Playmakers re-emerged at the World Cup, largely because of the development of 4-2-3-1 as the most common formation: it's impossible to play the system successfully without at least one creator in the line of three. As I tried to trace the lineage of the playmaker though, to map his rise and fall, it became increasingly difficult to define exactly what constitutes a playmaker, and when Barney Ronay asked me whom the first playmaker had been, I found it difficult to answer.

I'm in Argentina at the moment and here the question seems facile. The playmaker is the enganche, the hook, the No10, the player who operates behind the front two in the 4-3-1-2 or the 3-4-1-2 that around half the teams still favour. So revered is the position that Boca Juniors have just agreed to pay Juan Román Riquelme $5m over the next four years – including half his tax – despite the fact that he is 32 and increasingly suffers injury problems.

But elsewhere the question is more fraught. In Croatia, for instance, Luka Modric would be considered a playmaker, and when he was at Dinamo Zagreb he played as an enganche in a 3-4-1-2. Yet on Saturday for Tottenham he operated as one of the two central players in a 4-4-2 and he has played on the left: is he still a playmaker even if he is not playing in a formation with a 1 in it? Can a playmaker play anywhere other than the centre? And, for that matter, given how Tom Huddlestone sprays the ball around, isn't he also a playmaker, although one of a very different type to Modric?

Origins

The playmaker is his side's prime creator, the hook that joins midfield and attack. When football was in its infancy and formations were slowly emerging from the chaos of the mob game, the creators were the inside-forwards whose job was to take the ball from the wing-halves and feed the centre-forward or the wingers. In the first international, a goalless draw in 1872, England seem to have played a 1-2-7 formation and been flummoxed by the 2-2-6 used by Scotland.

It is difficult to be sure how England arranged their forward-line, largely because contemporary accounts suggest they operated with two left-wings, but a fair guess would be that their two inside-forwards were Cuthbert Ottaway and Arnold Kirke-Smith, although as England eschewed passing it is hard to see how they could be considered creators.

Of Scotland, with their revolutionary 2-2-6, there is a little more evidence and we can be reasonably sure their two inside-forwards were Robert Leckie and James Begg Smith. They did pass, so perhaps they can be considered the first playmakers, although it was only really when the 2-3-5, into which 2-2-6 soon evolved, reached South America that the inside-forwards began to drop deeper towards the midfield and take on the role of linking midfield and attack. The Uruguay side of the 1920s, Olympic champions in 1924 and 1928, were probably the most effective at that, so perhaps the first playmakers were Pedro Cea and Héctor Scarone.

Yet it feels odd to talk about a side having two playmakers (although it is commonly said that River Plate's la Máquina side of the late 1940s had five, even after the departure of Alfredo di Stéfano). As 2-3-5 became W-M (or 3-2-2-3), it seems one of the two inside-forwards took on a more creative role, as, for instance, Alex James did for Herbert Chapman's Arsenal. His job was to gather the ball from defence and initiate sweeping counterattacks with long, low, through-balls to the wingers, and so he was, in a sense, the first British playmaker.

4-2-4 and beyond

The process was formalised in Brazil in the late 1940s with the development of the diagonal. A form of the W-M had been implanted at Flamengo in 1937 by the Hungarian Dori Kruschner and, after he was sacked, his assistant Flávio Costa took charge. Costa had been scathing about Kruschner's tactical innovations but, recognising their worth, modified them, nudging the central square of the W-M so it became a rhombus, with either the inside-left pushed higher up the pitch and the right-half dropped deeper, or vice-versa.

The advanced inside-forward became known as the ponta da lança (point of the lance) and had a clearly defined function in joining midfield and attack. Even when the rhombus was nudged a little further and 3-2-2-3, having become 3-1-2-1-3, became 4-2-4, the ponta da lança tended to drop deep from the frontline as a playmaking second striker: a role Pele shone at in the 1958 World Cup.

But in Europe the evolution towards 4-2-4 came via a different route as the centre-forward began to drop deep. Matthias Sindelar was the first to do that, for Hugo Meisl's Austrian Wunderteam, pulling away from the other four forwards and focusing less on scoring than on creating. In the modern sense, he was probably the first playmaker against whom England played but he would probably not have recognised the description. Certainly by the time Nandor Hidegkuti destroyed England at Wembley in 1953 the deep-lying centre-forward was a common ploy: England had been just as befuddled by Alfred Bickel against Switzerland in 1947 and by Jose Lacasia against Argentina in 1953. Even in that Hungary side, though, it would be difficult to say whether the true playmaker was Hidegkuti or the inside-left, Ferenc Puskas.

After the success of Brazil with 4-2-4 in 1958, other nations took up the formation and tinkered with the distribution of the front six. By the time Argentina got to the 1966 World Cup, they were operating with Antonio Rattín as a deep-lying anchor, Luis Artime as a centre-forward, Oscar Más as a forward on the left-wing, Alberto Gonzalez and Jorge Solari as shuttling midfielders, and Ermindo Onega as a playmaker. That shape, a basic 4-3-1-2, remained the template in Argentina for the next two decades.

While most – including Brazil and England – found an extra midfielder from the 4-2-4 by withdrawing a winger, in the Netherlands, West Germany and the USSR it was more common to withdraw a centre-forward, leaving two wingers in a symmetrical 4-3-3. For those sides, the key was flexibility, and if there was a playmaker he tended to be the libero – although Johan Cruyff, almost by force of personality, is an obvious exception. The midfield three, though, was flexible enough to incorporate a playmaker, and when West Germany beat England 3-1 at Wembley in 1972, Günter Netzer was obviously operating as such. The liberi – Franz Beckenbauer in particular – were probably the first of the deep-lying playmakers, who by the 1980s were emerging in midfield. In 1982, Brazil had Falcao and Cerezo as deep-lying playmakers with Zico and Socrates as playmakers in the more advanced role.

The Bilardo protocol

What really confused the issue, though, was the tactical switch made by the Argentina manager Carlos Bilardo during the 1986 World Cup. It was not so much the shift to a back three – for playmakers it makes little difference whether the seven players behind him are arrayed as a 3-4 or a 4-3 – as the decision to play Diego Maradona as a second striker in the quarter-final against England.

Bilardo admits he made the move purely for practical reasons because he did not believe the centre-forward Pedro Pasculli, who had scored the winner in the second round against Uruguay, could cope against physical English defending. The switch, though, proved probably the most significant tactical change of the decade. Once a playmaker had been used as a second striker, the roles bled into each other. Was Dennis Bergkamp a playmaker or a second striker? Roberto Baggio? Gianfranco Zola?

They were neither and both, and that ambiguity has been formalised by the spread of 4-2-3-1. One of the system's many advantages is that it allows for a deep-lying playmaker – a Xabi Alonso figure – to operate as one of the holding two, so a team can have two creative hubs while retaining a solid defensive structure. It is intriguing too that the emergence of 4-2-1-3 seems to hint at the playmaker/second striker hybrid once again becoming something akin to the playmakers of the 1980s, but operating behind a front three rather than a front two. In that the playmaker is returning to his origins: Scarone, James and Pele, at least in 1958, were similarly creating the play for a central striker and two wingers.

None of this truly defines what constitutes a playmaker: given the range of what people consider playmakers, perhaps the truth is that playmaker is not a position at all but a state of mind.

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