Football used to be an easy game. The big lads played at centre-half and centre-forward, the hard lads played at full-back, the bright lads played at inside forward, the hard lads who were a bit bright and the bright lads who were a bit hard played at wing-half, and the little, quick lads played on the wing. Left-footers played on the left and right-footers played on the right. And the one with no mates went in goal.

Eight decades on, and it's all rather more complicated, and not just because not all goalkeepers these days are entirely socially dysfunctional. Wingers disappeared for a while, and became a luxury item, almost a museum piece, but now they're back, all over the place, and the tendency is for them to play on the opposite flank.

There have always been a handful who did that. Tom Finney, for instance, played as a right-footed left-wing in the greatest English forward line there has ever been – along with Stanley Matthews, Stan Mortensen, Tommy Lawton and Wilf Mannion – but that was only because Matthews was already installed in his preferred position. Later, players such as Dennis Tueart, Chris Waddle, Marc Overmars and Robert Pires, operating on the opposite side through preference, were highly effective coming in on to their stronger foot.

But now these inside-out wingers are everywhere. At Barcelona, Leo Messi is proving himself probably the greatest individual talent since Diego Maradona, cutting in from the right on to his stronger left foot. Arjen Robben has resurrected Bayern Munich's season doing much the same. Cristiano Ronaldo is right-footed and plays on the right, but is so strong with his left that he too is constantly shifting inside, looking for shooting opportunities.

It's the same in England. Ashley Young is a right-footed left-winger. Adam Johnson is left-footed but has made an impact at Manchester City on the right, while Craig Bellamy, a right-footer on the left, has arguably been their best player this season. Niko Kranjcar plays on the left but drifts infield on to his right. Damien Duff spent most of his career on the left but has prospered on the right for Fulham. At Wigan, the left-footed Charles N'Zogbia is having a decent season on the right. Steed Malbranque has been a revelation in recent weeks on the left for Sunderland. At national level, Steven Gerrard has become the preferred choice on the left of the attacking midfield trident when Fabio Capello opts for 4-2-3-1. So why is the tactic so effective, and why has it suddenly become so widespread?

The death of the traditional winger

Herbert Chapman, who foresaw most developments, was suspicious of the winger even before the 1925 change in the offside law prompted the shift away from 2-3-5 to W-M. His Huddersfield team that won the FA Cup in 1922 and went on to lift three successive league titles featured two wingers in George Richardson and Billy Smith who eschewed the touchline-hugging stereotype. Inside passing, Chapman argued, was "more deadly, if less spectacular" than the "senseless policy of running along the lines and centring just in front of the goalmouth, where the odds are nine to one on the defenders".

Chapman's Arsenal side that itself completed a hat-trick of championships was thoroughly modern in the sense of having wingers who regularly drifted infield, making the most of the long, accurate passing of the inside-forward Alex James. Yet for all their success, the image of the winger, isolated, bandy-legged, sashaying his way past the full-back and crossing, remained to English eyes the creative ideal. Perhaps the hurly-burly of English midfields, or the fact that from autumn onwards the only firm ground was to be found out wide, meant flair was necessarily pushed to the flanks. Perhaps it was simply nostalgia.

In the year immediately following the World War Two, there was a great flowering of the English winger with Matthews, Finney, Len Shackleton, Bobby Langton, Jimmy Mullen, George Robb, Johnny Hancocks and Charlie Mitten. The problem was that they emerged just as the collectivist football of the Communist bloc was demonstrating the outmodedness of the English focus on the individual.

Mikhail Yakushin, the manager of the 1945 Dinamo Moscow tourists, for instance, was scornful of Matthews. "The principle of collective play is the guiding one in Soviet football," he said. "A player must not only be good in general; he must be good for the particular team. His individual qualities are high, but we put collective football first and individual football second, so we do not favour his style as we think teamwork would suffer." It took the 6-3 mauling at home to Hungary in 1953 to bring that message home – six months after what many saw as the apogee of wing-play, Matthews's performance in the 1953 FA Cup final.

What really did for the old-school winger, though, was the shift from the three at the back of the W-M to a back four, a process which began in Hungary, the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and was universalised after Brazil's successes in the 1958 and 1962 World Cups. The back three of the W-M operated on a pivot; the ideal for attacking teams was to switch play rapidly from one flank to the other, so "turning" the defence, and providing space for the winger so he could be travelling at speed by the time he reached the full-back. Add an extra defender, and that acceleration room simply isn't there any more.

It was that realisation that led Alf Ramsey and Viktor Maslov to develop the 4-4-2 (or, more accurately in both cases, the 4-1-3-2) in the mid-1960s. As their ideas took hold, the winger became a wide midfielder, a shuttler, somebody who might be expected to cross a ball but was also meant to put in a defensive shift. The lop-sided 4-3-3s of the 1970s could still accommodate something approximating to a winger, but by the 1980s they had become increasingly rare, evolved out of existence by the dominance of 4-4-2 and 3-5-2 – which Johan Cruyff described as "the death of football" precisely because it militated against wing-play.

The reinvention of the winger

As 4-2-3-1 and 4-1-2-3 came to vie with 4-4-2, so the winger could be introduced. Dribbling was a way of disrupting the predictability that 4-4-2 often seemed to engender, and the deployment of two holding midfielders provided the platform that enabled the incorporation of dribblers again. Why, though, do so many prefer to turn infield rather than doing what wingers used to do, trying to get to the goal-line and sweep in a cross?

With a lone centre-forward, of course, there is a need for the advanced midfielders to provide goals (and conversely, it may be that many of the players now operating as wide forwards would in a previous age have been second strikers), particularly if that forward operates as a false nine, so that perhaps, to an extent, explains the modern directness.

But it also seems hard to explain the idea that the most lethal cross was a ball dragged back from the goal-line. It can be dangerous of course, raising doubt in a goalkeeper's mind as to whether he should come to claim or not, but there seems no reason why it should be more threatening than an inswinger delivered at pace (I'm not sure any stats exist to prove or disprove this, but if they do, please post a link).

In fact, intuitively, it would seem a ball whipped towards the far post that requires just a touch to divert it in or that will sneak in if nobody touches it is more dangerous. It also feels as though that sort of goal has become more common over the past decade or so. That may itself be a result of an increasing number of inside-out wingers, or it may be a result of the increased spin that can be imparted on modern balls, or even perhaps of the liberalisation of the offside law which forces teams to defend deeper – an inswinger curving into the far post is obviously more dangerous if players are running into it six yards out than 15 yards out, both in terms of angle and the time a goalkeeper would have to react to a touch.

There are other advantages to a wide player coming inside. For one thing, given most full-backs still play on the traditional side, a winger taking him on on the inside is attacking his weaker foot. For another, a wide player drifting infield is opening space for an overlapping full-back, of whom there are an increasing number. The link-up of Pires and Ashley Cole at Arsenal was an early example of that; more recent examples include Ivan Rakitic and Danijel Pranjic for Croatia, Gerrard and Cole for England and, most obviously, Messi and Dani Alves for Barcelona.

And then there is the issue of acceleration room. A full-back pushed tight on a wide forward does not allow him to accelerate down the line, but by cutting inside on to his stronger foot, the forward opens up room on the diagonal. It is that, for instance, that allowed Messi to score his first against Stuttgart last week. It was rapidly obvious what he was going to do as he turned inside but the best efforts of four defenders couldn't stop him because of the pace he was going at by the time he got within shooting range.

The two types of inside-out winger

Not that the wide forward has to use the room to dribble into. Darren Bent's second goal for Sunderland against Birmingham on Saturday, for instance, came because Malbranque checked inside, and had space to measure an angled pass to the forward with his stronger foot. Earlier in the season, playing on the right, Malbranque looked past it, too slow to beat his full-back on the outside, so right-footed that when he came inside he resembled a canoe with only one paddle, turning always in a circle away from goal. Switching to the left means the lack of pace no longer matters, and he effectively becomes a playmaker who happens to operate wide.

That certainly has been the role occupied by Kranjcar and Luka Modric at Spurs; in their case, the flank becomes an area where a playmaker can still be accommodated in the English game. Others, though, such as Ronaldo and Bellamy, are more obviously forwards, who just happen to start wide. Wayne Rooney's aerial ability perhaps means that centre-forward is his best position, but previous seasons have suggested that he too could occupy that role.

And in between, both playmaker and forward, is Messi, a genius for all the ages. It is hard to believe any player starting wide has had such an impact on games so regularly since Matthews (and even then you wonder whether British pundits, conditioned to see greatness in wingers, weren't seeing what they wanted to see).

Wide forwards can be stopped, but it takes a major change for the defending team. Alvaro Arbeloa's marking job on Messi for Liverpool in 2007 shows how effective it can be switching a right-footed full-back to play on the left flank, and Young's slightly stuttering form for Aston Villa earlier this season shows what can happen when full-backs get used to showing a player outside rather than inside.

But then a player of the class of Ronaldo or Messi (as he is today) will simply go outside (could that, in fact, be why Barça bought Zlatan Ibrahimovic, to give them an aerial presence if Messi were forced into crossing more often?), and playing a right-footer at left-back or a left-footer at right-back immediately impairs their capacity to overlap.

So, the wide forward is hard to combat, scores goals, can operate as a playmaker and creates space for attacking full-backs. All he doesn't do is get to the by-line and curl in away swingers. He seems such a potent threat that the real puzzle is why he didn't emerge earlier.