One of the beauties of football is its capacity for reinvention, without great rewriting of the rules. Unlike certain other sports – for instance Aussie Rules, which I pick on for no reason other than that the issue was brought to mind by this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald – football seems to have (historically justified) faith that coaches and players will be able to mediate their own way away from predictability or, worse, unwatchability.

Yes, there has been tinkering with the offside rule, and the backpass and the tackle from behind have been outlawed, but essentially a player from a century ago could be parachuted into a game today and would need no more than a two-minute tutorial to get him up to speed on the modern rules. He'd be gasping for the Woodbines after 10 minutes, admittedly, but he would at least know what was going on.

When a rigid W-M seemed dominant, fluid 4-2-4 rose up to overcome it. As catenaccio threatened to strangle the game, along came Total Football. As Johan Cruyff was accusing 3-5-2 as being "the death of football" because it killed the winger, single-striker systems emerged to reintroduce them. Football constantly evolves, and watching Internazionale frustrate Barcelona two weeks ago, it was hard not to wonder whether tactical historians of the future will look back on that game as a turning point as significant as, say, Hungary's 6-3 win over England in 1953, Celtic's 2-1 win over Inter in the 1967 European Cup final or Italy's 3-2 victory over Brazil at the 1982 World Cup.

It rather depends, of course, on what happens next as to whether this is confirmation of a trend or a blip, but what Inter's victory has done is to challenge the assumption that the "best" way to play is to maintain possession and pass a side to death – as Barça have, as Spain do and as, in a slightly less aesthetically pleasing way, Brazil do.

In context

Now, some caveats. Inter still lost at Camp Nou, and but for a handball decision against Yaya Touré that could have gone either way, would have gone out on the away goals rule. Although they were themselves wronged in losing Thiago Motta to a red card (the continuing unwillingness of the authorities retroactively to punish those, like Sergio Busquets, who have blatantly cheated is bewildering), they also had the benefit of two key decisions in the first leg, in that Diego Milito's goal was offside and Dani Alves should have had a penalty (although it's hard to have sympathy with somebody who cries wolf so often). And, of course, Barça were disadvantaged in having had to make the journey to Milan by bus, which perhaps left them leggy and not quite so sharp in their pressing as they had been, for instance, at the Emirates.

So their 3-1 lead was fortuitously obtained, and without it, Inter would not have had the platform on which to build their rearguard action, and even then it might have meant nothing had Bojan's late strike been allowed to stand. And yet, for all that, to make Barcelona look so toothless when they had 84% – 84%! - of possession is remarkable, and shows what can be achieved with rigorous organisation allied to immense mental strength.

José Mourinho's claim that his side deliberately gave the ball away so as not to lose focus may have been exaggeration for the sake of bravado but, whether purposeful or not, to prosper having had so little of the ball seems almost the definition of anti-football. (Earlier this season, a frustrated Arsène Wenger asked how his side were supposed to play properly when other teams persisted in playing anti-football against him, and raised the thought of the former Estudiantes coach Osvaldo Zubeldía, an evangelist for "anti-fútbol", storming into a press conference in La Plata demanding to know how his side were supposed to spoil and break the game up when the opposition persisted in playing "fútbol" against them, passing and dribbling, having shots and generally disrupting his team's game plan.) At the very least, Inter's success must make football ask whether possession is really all that important.

The British debate

Nobody likes to talk about it, of course, what with the instinctive British distrust of anything resembling a theory, but English football in the 1970s and early 80s went through a philosophical battle every bit as keenly fought as the clash between Bilardisme and Menottisme. Where the Argentinian debate was essentially a moral one – was football about beauty or about winning? – the English debated the importance of maintaining possession. For them, the divide between winning and beauty seemed almost artificial: football was just played, and – to exaggerate slightly - it was assumed that everybody accepted that cheating was bad, kicking people was acceptable and that skill, rooted in the sort of powers of deception that seemed worryingly close to cheating, was largely to be distrusted.

On the side of possession was Allen Wade, the technical director of the FA, whose coaching course was such an influence on the likes of Roy Hodgson. Arguing against that was Charles Reep, whose ideas would become FA policy under Charles Hughes, Wade's successor as technical director.

Reep is a much-maligned figure, and to an extent that is understandable. He was, as Howard Wilkinson said, "a zealot", a fussy, rather pompous figure, unsubtle of thought, and intolerant of any criticism. To dismiss him out of hand, though, would be wrong, for he was the British pioneer of match analysis – touchingly, he would record games from the stand at Plymouth's Home Park wearing a miner's helmet to illuminate his notebook – and, however questionable his conclusions may have been, they were at least honestly held and based on meticulous research, if not rigorous analysis. When he fell out with Hughes, accusing him of plagiarising his ideas to write his hugely popular coaching manual, The Winning Formula (something Hughes vehemently denied), his dismissal of the book was rather magnificent, pointing out that its conclusions were based on a study of 202 goals, while he had analysed 9,175.

In 1973, he wrote League Championship Winning Soccer and the Random Effect: The Anatomy of Soccer under the Microscope, a book outlining his theories that remains unpublished. In it, he analysed England's 3-1 home defeat to West Germany in the first leg of their 1972 European Championship quarter-final. Most regarded the game, in which a Günter Netzer-inspired West Germany passed and passed and passed and made England look lumberingly Neanderthal by comparison, as England's most crushing setback since the 6-3 defeat to Hungary. But not Reep.

"Many managers," Reep said, "still seem to believe that, if they scorn the long forward pass, and play 'cultured', 'smooth flowing' football, they will not only please the crowd, and be praised by the Press, but also score enough goals to win promotion too… The very meagre use of the long pass by West Germany recently, will doubtless cause much imitation in the Football League… several first division teams have been observed… to be apparently imitating West Germany's extreme elaboration. The Press call it 'playing total football'."

Long passes may not find their intended target, but for Reep that was irrelevant. "While the intention should always be to find a team-mate with each long forward pass," he wrote, "the long pass not received brings valuable gains, and is by no means wasted." His figures, he claimed, showed that in terms of effectiveness of chance creation five long passes not received are the equal of four long passes received. "Passing has become such a fetish that when watching 'modern' play one sometimes has the impression that goal-scoring has become the secondary objective, with 'stroking the ball about' in cross-field moves, taking first place."

Reep was largely protesting against what he saw as pointless sideways passing, and to an extent he had a point. Mourinho has introduced English football to the notion of "resting with the ball", and ball retention in itself can be a way of wearing down an opponent, even if there is not a lead to be protected, but there is a danger that possession becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to opening space or running down the clock. There are times when sideways passing is simply a means of offloading responsibility, and there were spells last week when Barça's passing, usually so incisive, seemed like passing for passing's sake. As Hughes adapted Reep's ideas, and applied them at the FA's Centre of Excellence at Lilleshall, direct football became the explicit tactical philosophy of the English game, and the emphasis came increasingly to focus on long diagonals and effort.

Position or possession?

Egil Olsen, who had played 16 times for Norway, and was a lecturer at the Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education, took Wade's theory, dissected it and presented a revised model. His statistical analysis suggested that the probability of scoring again before the ball goes dead is greater when the ball is with the opposing goalkeeper than with a side's own, which led to his conclusion that the position of the ball is more important than who is in possession. Accordingly, after becoming national coach in 1990, he demanded that balls be played as often as possible into the "bakrom" – that is, the space behind the opposition's defensive line. Norway ended up being ranked second in the world.

There are reasons to be cautious with the work of Reep in that he pays no attention to the quality of the teams involved. It seems, for instance, a reasonable assumption that the poorer a team is technically, the greater the risks when it attempts to play possession football and, equally, the better an opponent, the less likely they are to be undone by a simple long ball. Hughes's figures, insubstantial as they are, tend to support the theory that the higher the level, the less effective direct football is (very briefly, if you separate goals scored in internationals in his sample, 63% resulted from moves of five passes or fewer, as opposed to an overall figure of 87%).

Where the analysis of Reep and Hughes seems deficient is that they seem to have assumed teams should constantly be trying to score. Inter last week had little intention of doing so. Other sides in a similar position – Brazil against England in the 2002 World Cup, for instance, or Liverpool in the away leg of their Champions League quarter final against Juventus in 2005 – may have defended their advantage by holding possession; Inter preferred to surrender possession and hold a position just outside their own box. It worked, and while they may have had a touch of fortune, it is also the case that they frustrated Barça as well as anybody has done this season, so in that regard it must be regarded as having been a successful tactic.

General application

Perhaps, though, this was a special case. Inter proved themselves a team with great tactical discipline – as they had in holding Fiorentina when down to nine men earlier in the season – and they were playing a side who pose a special set of problems in a game in which they knew narrow defeat would be enough.

Opta statistics, produced in conjunction with Castrol, show that over the past two seasons in the Premier League in only around a third of games did one side have 60% of possession or more, and when they did they won 52% of the time, and lost 25%. If a side had 70% possession or over (which happened in 4.7% of games), they won 67% of the time and lost 17%. Only once in the past two seasons did one side have over 80 per cent possession – Liverpool, in their 3-2 win at Bolton last August.

In the closer games, having 50-59.9% possession meant a side won 43% of the time and lost 31%. So there is a clear correlation between dominating possession and winning matches. Intuitively, we know that there are sides who are successful at counter-attacking, which logically means accepting a lower percentage of possession.

What Inter showed last week, is that there are specific cases in which a radical disregard for possession can succeed. At Milan, Arrigo Sacchi got fed up of players moaning about his obsession with team shape, and so proved its worth with a simple drill. "I convinced [Ruud] Gullit and [Marco] Van Basten by telling them that five organised players would beat 10 disorganised ones," he said. "And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, [Mauro] Tassotti, [Paolo] Maldini, [Alesandro] Costacurta and [Franco] Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, [Frank] Rijkaard, [Pietro Paolo] Virdis, [Alberigo] Evani, [Carlo] Ancelotti, [Angelo] Colombo, [Roberto] Donadoni, [Christian] Lantignotti and [Graziano] Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once."

There are times when possession matters less than organisation.