If we had to slap a name on this era in football, we could do worse than the Rise of the Quants. These days, there is a widespread belief that even the mascot needs to have read Moneyball, and not simply be able to critique the movie. The biggest clubs employ armies of data analysts, while advanced metrics and tactical analytics are the adornment of increasing amounts of commentary. Privately, you might think some of your friends speak the language of football statistics much as Andy Gray once spoke the language of Spanish, when he inquired of a La Manga hotel receptionist: “Eh senoreo, where’s the fucking taxio?” But like Andy, they certainly have a go, and forcefully so.

In this occasionally stifling and frequently deeply boring atmosphere, it’s refreshing to hear of idiosyncratic tactical approaches. All respect to Chris Coleman, then, who this week gave the media a glimpse into his forward planning. “We just need to look and see what’s happened in the last five years,” the Sunderland manager explained, “and then do the opposite.”

Obviously, Coleman was not being completely serious but there was something cheerily liberated about his comments. Liberation is what he is aiming for, what with Sunderland trapped in the Championship relegation zone. Perhaps Chris will turn out to be a counterculture hero – football’s equivalent of The Diceman, the protagonist of Luke Rhinehart’s cult anti-analysis novel, who makes all his decisions on the throw of a dice.

An even closer analogue to the Sunderland manager’s “do the opposite” approach exists. There’s a Seinfeld episode called The Opposite, where George Costanza bemoans what feels like a lifelong losing streak. “It became very clear to me sitting out there today,” he tells Jerry and Elaine, “that every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat … It’s all been wrong.”

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“If every instinct you have is wrong,” reasons Jerry, not entirely reasonably, “then the opposite would have to be right.” George duly decides to fight his natural impulses and see what happens, and is immediately rewarded when a beautiful woman agrees to a date, despite the fact he introduced himself to her with the words: “I’m unemployed and live with my parents.”

As Coleman freely admits, this will basically be Sunderland’s approach to potential new signings – we’ve got a wantaway owner and you need to take a guess what division we’ll be playing in next season.

It’s not just fictional sitcom characters failing to give absolute primacy to tactical science, though – real football people are at it too. A year or so ago, the Borussia Mönchengladbach coach Dieter Hecking let daylight in on magic when he said tactics were important “but you must not make any secret science out of it”. Many of the secrets that observers scientifically divined each week were quite beyond him. “Today there are even websites, presenting alleged thoughts of us coaches after the game,” Hecking marvelled. “I have read them once after a Wolfsburg game. I was wondering: ‘Am I supposed to have come up with these highly complex things?’”

Soon after, the German FA’s head of coaching education, Frank Wormuth, declared tactics “overrated” and less important than the quality of players. Wormuth compared the fetishisation of modern tactical analysis to some pretentious art exhibition preview, “where people are seized by a canvas with colour patches, wondering what the painter wanted to tell them, and afterwards pay a lot of money for it. What did the painter want to tell us? Nothing. Perhaps he had just had a bad day.”

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At the England level, we are always encouraged to believe we have come a long way technically in the past 25 years or so. At the start of our journey, horrified documentary viewers were able to watch Graham Taylor’s tactical plan unfold as he judged a game was “made for Wrighty”, or bellowed rhetorically: “Can we not knock it?” At the end of our journey, we were deep in the realms of the FA elite development director Dan Ashworth’s spreadsheets. And yet, looking at England’s last major tournament exit to Iceland, you could be forgiven for thinking we had perhaps not journeyed anywhere at all but were simply knowing the place for the first time.

As for Coleman’s do-the-opposite dossier, how might it pan out? I’m not sure if one is permitted to run so-called spoilers to Seinfeld episodes – the other day a chap wrote crossly to me saying I’d spoiled a plot point of Return of the Jedi (1983) for him, because he’d only got up to Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).

But let’s live dangerously: at the end of The Opposite, George gets a coveted sporting job of his own, hired by the New York Yankees. The next episode opens with him offering batting advice and, though it’s not explicitly clear this is the continuation of do-the-opposite policy, George promptly approaches management with a creatively destructive scheme. The Yankees, he says, would be advantaged by switching from playing in polyester uniforms to cotton. Unfortunately, the cotton kits shrink, the Yankees end up running like penguins, and … well, spoilers. A reminder that asking: “What’s the worst that can happen?” is tempting fate in sport, and we can only hope Coleman’s convention-bucking goes better.