You used primarily "anti-football" examples. It's not even about appreciating the other side of the game.

If you look back to what "good football" was just before the world was swept away by the idea of playing sideways, you had loads of different examples of teams who found success using tonnes of different methods.

Sir Alex won the prem with, quite frankly, pretty average teams simply because his squad did what they did really well. Play as wide as possible. Counter attack primarily off the wing. They played like that for so long. It went from Ronaldo playing the wing to Antonio Valencia. And they still won.

What about the whole Joga Bonito campaign? That Brazilian side, while possession oriented, did not play the stat obsessed possession football of today.

Holding the ball has always been a big part of dominating a game. That's not up for debate. When you hold th eball, you make the other team work, while you play. The problem with the mentality is simply put, is that not every team or player is good enough to play like this.

When the chance comes up, will you execute and put it away? Will you have the spacial awareness to do what the Barcelona players do? The ability? In a lot of cases, no.

So the goal, which is to drain the desire out of the other team by making the game seem hopeless to win, actually becomes an aspect of the game that helps the lesser team stay in it. If you're the better team and you refuse to go at goal, you will ease off a huge chunk of the games time, and thus pressure by knocking the ball about.

Top teams need to be more concerned about having 10 shots to anothers teams 1 at half. Not that they had 80% posession.