“My worry,” Louis van Gaal said after Manchester United’s draw against Newcastle on Saturday, “is that we have to dominate the opponent”. He was not bothered, he insisted, that his side had failed to score, and he felt no great urge to sign another striker despite the ineffectiveness of Wayne Rooney; rather he was happy because “three times we are the better team … We did it today, we did it against Aston Villa and against Tottenham. Against Tottenham was less but against Villa, Brugge and today we dominated”.

Tottenham actually had slightly more possession on the opening day of the season (53% to 47%) and more shots on target, but that aside Van Gaal was right (there’s an assumption here that he wasn’t simply lying about the striker situation; that’s possible, but the suspicion is that a man whose vision of the world is so idiosyncratic would find dissembling difficult, particularly when he has chosen to communicate purely through the medium of Downfall parodies).

If possession and shots are the measure, United played out a fairly equal game against Spurs and have dominated the other four competitive games this season. And yet, for all they have put seven past Club Brugge over two legs, their return in the league is two from three games, one of them an own goal and the other a deflection. It is true that, on the balance of chances, United would have won more often than not on Saturday, but you wonder how long United would have to keep failing to take advantage of such dominance before Van Gaal acknowledged it was a problem. There was greater fluency in Belgium on Wednesday but until United produce that in the Premier League there will remain doubts.

For now Van Gaal is happy to echo Juanma Lillo’s explanation of his mindset. “What enriches you is the game, not the result,” he told Sid Lowe in Issue One of The Blizzard. “The result is a piece of data. The birth rate goes up. Is that enriching? No. But the process that led to that? Now that’s enriching. Fulfilment comes from the process.

“You debate the game, not the results. Results are not debatable, they are. Do you buy a paper on a Monday morning for a euro and the only thing in it is list after list of results? Do you go into a football stadium, in the last minute of a game, have a look at the scoreboard and leave? You watch 90 minutes, which is the process.”

For Van Gaal, magnificently thick-skinned and convinced of his own correctness as he is, details such as results are – for now – irrelevant. What matters isn’t the lack (or surfeit) of goals but the process. For him, you don’t win games by scoring goals, you score goals by winning games. He is not concerned by moments of individual genius that can turn a match; what he wants is to dominate midfield to such an extent that the impact of such moments of freakish brilliance are minimised. Win the game of control in midfield and the goals will come.

This is the approach about which José Mourinho was so scathing in April (although he was ostensibly talking about Arsenal at the time – and was clearly actually talking about his great obsession, Pep Guardiola). “Sometimes,” he said, “I ask myself about the future, and maybe the future of football is a beautiful, green grass carpet without goals, where the team with more ball possession wins the game. The way people analyse style and flair is to take the goals off the pitch.”

The curious aspect of this is that, for once in a debate over footballing philosophy, Mourinho and Johan Cruyff find themselves on the same side. They might disagree about what the right way to play is but they agree that Van Gaal’s way is wrong. For Mourinho, as he made clear after Chelsea’s 1-0 home win against United in April, Van Gaal is too concerned about possession and not enough about results. For Cruyff, Van Gaal’s version of total football was overly mechanised, too concerned with what might happen if the ball was lost ever to reach the levels his side had reached in the early 70s.

“The Ajax No10,” Henry Kormelink and Tjeu Seeverens wrote in The Coaching Philosophies of Louis van Gaal and the Ajax Coaches, “… has to set an example by pursuing his opponent”. Van Gaal used Dennis Bergkamp in the role and then Rob Alflen but his ideal was always the industrious Jari Litmanen. “When Ajax lose possession,” Kormelink and Seeverens continued, “he immediately carried out his defensive tasks, and when Ajax are in possession, he chooses the right moment to appear alongside the centre-forward as the second striker.”

The problem is that, until Van Gaal’s methods have been fully absorbed, forward players can be inhibited. Adnan Januzaj, in particular, seems to hesitate as he swoops forward, as though asking himself what he has to do should he lose the ball. It seems odd that he should be in that role given the most naturally defensive forward in English football for a decade, a player who at times seemed to be struggling to contain a desperate urge to be a full-back, has been Rooney, who is inexplicably being asked to play as a centre-forward, despite only ever looking comfortable in the role a) before his explosiveness had begun to dissipate; b) when he played in a team that, unlike this one, specialised in whipping in crosses; and c) away to Club Brugge on Wednesday.

Cruyff wasn’t the only one who found himself unmoved by Van Gaal’s interpretation of total football. Sjaak Swart, who had been a winger in the great Ajax side of the early 70s, was appalled by the way his 90s counterparts, Finidi George and Marc Overmars, would always check back if faced with two defenders. “I never gave the ball back to my defence, never!” Swart told David Winner in Brilliant Orange. “It’s unbelievable! But that was the system with Van Gaal. Many games you are sleeping! On television, they say: ‘Ajax 70% ball possession.’ So what? It’s not football. The creativity is gone.”

Paul Breitner expressed similar concerns about Van Gaal’s Bayern. “We swapped Bayern’s traditional style for this high-possession game but there was still no flexibility in terms of players’ positions and everyone had to stick rigidly to his own area,” he told Marti Perarnau in Pep Confidential. “In some matches, we ended up with 80% possession but there was no real rhythm or pace. After half an hour, everyone in the Allianz Arena would be yawning at this display of constant passing. Our game was well executed but very, very predictable … the basic idea was sound. What we lacked was speed and regular changes of rhythm.”

Swart and Breitner, it should be said, were criticising sides that reached Champions League finals; their concerns were about the aesthetic rather than the efficacy of how Van Gaal played. Yet the sterility both spoke of has been evident in United this season.

Perhaps over time the percentages will fall in his favour and control will yield goals – perhaps Wednesday was the start of that, or a new striker will be signed who can conjure magic to charge the process, but at the moment the demand for domination seems mainly to be generating inhibition.