The Leicester City effect is in full working order. Wes Morgan placing two giant paws on the Premier League trophy before lifting it above his head was a "ground zero" moment for English football that was always likely to see a recalibration of the national game.
Leicester winning the Premier League was a Moneyball occurrence even Hollywood would have balked at for being unrealistic had it been pitched as anything other than a biopic. Brad Pitt would probably have passed, even if the fantasy genre is currently enjoying a golden era in cinema.
Billy Beane fashioning Oakland Athletics into a competitive Major League baseball team against a backdrop of crippling financial disadvantage is one thing; Claudio Ranieri assembling a title-winning side in his first season at Leicester another altogether.
Oakland forcing the New York Yankees to peer down from their perch was enough to make the Moneyball movie. Leicester knocked them clean off it.
The Foxes cocking a snook at one of sport's most rigid power structures is the equivalent of a tramp rocking up at a Michelin star restaurant demanding the best table in the house and insisting on drinking their own wine, straight from the bottle.
Since the Premier League's inception in 1992, prior to Leicester gatecrashing the most exclusive of parties, 16 of 23 titles were shared between twin behemoths Manchester United and Arsenal. Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea and Manchester City were the only other clubs to have gained entrance to a closed shop that opens its doors only to those who understand that if you have to ask the price you probably can't afford it.
Leicester didn't need a sugar daddy, even if the excessively churlish claim the club's Thai owners are precisely that.
For the most part they achieved the impossible with journeymen and nearly men, non-leaguers and lower leaguers, grafters and drifters, bandy-legged wingers and metronome midfielders, an old-school back-four and a one-man wrecking ball up top. All fuelled by pizza and espresso, overseen by a manager who method acted his avuncular role to the extent he was still undecided on whether Leicester were genuine contenders when being showered with champagne.
Leicester winning the Premier League title was one of those rare occasions when sport transcended itself to become something significant in a wider context.
To dare to dream no longer seemed a wistful strapline for the type of self-help book that more often induces self-loathing than any real enlightenment. This was not a shaggy dog story, but a tale of an underdog taking a p--s against the lamppost of moneyed entitlement and getting away with it.
Who hasn't dreamed of doing the same?
At the tail end of last season, Alan Pardew was asked about the Leicester effect, as though the only requirement needed to be a plus-size model is a healthy appetite.
"We all have to sit down after what Leicester have done and think about how to go forward, because for chairmen, chief executives and football club boards, it has changed the concept of what it is possible to achieve," he said, per the Guardian's Paul Wilson.
"At a club of our size you've got to think: 'OK, why didn't we do it? Why haven't Watford done it, or can Bournemouth do it?' You see something happen like Leicester and it's natural to want to follow that model, but it might not work for us."
The American writer and professional bon vivant Gore Vidal once said, "every time a friend succeeds something inside me dies." It's possible to detect more than a hint of quiet disappointment in Pardew's words, too.
It's noticeable how he lists chairmen, chief executives and club boards as having altered perceptions, but not managers. He has certainly proved prescient.
That's not to say Pardew was sacked by Crystal Palace for failing to "do a Leicester”—his dismissal was hardly a "football's gone mad moment”—but there is definitely a foreboding sense (at least among managers) that ensuring a football club exists at about the right level is no longer enough.
Horizons have been extended in boardrooms that even in normal circumstances have a flaky relationship with patience. Treading water is the new drowning. P45s are more often thrown than floats.
Still, to take a cursory look at the Premier League table and the clear re-establishment of a hegemonic order—especially when allied to the fact Ranieri's side have accrued 21 points this season, which is only just over half the 40 they had on the board at the same stage last term—could be enough to file "Leicester effect" next to "staycation" (a holiday spent in one's home country rather than abroad) on the bonfire pile of mind-numbingly stupid, infantile phrases that should never have left the mouth of the muttonhead who coined it.
It's tempting to shrug and say "back to normal" when looking at a table that reads: Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City, Arsenal, Manchester United. Yet to do so would be to grossly underestimate just how remarkably well the top six are playing. It's not unfeasible any of them could win this season's Premier League. And that's pretty much unprecedented.
That five of the six managers overseeing the leading pack, with Jurgen Klopp the exception, have come in for criticism at some point or other over a season just past the halfway mark says much about English football's insatiable appetite for delivering black-and-white verdicts after each and every game.
While talk over the summer was of stratospheric television money shrinking the disparity between Premier League members, the reality is more low-to-mid ranking clubs can now afford to pay meteoric wages to mediocre players. English football may be awash with money, but there's an argument it's a case of all fur coat and no knickers for the rising middle classes.
For idealists and dreamers, though, Leicester euphoria was topped up over the summer by the exploits of Iceland and Wales at Euro 2016. Even when the comedown kicked in they failed to notice English football serving a huge plate of red herrings at breakfast.
The Leicester effect is real all right, but it's only really relevant to the ruling elite. As a wake-up call it was the equivalent of dispensing with an alarm clock in favour of having an icy glass of water thrown on your face each morning. There was no messing around over the summer in the ivory towers.
Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea each appointed one of best managers in the world, with Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte undisputedly upgrades on Manuel Pellegrini, Louis van Gaal and Guus Hiddink, respectively.
Each were armed with handsome war chests, with Mourinho adding stardust in the form of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba in a bid to restore Old Trafford to the Theatre of Dreams after three seasons in which Theatre of Daydreams would have been a more apt moniker.
Guardiola was less showy with his acquisitions but no less expensive, while Conte convinced Leicester's most important player N'Golo Kante to leave the champions for a club that had just finished 10th.
Squads that once looked shallow can now regularly only find places on the bench for players of the ilk of Cesc Fabregas, John Terry, Branislav Ivanovic, Michy Batshuayi, Yaya Toure, Leroy Sane, Antony Martial, Marcus Rashford and Wayne Rooney.
Liverpool's acquisition of Sadio Mane has gone better than either the player or Klopp could have anticipated, with north London duo Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal perhaps the only clubs in the top six who will look back at their summer recruitment with heavy hearts. It's fair to say you would struggle to recoup £75 million for Granit Xhaka and Moussa Sissoko on the open market—unless China came calling.
Every manager in the Premier League will have at some point over the summer been told they could do a Leicester. In idle moments they may even have daydreamed of it themselves. That's not real pressure, though. Every fat kid that has ever earned a swimming badge has been told they could make the Olympics one day.
"Could" is a kind verb, denoting possibility. It's "should" that breaks managers, all of us, into a cold sweat. Each of those in charge of a top-six club will have been told they should be challenging for the Premier League title. By fans and board members alike.
English football has indeed changed since Leicester won the Premier League, with the main difference being excuses at the top have now been rendered obsolete. It's as though the Leicester effect has shamed the big boys into consistency.
How can either of the Manchester clubs cite being in a period of transition as a reason for a lack of silverware when Leicester City won the Premier League by 10 points?
How can Arsenal get their accountant to release a statement proclaiming the healthiest spreadsheets in England as being an excuse for falling short when Leicester City won the Premier League by 10 points?
How can Tottenham and Liverpool be happy being perpetual works in progress (since 1961 and 1990, respectively) when Leicester City won the Premier League by 10 points?
How can Conte complain of having to sort out the mess he inherited from Mourinho when Leicester City won the Premier League by 10 points?
In fairness, they have responded emphatically.
Christmas trees are still cluttering back yards waiting to be tipped; yet already the top six are out of sight.
Nine points separate Manchester United in sixth from seventh placed Everton; 15 points are between Mourinho's side and Stoke City in 11th. At the same 20-game mark last season, there was a just a point between West Ham United in sixth and Crystal Palace in seventh. Just five points was the difference between sixth and 11th.
To put into context just how dominant the top six have been this season, they have accumulatively accrued 257 points. That's some 35 points up on last term. It's a tally that betters the top-six equivalents for the 2014/15 season by 25 points, 2013/14 by 11 points and 2012/13 by 26 points.
Prior to the weekend's FA Cup exertions, the current top six's combined form over the previous five games in the league is 24 wins, four losses and two draws from 30 matches. Of those losses and draws, only Liverpool's 2-2 draw with Sunderland, Arsenal's defeat to Everton and the Gunners' 3-3 draw at Bournemouth were not against fellow top-six sides.
How the top six fare against one another in the second half of the season will go a long way to deciding the title, as pointed out this week by Guardiola.
After his impromptu post-match rendition of the Arctic Monkeys' "Mardy Bum" following Manchester City's victory over Burnley last weekend, when he answered routine questions as though being impertinently quizzed on his sexual peccadilloes, Guardiola has been on the charm offensive. Quite the change of tact given when he's at his grouchiest it's hard not to recall Monty Python's Life of Brian: "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"
English football's time-old obsession with being "more competitive" than its European counterparts has finally been validated by the Spaniard, who has previously rolled his eyes at Sky Sports' attempts to coax him into saying the Premier League is well hard each and every time they have a microphone within a mile of him.
By his own admission, a start to the season in which City won their first six Premier League games seems a long time ago, per the Guardian's Paul Wilson.
One team is already out in front and there are six all fighting for four positions, if not the title itself.
[...]
This time they are all playing well and the English league is showing why it is different to Germany or Spain. In those countries you have maybe two or three big teams each season. Here there are six and they are all good.
In the second half of the season I think it is likely the title will be decided by results when top-six teams play each other, always assuming they continue to keep beating the sides lower down the league.
Leicester were second at the 20-game point last season with 40 points. This season, that would only be enough to nudge Manchester United out of sixth position. They won the league with a points tally of 81, with the 15 titles before that secured with an average of 87.3 points. If they carry on at their current rate, Chelsea are on course to challenge the record 95 points they racked up to win the 2004/05 title.
It's hard to say "in any other season" without sounding as though you're sucking a Werther's Original and the only footwear you possess are slippers, but in any other season, Manchester United embarking on a six-match winning run (they haven't been beaten since October 23) would surely have got them into the thick of the title race. As it stands they are not making plans for Thursday nights next season. They trail Chelsea by 10 points.
Similarly, Liverpool and Tottenham can both boast having lost only two of 20 Premier League matches to date this season. Neither tops the table. Spurs have won their last five in the league (scoring 15 and conceding three), while Liverpool had won their previous four games before slipping up in a 2-2 draw with Sunderland at the Stadium of Light. The top six are playing so well it felt like a cataclysmic result. It really wasn't.
Tottenham's run to third has coincided with elimination from the Champions League. It's unlikely to have been a coincidence.
Chelsea's absence of any European commitments whatsoever this season has meant extra time on the training field, and it has largely been credited with Conte having them as finely tuned as a grand piano. It's unlikely they could have so seamlessly switched to three at the back if juggling midweek sojourns across the continent.
Spurs ending Chelsea's 13-game winning run last weekend was a slither of light for those chasing the table toppers. Roman Abramovich will be content enough with Conte masterminding an astonishing 26-point positive swing on the same juncture last season.
Like Conte, Klopp has revelled in being able to work with his players more regularly this season due to not being in Europe. Liverpool have 14 points more than they had at the same stage last term.
The British economy may be heading to hell on a hard cart, but at least football's Brexiters are feeling the benefit.
In a season where six will most definitely not go into four Champions League places, the temptation for Tottenham and Manchester United will be to give Europe's ugly step sister due care and consideration in the hope it may lead to Cinderella. Winning the Europa League is worth a Champions League place, but it may be easier to ditch the charade and concentrate on ensuring domestic exertions are good enough to seal the deal.
As it stands, all of the top six are on course to better last season's points tallies, with the exception of Arsenal, who are currently a point off the pace they set last term when leading the table with 42 points from 20 matches.
The prize for two of the six will be a Europa League place, which is bit like saying the prize for losing a winning lottery ticket is the knowledge money can't buy happiness.
It's scant consolation, but that's the Leicester effect for you.
All statistics worked out via the official Premier League website