Signing of the season?

N’Golo Kante was beaten to the PFA and FWA Player of the Year awards by Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy, but the £5.6m Frenchman is undoubtedly the signing of the season. Nick Wright examines his pivotal role in Leicester’s extraordinary title triumph…

Claudio Ranieri got just about everything right during Leicester’s relentless charge towards the Premier League title, but his best decision of the season came before a ball had even been kicked.

It was the middle of the summer transfer window and head of recruitment Steve Walsh was urging the new manager to sign an industrious little midfielder named N’Golo Kante from French side Caen. “He pushed me when I arrived here in June, and then in July,” Ranieri revealed in December. “He said ‘Kante, Claudio, Kante’. He was determined to sign him more than I was.”

Ranieri was unconvinced that Kante’s slight frame was suited to the physicality of English football, but Walsh’s persistence paid off. The £5.6m deal went under the radar in a summer of big spending up and down the Premier League, but Leicester’s new arrival immediately caught his manager’s eye.

“When I arrived my first day of training and I saw the quality of these players, I knew how good they could be,” Ranieri recalled in the Players’ Tribune last month. “This player Kante, he was running so hard that I thought he must have a pack full of batteries hidden in his shorts. He never stopped running in training.

“I had to tell him, ‘Hey, N’Golo, slow down. Slow down. Don’t run after the ball every time, okay?’ He says to me, ‘Yes, boss. Yes. Okay.’ Ten seconds later, I look over and he’s running again. I tell him, ‘One day, I’m going to see you cross the ball, and then finish the cross with a header yourself’.”

Slowing down is an alien concept to Kante, whose phenomenal engine has been the driving force behind Leicester’s title …

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