Robin van Persie, of Manchester United. Photograph by Jamie McDonald / Getty

Earlier this month, Louis van Gaal, the manager of Manchester United, showed up at a press conference armed with an unusual prop: printouts of statistics from his most recent match, a 1—1 draw against West Ham United. West Ham’s coach had accused van Gaal of playing “long ball,” a tactic that involves repeatedly sending long, searching passes forward to opportunistic strikers, hoping for a lucky bounce or knock-down near the goal. Long ball eschews the beauty of intricate passing play and coördinated counter-attacks for trial and error: more often than not, the passes are headed out of play or kicked back down the field by the opposing team, caught by the keeper, or go out of bounds. The approach calls for tall, muscular center-forwards who can overpower defenders to win the ball; the rest of the team hangs back so that they can immediately launch the ball forward after the play and try all over again. While long ball can be very effective, particularly for teams of lesser technical ability, it makes for deadly dull viewing.

At the press conference, van Gaal was eager to prove that his team was not relying on long ball. His dossier, which he passed out to reporters, contained pass-completion and possession percentages and pitch diagrams covered in red and green arrows indicating unsuccessful and successful passes. “When you have sixty-per-cent ball possession, do you think that you can do that with long balls?" he asked. He pointed out that while Man United did play more long passes than West Ham, the majority were "in the width, to switch the play”—his team wasn’t merely hoping for lucky goals but passing with purpose. In the soccer world, the distinction was serious enough to fuel more than one op-ed discussing whether Manchester United under van Gaal is, in fact, a true long-ball team. But the debate about long ball in English football is about something bigger, too: aesthetics versus results. Is it better to be a beautiful loser than a boring winner?

As detailed in “Inverting the Pyramid,” a wonderful history of soccer tactics, by Jonathan Wilson, long ball, also known as “direct” or “route-one” football, was born out of ruthless, mathematical practicality. In the spring of 1950, a retired Royal Air Force wing commander named Charles Reep began taking notating actions in soccer matches. He noticed that most goals tended to be scored after very short passing sequences, or “chains.” Reep’s data, which was published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_ _in 1968, showed that roughly eighty per cent of goals came from build-up play involving three passes or fewer. Therefore, he and others concluded, it made sense for coaches to encourage their teams to continuously move the ball up the field as quickly as possible, and that long passes to the forwards provided the most efficient option for doing this. Despite some detractors (including Wilson himself) who wondered whether Reep confused correlation with causation in his analysis of the number of passes leading to goals, this research would heavily influence the style of the English game for the next two decades.

A convincing rebuke to long ball’s stultifying pragmatism emerged in the Netherlands, at one club in particular: Ajax Amsterdam, which also happens to be the Dutch van Gaal’s former team. In the late nineteen-sixties and seventies, the Ajax coach Rinus Michels produced the possession-based tactic known as totaalvoetbal or “total football.” Total football could be considered long ball’s polar opposite: it emphasizes holding onto the ball using a mix of incisive short passes, quick positional switches, and the careful development of élite players from a very young age—an approach that Ajax, and the Netherlands as a whole, excel in to this day.

Though there have been skirmishes over the years, long ball and total football have never had their Waterloo. Instead, the styles have evolved alongside one another, and even intermixed. The possession-obsessed Spanish club Barcelona, steeped in total football’s principles with a Spanish flavor, admitted, in 2013, to using the long ball when under heavy defensive pressure. However, it’s safe to say long ball is losing the P.R. battle in the country of its birth. It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment that the tide turned against direct football in England, but the arrival of Arsenal F.C.’s manager, the Frenchman Arsène Wenger, in 1996, helped. His iconic brand of short-passing soccer, with foreign players like Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp, shifted perceptions about possession soccer in England and proved that it could win championships in the physical, kick-and-rush world of the Premier League.

Today, long ball is largely considered a tactic from a bygone era, one that doesn’t mesh with the cosmopolitan age. As the Premier League’s international purchasing power continues to grow with ever larger television-rights deals (the latest, with Sky, is valued at £5.136 billion), the more revenue-rich clubs are able to stack their rosters with expensive, technically gifted stars from all over the world. Wealthy owners, such as Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich, expect their teams not only to win but to provide entertainment in return for their hefty investments. Even some of the smaller clubs, such as Southampton and Swansea—the kind of teams that would traditionally rely on long ball to compete against stronger opponents—have, in recent years, embraced a more possession-based approach with success.

Where van Gaal falls in this spectrum is not entirely clear. While he vigorously denied, in his presser, playing the long-ball game, he didn’t make a particularly strong claim to playing beautiful soccer this season. For years, Manchester United had been the apotheosis of the Premier League’s flashier, more global style. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, the team attained enormous success with its fast-paced, incisive, attacking soccer. Sir Alex retired in 2013; his successor, David Moyes, was sacked after only ten months of poor results, and van Gaal was hired to reverse the club’s fortunes. While results have improved under van Gaal, some pundits have accused United of becoming boring—Paul Scholes, a former United player, called the team “miserable.” There is bound to be pressure on van Gaal from both fans and possibly the board if United continues to play a less-than-thrilling brand of soccer.

Long ball doesn’t always have to be boring, of course. During the World Cup last summer, van Gaal managed the Dutch national team and produced one of the tournament’s most exciting results: a 5—1 victory over Spain—the tournament favorites and possession soccer’s premier evangelists—in the group stage. Van Gaal brilliantly bypassed the Spanish side with some deft long passes. The most stunning of the match—if not the tournament—came when the wing-back Daley Blind played a gorgeous field-length pass from out wide to Robin van Persie, who majestically headed in Holland’s equalizer. (Both now play for Manchester United.) It was a long ball, and it was beautiful.