Andre Ayew, in one of those rare transfers where it's difficult to work out who got the better end of the deal, if anyone.
New Everton boss Ronald Koeman has already reinvested around £12 million of the John Stones windfall in acquiring Swansea City captain and talisman Ashley Williams. Without wishing to be churlish about Stones' potential, which is considerable, Everton will now almost certainly have a stronger defence this season than last.
After a summer of spending across the whole division that has evoked the last days of Rome, at least half of those players transferred must be thinking, "I'm not worth half that (but the signing on fee was nice)."
As Woody Allen once sagely remarked, "confidence is what you have before you understand the problem", but given football looks unlikely to get back into bed with real life anytime soon, we may as well enjoy the boom years over worrying obsessively about those of the bust variety.
New boys Hull City and Burnley have been the anomalies. The former have endured perhaps the worst preparations to a Premier League season in the history of the competition, while the latter have not bothered buying any new players but have invested significantly in some slightly taller floodlights.
Pogba's £89 million transfer to Manchester United seemed to be a watershed moment not just in terms of price, but how it was conducted. The last time a British club broke the world transfer record no expense was spared, as two giant inflatable Newcastle Brown Ale bottles were inflated and placed either side of Alan Shearer. That's show business. Job done.
Twenty years on, the Pogba deal had the strange of air of scripted reality to it, football's Made in Manchester, if you will. All summer, it was impossible to differentiate between what was genuine and what had been the result of brainstorming in a marketing meeting.
His sponsor Adidas hinted what was going on via a smart viral marketing campaign, while Pogba's Instagram account was a source of daily sleuth work. UK grime artist Stormzy inadvertently broke news of the deal being done, after posting on his Facebook page an Adidas video he starred in wearing a United shirt with Pogba on its back.
In an editorial meeting, I asked a colleague, "What's a Stormzy?" I guess I'm probably not the key demographic Adidas are targeting.
Pogba arrived at Old Trafford for his medical in a red and black Chevrolet Camaro, the latest model of the club's shirt sponsor. United's Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat went into overdrive with a #POGBACK hashtag, as pictures soon emerged of the record breaker wearing the club's new home and away strips. It seems Pogba was working hard to repay his fee back from day one.
When so much has happened over a period of breathless activity, it's hard to know where and how to make sense of it. Given the propensity of Premier League boardrooms to act with undue haste with regards managers, perhaps it is the dugout-dwellers who should be the starting point, given a handful may be gone before Christmas.
Earlier in the summer, I wrote an opinion piece on whether this was a golden age for Premier League managers. It's hard to conclude anything other than in the affirmative.
In any normal pre-season, Guardiola pitching up at Manchester City would have rendered any other story redundant. The back pages of every newspaper in the country may as well have been printed in sky blue. The force of personality of a man who, in the words of Xavi—according to the Guardian—is "a purist, a radical," draws people to him as a lit light bulb in a darkened room does flies.
When a player who probably hasn't misplaced a pass since being a teenager in a Barcelona discotheque calls someone a purist, it would be contrary for contrary's sake not to take his word for it.
For the first few weeks of the summer, the sight of Guardiola on the training ground was enough to reduce even the most measured supporter/journalist into the footballing equivalent of a Belieber or One Directioner (hand on heart, I had to look these monikers up). No act declares genius more than the placing of cones on grass.
Even a non-story of banning pizza was reported by many outlets as being a rare, candid insight into the gospel according to Guardiola. The way Gael Clichy told it with such reverence, it was as though Guardiola had gathered his flock around him to reveal he was the site foreman on the Pyramids of Giza job, as opposed to telling professional athletes to stop eating stuff that makes them fat.
The arrival of Mourinho in Manchester has not put paid to this microscopic analysis of his every move entirely, but it has slowed it considerably.
On a personal level, Guardiola is probably dreading bumping into his bete noire Mourinho in a city that can feel like a village compared to London. Professionally, though, it's an absolute godsend.
Mourinho's presence has shifted the focus significantly. While the Portuguese has already indulged his almost pathological predilection for mind games by lobbing verbal grenades in the direction of Arsenal's Arsene Wenger, Jurgen Klopp of Liverpool, and even to be fair Guardiola in his opening press conference, City's manager has quietly gone about reinvigorating his new squad to the tune of eight new players for around £150 million, without anyone noticing.
Paying the best part of £50 million for Stones has attracted plenty of comment, but otherwise City's transfer business has been conducted without fuss or criticism. Stones will join Ilkay Gundogan (when fit), Leroy Sane and Nolito in being expected to make an immediate impact in Guardiola's first team.
United's acquisitions of Pogba, Ibrahimovic, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and the raw but exciting Eric Bailly are about adding dynamism and star quality to a squad that had lost both its direction and lustre under first David Moyes, and then Louis van Gaal. City's buys have been more motivated by a desire to have the option of being able to veer away from the favoured 4-2-3-1 formation of Guardiola's predecessors, to a 4-3-3, maybe even incorporating a back three.
Guardiola knows he can make the difference on the training ground; it's where he is happiest. For Mourinho, the pitch is the most important place to win battles, but not the only arena to demonstrate professional prowess.
It would be hard to improve his capacity to rile other managers, with his early days in Manchester hinting his Machiavellian streak will be employed just as readily as it was at previous clubs. Sir Bobby Charlton is already practicing disguising a grimace with a polite smile.
Mourinho is the master of taking the focus off his players, like Sir Alex Ferguson in many respects. Guardiola wants it on his; the team is the star. His role is more that of the puppet master who attempts to make the audience so engrossed by what is going in front of them, they no longer see the strings, or wonder who is pulling them.
In the capital, Conte seems to be getting a free hit in comparison. Despite being bestowed with the same set of players that won the Premier League title just 12 months ago, without the distraction of European football, and armed with a war chest that has allowed him to spend over £60 million on acquiring two new players in Michy Batshuayi and Kante, the forthcoming campaign is seen by many as likely to be one of transition.
Roman Abramovich tends to like his new managers to oversee a transition from crap to champions, so it will be interesting to see what Chelsea's owner deems a success after last season's abject defence of the title left them with a 10th-place finish.
Dugout Galacticos Guardiola (six), Mourinho (eight) and Conte (three) boast a combined 17 league titles across five different leagues, along with four Champions League wins.
The new boys are only half the story.
Klopp is building something at Liverpool, and it's gathering momentum by the day. The German's methods need a club's supporters to buy into them almost as much as the players. He evolves football clubs, not just football teams. In Liverpool, he's probably popular enough to evolve a whole city. At least the red side of it.
It's a folly to glean too much from pre-season friendlies, but if you're going to take any team down to Chinatown and leave them begging for mercy, it may as well be Barcelona. Sadio Mane looks all his money at £36 million, but he knows the Premier League and has made an eye-catching early impression.
Like Mourinho, Klopp's not a huge fan of Guardiola either, so expect the odd tete-a-tete when the two meet on the touchline.
At Tottenham, similar acts of genuflection are afforded to Mauricio Pochettino. His vision is clear. He knows what he wants, and how to go about getting it. However, the departure of the club's head of recruitment Paul Mitchell has left Pochettino "very disappointed," per the Guardian, amid a quiet summer in the transfer market.
A gruelling UEFA Champions League campaign Pochettino has to work into his schedule will be punishing, especially given the high-octane brand of football his team espouses. The two additions made to date in Victor Wanyama and Vincent Janssen don't look adequate. The latter is little more than an educated punt given his background is scoring freely in the Eredivisie, not always a feat that translates well to the Premier League.
On a more positive note, the early indications are his England contingent have regrouped and refocused; with the fear being they may have suffered a collective hangover after the abject misery of the Euros. Pochettino will likely just shrug and point to a recent 6-1 victory over Inter Milan.
As Wenger has pointedly mentioned on occasion, Arsenal finished above Tottenham last season. He was thinking of getting a T-shirt made up saying as much but baulked at the printing costs. Too high in this market apparently.
It would appear that even in what looks likely to be his last season in north London, he's unwilling to throw caution to the wind financially. There have been murmurs recently of an outlandish bid for Bayern Munich's Robert Lewandowski, per the Guardian. Talk of Jonny Evans seems more realistic. It's like asking your mum to bring you a cream cake home, only for her to come back with a stem of broccoli.
So far, the only serious money Arsenal have spent is £29 million on Swiss holding midfielder Granit Xhaka. Be still, my beating heart.
Wenger's comments on Pogba have been interesting. Initially, he labelled the fee United paid as "completely crazy," per the Independent. It earned a stinging rebuke from Mother Teresa Mourinho, who labelled him and Klopp, who had similar misgivings, "not ethical," according to the Evening Standard.
All of which seemed a little strong from a man who once poked a rival coach in the eye and allegedly hid in a laundry basket to avoid a UEFA sanction.
Wenger had changed his mind by Wednesday, per Sky News: "The value of a player is dependent on his talent, the expected strengthening of the team, his age and of course his resale value. When you speak about Pogba, it ticks all these boxes."
In fairness to Wenger, he's been responsible for perhaps the only two world-class players to have joined the Premier League in their pomp in recent years. The unqualified successes of both Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez, both of whom are seemingly stalling on new contracts, makes it all the more perplexing as to why Wenger won't buy big more often.
Could this softening of stance on Pogba be Wenger's way of avoiding accusations of hypocrisy if he makes a Galactico signing of his own?
Apologies, it's hard not to get carried away when the new Premier League season is a matter of hours hence.