As part of our This is Europe week we look at how the game has been influenced by teams, managers and players from the continent

Alf Ramsey didn’t have much time for foreigners – and for him that meant anybody who wasn’t English. “Welcome to Scotland,” a local journalist once said to him as he landed at Prestwick. “You must be fucking joking,” he replied. In Moscow, given the chance to attend the Bolshoi Theatre he preferred to go to the British Embassy for a screening of an Alf Garnett film. He was not somebody who held any truck for continental sophistication. And yet his greatest lesson came from the Hungarians.

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Ramsey was at right-back in November 1953 when the Hungary of Ferenc Puskás, Nándor Hidekuti, József Bozsik et al demolished England 6-3 at Wembley. It was the moment at which English football finally woke up: the modern game might have been codified in England and disseminated around the world by British teachers, sailors, bankers and industrialists, but England could no longer claim to be pre-eminent. On a foggy afternoon at Wembley, the myth of English superiority was irrevocably destroyed.

What followed was a period of radical change. A shape and a style of play that had essentially been unaltered for quarter of a century was dismantled. Traditional English wing-play, the apogee of which had come just six months before the humiliation against Hungary as Stanley Matthews inspired Blackpool to a dramatic 4-3 victory over Bolton in the FA Cup final, was phased out. W-M became 4-2-4 became 4-3-3.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blackpool’s Stanley Matthews (left) dribbles past Bolton’s Malcolm Barrass during the 1953 FA Cup final. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images

Ramsey, having spent much of his career under Arthur Rowe, the architect of the push-and-run style that helped Tottenham to the title in 1951 and somebody with enough in common with the Hungarian game that he gave a series of lectures there, was perhaps predisposed to questioning the status quo. As Ipswich manager, withdrawing the left-winger Jimmy Leadbitter and winning an implausible league title in 1962, he was at the forefront of the avant garde.

By the time Ramsey led England to glory at the 1966 World Cup, he had withdrawn both wingers and developed an early form of 4-4-2. He would never have acknowledged it, perhaps wouldn’t even have admitted it to himself, but the trigger for the revolution that brought England the World Cup was defeat to Hungary.

England weren’t the only nation to benefit from the lessons of Hungary. Directly or indirectly, every World Cup winner since Uruguay in 1930 has been in some way shaped by the great blossoming of footballing thought that occurred in Budapest in the years immediately after the First World War and the diaspora that followed. But as the rest of the world continued to adapt, English football remained broadly insular, as though satisfied that the winning formula it had found would remain permanently applicable.

But some teams did evolve, most notably Liverpool, whose dominance of the late 70s and early 80s was at least in part rooted in a switch to a more patient approach after Bill Shankly’s side suffered a pair of uncomfortable defeats to a tactically intelligent Red Star Belgrade in the 1973-74 European Cup. “The Europeans showed that building from the back is the only way to play,” Shankly explained. “It started in Europe and we adapted it into our game at Liverpool where our system had always been a collective one … We realised at Liverpool that you can’t score a goal every time you get the ball. And we learned this from Europe.”

By the end of the decade, English teams weren’t just learning the lessons of European teams, they were signing European players. The Dutchmen Arnold Mühren and Frans Thijssen were integral to Ipswich’s success under Bobby Robson. Perhaps more would have arrived had it not been for the 1985 Heysel ban, but by 1992, when the Premier League began, there were only 13 players from outside Britain and Ireland.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arsenal’s Dennis Bergkamp was one of the most influential players in the Premier League, scoring and creating memorable goals. Photograph: Andy Hooper/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

That rapidly changed. The increasing financial clout of English clubs coupled with the Bosman ruling allowed English clubs to entice major foreign stars: Eric Cantona, Jürgen Klinsmann, Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp, Gianfranco Zola, Gianluca Vialli. And with them began the Premier League’s growth to become the major global league. Each brought their own ideas, their own way of doing things and that, inevitably, began to change the mentality and approach of the British players working and training alongside them.

But the greatest influence was a manager. It was Arsène Wenger who dragged English football into its new age with such cunning ruses as improved nutrition, a targeted counterattack and a detailed knowledge of overseas transfer markets. They seem basic strategies now but at the time they were revolutionary; by the time Wenger finally left Arsenal in 2018 his problem was that everybody else had caught up. His innovations by then came as standard.

After the disappointment of Jozef Vengloš’s brief reign at Aston Villa, Wenger was proof that European ideas could thrive in English football. Gérard Houllier, Rafa Benítez, José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Roberto Mancini soon followed. The Premier League became less an English league than a world league played in England, the majority of its best managers Europeans.

And so we reach the modern age, and the great clash between Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, a meeting of two schools of football, one Dutch filtered through Spain, the other characteristically German although with its origins in the Soviet Union. Other than Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish and Manuel Pellegrini, every manager who has won the Premier League has been continental European. The worldwide popularity of the Premier League is to a large degree down to the marriage of the British obsession with pace, effort and physicality to subtler external ideas about positioning, shape and tempo.

And this perhaps is the lesson of inter-war Budapest. After the British had brought football, why did the city prove so fecund? In part it was a combination of rapid urbanisation leaving vacant lots (the grunds) that proved ideal training grounds for kids, and writers and intellectuals in the coffee-houses debating football, developing for the first time tactical theories. And the spread of those ideas came about because the economic and political turmoil of the time led to great exodus of the gifted. But it was also because Budapest was a vibrant melting pot of ideas, cultures and ethnicities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp are continuing the European dominance of the Premier League. Photograph: David Klein/Reuters

English football now is a sporting equivalent. It no longer seems outrageous to see Marcelo Bielsa on the touchline at Barnsley or Phillip Cocu at Northampton. The foreign influence is everywhere. Has the influx of foreign players slowed the development of young English players? Perhaps, but that’s at least as much a product of the richer clubs stockpiling young talent and not playing them. When they do break through, the facilities could hardly be better or the environment more challenging.

English football’s only international triumph stemmed from a defeat to Hungary that proved local ideas had become outmoded. English football’s most internationally successful club side, was profoundly shaped by defeat to a Yugoslav team. Its step into modernity was led by a Frenchman. Innovation and development are driven by the interplay of ideas. At the moment, the Premier League, for all its inequalities and flaws, is truly international, a place where diverse theories can clash against each other and be tested and refined.

If that changes as a result of Brexit, if the European influence is diminished, the consequences for the future can only be damaging.