It has been all that and more, but it is hard to think of a more substantive change to the sport than the advent of social media. Reading back through that Babel story — he would, a week or so later, become the first player ever to be fined for saying something on Twitter; in time, that would become a rich source of revenues for governing bodies the world over — it is striking how naïve we were.

Twitter is a “social networking site,” or somewhere for “microblogging,” reporters noted at the time. Babel did not post it to his feed, but on his “Twitter website.” The Football Association’s officials, in punishing him, declared that anything published on Twitter was the same as “giving an interview in a national newspaper.”

Nine years later, social media has fundamentally altered the way that clubs communicate with fans, how players interact with the public and how we consume the sport, both the stuff that happens on grass and the stuff that happens away from it: bite-size chunks, brief six-second clips of action, ramping up the hyperbole and the immediacy of every tiny aspect of the game, every grain of news, every word spoken, every deed done.

But it has done more than that: it has proved a crucible for fake news — a phenomenon that some of us might argue actually started in sports — but also has fanned the flames of tribalism, turning most interactions between fans of opposing teams toxic, generating a fierce, fractious, puerile sort of rivalry. It has allowed racism to fester and flourish; it has proved capable of moments of beauty and brutality.

Soccer’s tactics will change again in the 2020s. Players will emerge to take the mantle of Messi and Ronaldo (though likely not meeting their standards). Power will continue to ebb and flow from club to club and, by extension, country to country. But it all will be refracted through social media’s twisted lens, the one, immutable influence of the 2010s that will never wane. That is what can be dated to Jan. 9, 2011, and to a blurred, pixelated photoshop of Howard Webb in a Manchester United jersey. All that history started with Ryan Babel.

A Matter of Opinion