jsonlite: toJSON on object from Python's requests package leads to arrays, direct call to API does not

Question

I'm playing around with some Fantasy Premier League data available through an API.

Desired result, nested dataframes, is achieved when running the following code:

library(jsonlite)
url <- "https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/bootstrap-static"
fromJSON(url)

More data is obtainable if you log in. I can't get the httr package working with the API, read somewhere that it stopped working after an SSL change a while back.

I'm able to log in and fetch data by going through Python, but I end up with different json. The code below illustrates the problem. After going through Python, values are placed in arrays (note the brackets in the bottom json output):

library(tidyverse)
library(jsonlite)

# No authentication

# API url
bootstrapUrl <- "https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/bootstrap-static"

# Desired result
fromJSON(bootstrapUrl) %>% 
  toJSON() %>% 
  substr(., 1, 100)
#> {"phases":[{"id":1,"name":"Overall","num_winners":3,"start_event":1,"stop_event":38},{"id":2,"name":


# With authentication

library(reticulate)

use_python("/usr/bin/python3.6")
source_python("~/Projects/pl/api_request.py")
### api_request.py
#
#  import requests
#  
#  def py_get_json(subdomain):
#    session = requests.session()
#    apiUrl = "https://fantasy.premierleague.com/drf/"
#    loginUrl = 'https://users.premierleague.com/accounts/login/'
#    payload = {
#     'password': '',
#     'login': '',
#     'redirect_uri': 'https://fantasy.premierleague.com/a/login',
#     'app': 'plfpl-web'
#    }
#    session.post(loginUrl, data=payload)
#    targetUrl = apiUrl + subdomain
#    
#    return session.get(targetUrl).json()
#
###

subdomain <- "bootstrap-static"
json <- py_get_json(subdomain)

json %>%
  toJSON() %>% 
  substr(., 1, 100)
#> {"phases":[{"id":[1],"name":["Overall"],"num_winners":[3],"start_event":[1],"stop_event":[38]},{"id"

I'm guessing this has to do with how the Python object is returned to R via reticulate. I'm looking for an easy fix, is there any functionality within jsonlite that can sort this out?