This was a bad World Cup for a lot of old favourites – anybody who appeared on the Nike ad, Marcello Lippi, preconceptions about Africa – but none of them had quite such a miserable tournament as 4-4-2. When even its old friend Michael Owen starts doubting it, the future for the formation that has ruled British football for 40 years looks bleak.

Johan Cruyff got stuck in as well last week – not particularly surprisingly given his lifelong ideological insistence on 4-3-3 – pointing out that "the numbers don't match up" and explaining that a system of three straight bands doesn't lend itself to the creation of passing triangles. This has always been an axiom: all else being equal, a triangle will always beat a line, and the Cruyff mode of play has always been predicated on the creation of triangles. A 4-2-3-1, with its W shape in midfield, is essentially comprised of interlocking triangles.

Which raises the question of why, if 4-4-2's disadvantages are so obvious, it has survived for so long? To start with, it should be made clear that Cruyff is speaking about his particular vision of football, which is rooted in ball possession and pressing, something that caused him, even before the game, to align himself with Spain rather than Holland in the World Cup final. That is one way to play – and the recent success of Barcelona and Spain shows it is a successful way to play – but it certainly isn't the only way. That a short-passing, technique-based game isn't for everybody was demonstrated very clearly in a tournament in which many people preferred the more dynamic, if more reactive, football of Germany.

Those passing triangles are only important for a side looking to dominate possession. For a side looking to disrupt that, 4-4-2 can be extremely effective – the famous "two banks of four" that for a long time seemed to be such a feature of any English team playing an away game in European competition. Fulham showed last season how effective the style can still be. Sit the midfield line deep on the back four so there is minimal space between the lines for attacking midfielders or deep-lying forwards to exploit, and it becomes very hard to penetrate. It doesn't matter how many triangles you create if you never get the ball closer than 35 yards from the opposition goal.

Think of Gérard Houllier's Liverpool away to Roma in the Uefa Cup in 2001, with Owen and Robbie Fowler left high upfield, often 50 yards and more from the midfield: keep it tight, make sure of the clean sheet, and if, as in that case, Owen can pilfer two goals, that's a bonus. Think of Fulham in the Europa League semi-final against Hamburg.

Slovenia's method both in qualifying and at this World Cup, although slightly more possession-based, wasn't dissimilar, particularly after Zlatan Ljubijankic had replaced Zlatko Dedic. Ljubijankic is a more technical player and a better finisher than Dedic, but he doesn't drop off and doesn't forage which, at least against England – a game in which Slovenia played with such trepidation you wondered if anybody had told them Stan Mortensen and Tom Finney had retired – left Valter Birsa's occasional forays on the right as the only bridge between midfield and attack.

Sacchi's squeeze and the modern stretch

So 4-4-2 has a future as a reactive formation, yet it was also the preferred formation of Arrigo Sacchi, probably the most proactive coach of all. It was the system's defensive attributes, though, that made it work for him. The great strength of the Milan of the late 80s was its pressing, with Sacchi demanding an ideal of 25 metres from centre-forward to centre-back when his side were out of possession. They squeezed high up the pitch, and so 4-4-2 made sense because a four-man midfield meant each member of the back four was protected by a midfielder and so was less likely to be isolated (which, with acres of space behind him, was a real concern).

Possession was less of a concern for Sacchi. I recently watched Milan's 5-0 victory over Real Madrid in the second leg of the semi-final of the 1989 European Cup, and was struck by how often (comparatively speaking) they gave the ball away. Madrid, for long periods, looked the better side on the ball, but were undone by the dynamism of Sacchi's side (although 5-0 was still a freakish scoreline). It's probably the case that, as Egil Olsen posited in a more pragmatic context, a team have to choose between prioritising possession and position on the field.

Pressing is still part of the game, and Barcelona and Spain both perform the high press excellently, but it has been made harder to execute because of the liberalisation of the offside law. The effective playing area has been stretched, and as a result, three-band systems have increasingly been replaced by four-band systems.

Perhaps it is just about conceivable that, if players could be persuaded to put their egos to one side (and that could be an issue for Roy Hodgson if he attempts to apply the Fulham system at Liverpool this season), a club team could still be drilled into an effective pressing 4-4-2, but achieving that level of discipline is an exhausting, demoralisingly boring process that became too much even for Milan after three seasons; it was very hard to implement then, with the change in the offside law and players enjoying greater freedom to change clubs it is even harder now. At international level, anyway, where the time available to work with players is limited and they are fatigued by club commitments, it is impossible, something even Sacchi was forced to acknowledge.

4-4-2 isn't dead

What the World Cup has done is to expose the problems 4-4-2 without hard pressing faces, and not just in terms of being outnumbered in midfield; with the stretching of the effective playing area, the midfield band can become exposed, with space in front of it and space behind it. That gap between defensive and midfield lines was precisely the space Mesut Ozil exploited so well in the first half of Germany's victory over England (this space, as Matthias Sindelar, Alfred Bickel, Laszlo Kubala, Nandor Hidegkuti, Pelé, Günter Netzer,Diego Maradona, Ruud Gullit, Zinedine Zidane, Rui Costa and Juan Román Riquelme and countless others have demonstrated, has always been a problem for England, and that weakness is one of the reasons Eric Cantona, Dennis Bergkamp and Gianfranco Zola were so successful in the Premier League in the 90s). Quite apart from the furious search for immediate justice that followed the non-award of a goal after Frank Lampard's shot had crossed the line, it may be that a desire to compress that area was partly behind England's suicidally high line in the second half of that game.

And yet when the Premier League begins again next month, probably around half the sides will be playing 4-4-2, and not all as a stifling tactic. That is not because of a lack of tactical sophistication, or at least not just because of a lack of tactical sophistication: 4-4-2, to those brought up in Britain, is the default; it's what every player is brought up to understand. A five-man midfield, however it is arrayed, brings its own problems, perhaps most obviously that it can be difficult, particularly for less technical teams, to get men forward to support the lone striker.

Below the very highest level, it may be that it is better simply to let players do what comes naturally. Then there is the issue of personnel, particularly at clubs with a relatively limited budget. At Sunderland, for instance, Steve Bruce may like the idea of 4-2-3-1, but when he has Kenwyne Jones and Darren Bent forming a potent partnership, it makes little sense to disrupt it, even if the corollary is that he occasionally loses control of midfield. Sunderland's form last season notably improved when Steed Malbranque moved to the left and began cutting infield, effectively giving Sunderland an auxiliary central midfielder and bringing them greater control in the centre.

So 4-4-2 isn't dead, but the World Cup confirmed that the trend of the past decade at the highest level is against it.