Among the post-match celebratory scenes after Chelsea’s 3-0 win over Middlesbrough on Monday night was this bit with Antonio Conte’s wife and daughter (and brother Daniele?), which included, of all things, a cute cartoony canvas of Conte (sorry, The ‘Confather’) and the players.
Antonio Conte's daughter pays tribute to father with 'The Confather' canvas after Middlesbrough win https://t.co/2yan1GiQqY pic.twitter.com/CynGcC0EVv
— Mirror Football (@MirrorFootball) May 8, 2017
So that’s all well and good — also, hurray for Conte family being there, since they are so often the focal point of transfer rumors! — but where did said piece of artwork came from (surely, they didn’t make it themselves) and how did they get it into the stadium (banners and such things are tightly regulated)?
Employing our Sherlockian powers (i.e. Google), we set out to solve this mystery.
Clue no.1: Sky Sports’ intro to the second half (h/t: /r/chelsefc) which was a bit more extended than the world feed. As Martin Tyler recounts the anecdote of Conte joking that he’s already got two English Queens in his life (his wife’s name translates to Elizabeth, his daughter’s to Victoria), we see Chelsea’s Gary Staker on hand to deliver it to them.
Clue no.2: The bag in which the print was delivered is shown briefly. It appears to have a business name ‘IC Soccer’ and a blurry URL printed on it. IC Soccer is tremendously vague, but after a few guesses, the web address turns out to be http://hkjai.com, a business in Hong Kong that seems to specialize in this sort of artwork, not just for Chelsea but for all teams.
Sure enough, after going to their Chelsea product page, here is the canvas print in all its glory. They also have prints of Stamford Bridge, a take-off of Toy Story about ‘Kanté ... Kanté everywhere ...’ and a few other things. There’s also a long discussion thread about it on their Facebook page.
Pretty cool!