The most intelligent thing Antonio Conte managed to do last season was change his formation to one no other team in the league seemed to expect.

Perhaps that was a master stroke. The other explanation is that most teams in the league simply didn’t do their homework. Conte’s Juventus, not to mention his Italy side which performed above expectations at Euro 2016, played regularly with back three formations. Why wouldn’t Chelsea?

Perhaps received wisdom told most Premier League observers that such a formation would be picked apart by the blood and thunder of the English top flight. Others thought Chelsea simply didn’t have the players – after all, Conte inherited a side who won the league under Jose Mourinho, but who played a rigid 4-2-3-1 system where anyone paying attention could probably have named the entire starting XI for every game, such was the continuity.

But then, just the very next season, Leicester City proved that following received wisdom isn’t necessarily a good thing when it comes to winning the Premier League.

Rather than compete with a midfield three, the Foxes under Claudio Ranieri played a 4-4-2 system which seemed charmingly anachronistic, just like their manager. It’s not the sort of formation that many of the top sides will ape very often this season, but when Conte moved for Danny Drinkwater on deadline day, Chelsea seemed to be attempting to bring the old band back together: the former Fox will join up with his title-winning teammate N’Golo Kante, presumably to reprise a similar partnership in some games this season.

It’s no secret that Chelsea needed a midfielder. Getting rid of Nemanja Matic and Nathaniel Chalobah left them slightly short in that department, and Tiemoue Bakayoko was the only incoming player before the deadline. And so even if the three-cap England international wasn’t on the shortlist specifically because of his partnership with Kante, he may well have been on it simply because he’s a central midfielder.

And yet, even if it would be incredibly odd for Chelsea to revert to a Claudio Ranieri 4-4-2, there’s an overlooked tactical element of that system which has crept into English football over the last few years, rendering it slightly less archaic than it might sometimes appear.

Under Conte, Chelsea’s back three allows the team to play with only two central midfield players rather than the now-standard three. The idea is that, with a back three, you can almost play as if the defensive midfield anchorman has dropped from the middle line to the back one, between the two centre-backs, forming a back three. It leaves you with a two-man midfield.

The explanation – only half jokingly – for why Conte managed to win the league with only two box-to-box midfielders in his starting XI and with a whole front three up ahead of them, was that Kante allowed him to play that system because he did the midfield work of two men. The jokes about being everywhere, seemingly backed up by Kante’s heatmaps went viral, and it was perhaps the biggest con of the season. Kante, for all his incredible qualities, is but one man: the secret is that the extra help comes behind him in the form of David Luiz.

And so the signing of Drinkwater would seem to show that Conte understands that his side’s advantage last season is still reasonably misunderstood. Few other teams in the league now play with two central midfielders in as pronounced a way as Chelsea. Even Tottenham Hotspur, who do sometimes play a similar back three formation, end up with Christian Eriksen and Dele Alli playing in attacking midfield roles in a way that Eden Hazard and Pedro don’t.

The game had moved away from midfield partnerships, viewing them as inefficient and piling too much pressure onto the pair in the engine room. The Gerrard/Lampard debate of the Sven-Goran Eriksson era of English football shows this up magnificently: if one went forward, the other had to stay, they said, and neither were defensive midfielders.

What Chelsea have done is place Luiz behind the two, allowing them to do their jobs more efficiently. Now, Conte is bringing back together the most effective midfield two of the last decade, safe in the knowledge that the last two champions have played almost exclusively with formations with two-men midfields, whilst few other clubs have been able to make that work in the same time.

If Chelsea were already ahead of the rest last season, this new signing – arguably the Blues’ least glamorous of the summer – looks to have brought them yet another step further on.