Cox has stressed the foreign influence during the 1990s,

with the arrival in the Premier League of Eric Cantona, Ruud Gullit and Wenger. But these developments mainly concerned individual player-positions such as the “floating attacker” or the “sweeper”, as well as changes in diet and fitness. For the most part, cohesive approaches to footballing strategy came later, with the arrival, in 2004, of Mourinho at Chelsea and Rafa Benítez at Liverpool: “the entire feel of the league changed massively overnight”, Cox told me. And while Andy Gray could be “pretty interesting”, he believes that, like many former players, he didn’t sufficiently revise his view of how the game is played – the duty of any pundit.

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A recent battleground between rigour and romanticism was the latest attempt by Manchester United to find a manager who could replicate the success of Alex Ferguson, who led the team for 26 years. Cox says he has “never read an entirely convincing account of why Ferguson was so good, and I’m not sure his players can explain it either”. Cox was similarly mystified by the decision to give Ferguson’s old job to one of his former players, Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Solskjær was initially hired, back in December 2018, as a temporary stand-in following the dismissal of Mourinho. Writing for ESPN, Cox described it as “possibly the most surprising appointment in the history of the Premier League”, and said that it was difficult to see “any genuine benefit” in the fact that Solskjær – in the favoured phrase – “knows the club”.

In the months after Solskjær joined as caretaker manager, United won some big games, notably away to Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. Graeme Souness claimed that Solskjær had “got the dressing room all playing together” and noted the team’s “winning mood”, a “different feel”, “a swagger”, the “tune” he had got from the team. In March 2019, Solskjær was given the job on a permanent basis. The team’s form since then has been patchy. But Cox said that even during the initial bounce, they hadn’t been playing “that well”. Duncan Alexander told me that after the PSG match, a lot of coverage said “they were back playing ‘the United way’ – attacking. They only took five shots in the game. People weren’t accurately reporting what was going on.” (United were knocked out in the next round.) Cox said that United's problems were “obvious" both from the data and "just watching the games".

But strict accuracy is often disparaged as a killjoy impulse – a threat to football’s natural romanticism. Duncan Alexander said that if you had pointed out that United’s initial form was “massively unsustainable”, that the data about their performances pointed to a future downturn, you were seen as “going against the heritage-monolith thing”. And even the past greatness being hankered for was being misconstrued. Cox strongly doubts the existence of a “United way”. He thinks that unlike Barcelona or Ajax or Real Madrid, United have always been flexible and pragmatic, driven by a burning desire for glory, not a “grand footballing philosophy”. When Solsjkaer was first appointed, Cox wrote that “the obsession with meeting indistinct criteria based upon revisionist views of previous successes can only hamper the club”.

***

There’s a crucial difference between Michael Cox and British film criticism in the 1960s. Though textual analysis became influential, even ubiquitous, it proved to be at odds with the direction of film practice. By the time V F Perkins was the age that Cox is now, his favoured directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Max Ophuls, were either fading or dead, and his decades as a critic coincided with the retreat from careful, calibrated technique that he called “the death of mise-en-scène”.

Cox, by contrast, has been highly fortunate in his timing: “What I like is technical football, passing football, that’s kind of always been my thing.” He said that he “absolutely loathed everything” about the flashy Real Madrid team of the early 2000s. “They sold all their defensive players, piled up on attacking players” – the so-called galactico transfer policy, which brought in David Beckham and legendary French midfielder Zinedine Zidane, who takes a bit of a beating inZonal Marking.

Although Zidane serves as the current manager of another – albeit decreasingly – star-studded Real Madrid team, that model has long since ceased to dominate. Mourinho’s successes at Porto, a comparatively small team that won the 2004 Champions League, showed that tactical nous was more important than individual virtuosity, while the appointment, in 2008, of Pep Guardiola as Barcelona manager re-introduced intricate passing (‘tiki-taka’) as well as emphasising players trained in the same youth set-up, instead of buying full-fledged superstars. Cox’s career has so far coincided with a golden age for all the qualities he prizes – intricacy, intelligence, cohesion.

Reflecting on the developments he has witnessed over the past decade, Cox said that of the two Dutch managers who worked at both Ajax and Barcelona, the charismatic Johan Cruyff had been less influential than the stony-faced Louis Van Gaal. One of the revelations of Cox’s book is that these two managers, both associated with bringing the Ajax tradition of “Total Football” – a tactical philosophy emphasising the fluidity of roles – to Barcelona, were “remarkably different in almost every respect”. Van Gaal believed in the collective, Cruyff in the individual.

At the moment, Van Gaal’s reputation is slightly tarnished by his frustrating time managing Manchester United between 2014 and 2016, whereas Cruyff is seen as the mentor of the hyper-successful Guardiola. But Cox’s book works hard to relocate connections obscured by mythology, hearsay or prevailing fashion. He points out, for example, just how much Guardiola, the inheritor of a Dutch-Spanish tradition, learned between 2013 and 2016 as manager of Bayern Munich, a team that Van Gaal had managed a few years earlier. Cox told me that, for the time being, it looks as though it is Van Gaal who has really “set the tone for future football”. If you watch Guardiola’s Man City team, he explained, the players “move so structurally” – in a rigid system, as Van Gaal would have wanted.

I asked Cox about the possible next stage of tactical evolution – what might supersede things like counter-attacking, possession play and “gegenpressing”. He said that the Italian manager Maurizio Sarri, especially during his time in charge of Napoli, had devised a system that involves retaining the ball in a defensive area and inviting the opposing players to press high up the pitch and then to pass through them. “That’s something slightly different from what other teams have been doing.” During the season, he was delighted by the inventive attacking styles of Sheffield United and the Italian side Atalanta. He also said he was keeping a close eye on women’s football, an industry where various countries are currently “tussling for dominance”.

***

Zonal Markingends with a chapter on the years “ ”, in which England carries the baton previously held by Holland, Italy, France, Portugal, Spain and Germany. Though English football doesn’t boast a proud history of technical innovation, it has become, during the Premier League era, an effective “importer of ideas” and, increasingly, a culture where new thinking is embraced. (Cox's 2017 book about the Premier League is titled The Mixer.)

As we were leaving the Mestalla, we learned that in the other Europa League semi-final, Chelsea had beaten Eintracht Frankfurt on penalties. For the first time, both the Europa League the Champions League finals would be contested by clubs from a single country, and in the week thatZonal Markingwas published in hardback. No single football result can tell you very much, but a full sweep in the European finals amounted to confirmation of the book’s thesis. Cox resisted any obvious display of pride, simply observing that this was “handy”.

As things turned out, the following season – the expected end-point of English hegemony, in Zonal Marking – marked the changing of a guard in “a wider way”. Cox said that the hiatus imposed by the pandemic forced football coverage to become “ambitious and off-the-wall”. Cox published essays on subjects such as AC Milan’s fortunes in 1999 and the tactical strategies that Guardiola might cook up during lockdown. But since football resumed in the summer, Cox has shown that he doesn’t need a halt in fixtures to approach the game in imaginative ways. Since June, he has written or co-authored around 50 articles. Topics have included the “cat” and “dog” types of centre-back, Lionel Messi’s ten stages of greatness, why the Portuguese forward Diogo Jota gets opponents sent off, and a guide to beating Liverpool.

During a recent conversation, I asked Cox to compare himself to a footballer. At first he demurred. Then he replied: “Well, David Beckham was good at one thing, right? Kicking the ball accurately over long distances – which he applied to passing and crossing and free kicks.” Cox says that he doesn’t do “90 per cent of what most football journalists do”. But that’s the advantage of the current climate – the climate he did so much to form. “You can be a specialist,” he observed, “and get away with it.”