"Football is a simple game - players make it complicated"

This isn't to say tactics don't matter; just that they don't always matter the most. Despite what the media - and certain coaches - insist, results aren't always decided by a clever formation or ingenious ploy from the wizard in the dugout.

A rule of thumb in business is that a manager only controls 10 per cent of the variables that determine success or failure. The weather, pitch and officials are just three variables the coach can't do a lot about. And there are so many other factors a coach can only partially influence: club culture, injuries, the barely fathomed mystery of form, the club's infrastructure. If you miss out on a star player because your club faxed its bid rather than picking up the phone - yes, this happened - you can't rectify that.

Coaches probably like talking about tactics because it fosters the morale-boosting belief that they can shape their destiny. If they can drill systems, formations and moves into their players, they can reduce the risk of defeat - and unemployment. As bystanders, we love talking tactics because it feeds our secret conviction that we'd do a better job in the dugout. Besides, it doesn't require rocket science to waffle about inside-out wingers, Brazil's diagonal 4-2-3-1 and whether Luciano Spalletti's Roma really reinvented Total Football. (Not everyone who gushes about Spalletti's Roma is a tactical bore, but all tactical bores can explain, in stultifying detail, why Spalletti's Roma were so innovative.)

It is reassuring for us to believe football is a predictable business of cause and effect. And
as we can always find a tactical explanation for a win, draw or defeat, we ignore the slender margin of success. When Inter beat Barcelona in last year's Champions League semi-final by protecting their area with a determination reminiscent of the Alamo's defenders, Mourinho was hailed a tactical genius. His plan worked. But if Yaya Toure hadn't been harshly penalised for a handball when Bojan scored in injury time, Inter would have lost on away goals.

Terry Venables liked to remark that "football is a simple game," before adding the caveat, "It's the players who make it complicated." Players complicate football in many ways. They may misunderstand instructions, lie about their fitness or just take it easy. And because footballers need an ego to survive, they will often depart from Plan A and take the initiative, ignoring furious reprimands from the dugout by, as Ray Wilkins would say, "copping a deaf 'un".

Sometimes, they complicate football by being geniuses. When Sven-Goran Eriksson started coaching he set out to be "as hard as nails on tactical discipline" but, managing Roberto Mancini at Sampdoria in the 1990s, he changed his mind. "If I had been a strict disciplinarian with Mancini," he said, "he would have been a poor player. He could find solutions on the pitch you couldn't find in any textbook."

The cult of the coach, and their presumed mastery of the arcane mysteries of football tactics, means fewer players are trusted to find their solutions. Messi's marginalisation in South Africa was a sublime example of this ridiculous tendency. It was his peculiar fate to be converted into a kind of playmaker for the good of the team (and especially Carlos Tevez) by Diego Maradona, who had won the World Cup, in part, because entire teams were built around his miraculous genius. One of the roots of Rooney's discontent may
be the realisation that he may never taste the freedom on the pitch that his boyhood idol,
El Diego, enjoyed only 20 years ago. In South Africa, the English looked to Rooney for imaginative magic, forgetting that players like him are schooled in obedience most of the time.

If tactics trump all, football does become a kind of number's game, paving the way for zealots like Wing Commander Charles Reep, the self-appointed football analyst who 'proved' through statistics that though England lost 6-3 to Hungary in 1953, the idea that the Mighty Magyars were the better side was a "myth". Reep's analysis proved 70 to 80 per cent of goals come from moves of three passes or fewer. As Barney Ronay points out in The Manager, Reep had to include direct free-kicks to come up with this figure and based his analysis purely on English football. But Reep's statistical certainty was appealing to managers like Graham Taylor and may explain why, as England boss, he drafted in 78 players in three and a half years but not Chris Waddle, who very nearly won the European Cup with Marseille.

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