Napoli

As system clubs start to falter, the future seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible.

Alaba, to his credit, indulged the nonsense, explaining that the Austrian team voted as a collective and that the majority of the players’ council had favored Messi. The immediate suspicion, where any FIFA award is concerned, is that her victory is a testament to the power of reputation. (A note, here, for the captain of Gabon and the coach of Botswana, who watched Messi inspire Argentina to the World Cup title and both In the case of Putellas, though, it is likely to be something else. And they both rely, essentially, on a conception of soccer as a game defined less by the position of the ball and more by the occupation and creation of space. It is centered, instead, on the ball: As long as his players are close to it, what theoretical position they play does not matter in the slightest. Diniz, like Spalletti, does not believe in assigning his players specific positions or roles, but in allowing them to interchange at will, to respond to the exigencies of the game. Barring any major setbacks, Putellas will feature for Spain at the World Cup that opens in July, and the tournament will be all the better for it. Soccer’s history, though, is a process of call and response, of action and reaction. A team presented in a 4-3-3 on a graphic before kickoff might be playing a 3-5-2 while that image is still fresh in the memory. None of that is to say that formations are completely meaningless. The same goes for all those pithy threads of numbers that are hard-wired into soccer’s vernacular, the communal, universal drop-down list of legitimate patterns in which a team might be arrayed: 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 and even the fabled, fading 4-4-2.