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Six of the world’s most successful managers are fighting tooth and nail for the Premier League title.
Here, Sportsmail analyses their fascinating tactical and mental battle for supremacy…
If you change the way a team play, it has to work or you put yourself under severe pressure. Louis van Gaal’s attempts to play with a back three at Manchester United last season did not come off and when he abandoned it, he looked foolish.
So Antonio Conte’s success in implementing a 3-4-2-1 formation at Chelsea represents a tactical masterpiece of recent Premier League history.
He has breathed life into a set of players who looked weary under Jose Mourinho just a year ago.
Liverpool, on the other hand, are perhaps the best team to watch in the Premier League and that owes much to the high-energy, aggressive style of football implemented by Jurgen Klopp.
Liverpool deserve to be challenging again but can they find another way when things are not going their way? And will they keep enough clean sheets? Teams who lift the title will win their share of games 1-0. Liverpool have done that just twice in the league in the past calendar year.
JURGEN KLOPP – LIVERPOOL
Age: 49 Salary: £7.5m
League titles won: 2
Ladyman’s January target: A defender
… Ben Davies (Tottenham)
ARSENE WENGER – ARSENAL
Age: 67 Salary: £8.3m
League titles won: llll 4
Ladyman’s January target: A defender
… John Terry (Chelsea)
JOSE MOURINHO – MAN UTD
Age: 53 Salary: £15m
League titles won: 8
Ladyman’s January target: A defender
… Michael Keane (Burnley)
ANTONIO CONTE – CHELSEA
Age: 47 Salary: £6.5m
League titles won: 4
Ladyman’s January target: A striker
… Alvaro Negredo (Middlesbrough)
PEP GUARDIOLA -MAN CITY
Age: 45 Salary: £15m
League titles won: 7
Ladyman’s January target: A defender
… Virgil van Dijk (Southampton)
MAURICIO POCHETTINO – SPURS
Age: 44 Salary: £5.5m
League titles won: 0
Ladyman’s January target: A striker
… Jermain Defoe (Sunderland).
The way Pep Guardiola has tried to play in England is no surprise and 10 wins on the bounce convinced some that his Manchester City team would stroll to the title.
But as the season has rolled on, Guardiola has discovered that here in ultra-competitive England you need great players — not just very good ones — to play the way he did at Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
His constant tinkering tells its own story and jettisoning Joe Hart for Claudio Bravo looks a mistake.
Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal are great to watch, score great goals and can beat anyone on their day. On the other hand they are unable to turn possession into big leads, can be mentally suspect and are likely to produce the odd horror result.
The conundrum for Mauricio Pochettino at Tottenham this season has been how to find goals when Harry Kane is not playing or not scoring — and how to bring physicality to the centre of a team that wilted in the final stages last season.
So far, Tottenham look a less convincing version of the 2015-16 model. The fundamentals of Pochettino’s playing style remain sound but his squad needs more depth.
Manchester United fans hopeful of a return to relevance under Jose Mourinho may not be disappointed but with the Portuguese in charge the front-foot football of yore will soon be a distant memory.
United have what they hired, a coach who will make his team hard to beat first and build on that. It has been effective recently. Michael Carrick’s return to the team has helped. Mourinho has been big enough to swallow his pride on that one.
Guardiola arrived keen to leave his mark on a City squad that had grown lazy under Manuel Pellegrini. His exclusion of Yaya Toure was brave and paid off because it delivered a message that even superstars would not be tolerated if they did not toe the line. It also set a talented player a challenge to which, ultimately, he has responded.
Few used to man-manage better than Mourinho but his second spell at Chelsea and his early days at United have left questions about his methods.
On one hand, he has played Henrikh Mkhitaryan beautifully and the Armenian looks set to make a real contribution, while Mourinho’s suggestion that Luke Shaw and Chris Smalling are not willing to put their bodies on the line remains a staggering piece of misjudgment.
In contrast, without Diego Costa, Chelsea will not win the Premier League and it seems as though Conte has realised this.
His handling of Costa — a strategy that has included the occasional moment of indulgence — seems to have turned the 28-year-old from last season’s pantomime villain back into a proper footballer.
At Liverpool, Klopp arguably threw goalkeeper Loris Karius into his team before he was ready but was brave enough to pull him out again when the time was right.
Wenger has always believed it will be Arsenal’s values, rather than money, that will persuade Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil to sign new deals.
One can only hope he does not really believe that because Arsenal have the capacity to pay players the going rate these days and this is an occasion when Wenger must insist on it. Too many great players have walked away in recent times.
The summer signing of Moussa Sissoko has not overly impressed his new team-mates at Tottenham so Pochettino’s decision to denigrate the Frenchman’s contribution recently was perhaps not as big a gamble as it appeared.
Criticising a popular player is one thing, digging out somebody who is obviously not cutting it quite another.
Similarly for the Tottenham manager, the decision to recruit Vincent Janssen as competition for Kane has not worked either. The 22-year-old has scored one league goal so far — and that was a penalty.
It is different at United. They spent badly in the three summers prior to Mourinho’s arrival and that is one of the reasons they finished last season at such a low ebb.
But each of the three big names he has brought in — Mkhitaryan, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba — have contributed something. Pogba in particular will prove a United star in years to come.
For Chelsea, N’Golo Kante was a straightforward summer buy and the Frenchman is slowly proving his worth in midfield. The David Luiz transfer, on the other hand, seemed ridiculous but now looks eminently sensible.
Wenger also needed to bolster his back line and signed German central defender Shkodran Mustafi.
The Frenchman has not always been the best at identifying nuts-and-bolts defenders so Arsenal fans hoped this would be one to buck the trend of disappointments in that position.
The 24-year-old was doing well enough until suffering a hamstring injury. Arsenal lost the two games he missed subsequently.
Liverpool needed a new keeper but it is not yet clear whether Klopp has bought the right one.
Elsewhere, Sadio Mane has been good enough to be seriously missed when he disappears to the Africa Cup of Nations next month, while defender Ragnar Klavan needs to find greater consistency.
Forgetting the fact that City’s best goalkeeper is sitting in Turin, Guardiola has recruited soundly. John Stones will be one of the Premier League’s best defenders when City find him a partner.
Ilkay Gundogan was bringing much to the team prior to recent injury and Leroy Sane looks a real talent.
