A fortnight ago, Europe’s football carnival was in full flow yet again. It was the routine frenzy, madness and a cavalcade of superstar players with unreal skills and grotesquely inflated egos, befitting of the kind of stature Europe’s most prestigious club football tournament, the Champions League, enjoys.

Paris Saint-Germain (owned by the Qatar Investment Authority) and Manchester City (owned by Abu Dhabi millionaire Sheikh Mansour) battled to reach the final four for the first time in their history. After 180 minutes, Abu Dhabi had toppled Doha with thoroughly entertaining, albeit low quality football.

In the all-Spanish clash between Atletico Madrid and FC Barcelona, the famed MSN-trio – Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar – underwhelmed in an uncharacteristic dip of form. It was a goalscoring abstinence of cataclysmic proportions, causing reverberations across Catalonia with FC Barcelona going into “existential crisis mode”.

Elsewhere, both Bayern Munich and Real Madrid struggled to impose their supposedly hyper-modern and sophisticated gameplans as well against less fancied clubs, Germany’s Wolfsburg and Portugal’s Benfica. They both won, but not without hiccups.

The same week, Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund played out the best 90 minutes in the Europa League, the second tier of European football. In a topsy-turvy match, the Germans steamrollered Liverpool in the opening exchanges, but the hosts’ rapier attacks provided the English with a great comeback for a 4-3 win, ensuring a 5-4 victory on aggregate and progression to the semi-finals of the competition.

A tactical stalemate

Notwithstanding the empirical evidence, it would be a stretch to deem the Europa League of a higher calibre than the Champions League. The difference was striking though. The Champions League has become a closed circuit, football’s Bullingdon Club if you will, a conservative and elitist fraternity, priding itself on innate superiority. By and large, the same clubs always feature in the last eight and four, subject only to the macroeconomics of Gulf states or the whims of a wealthy bankroller.

That sense of borderline chumminess between Europe’s “uberclubs” translates into a tactical on-field stalemate. Atletico Madrid’s performance is the perfect illustration. Coach Diego Simeone instructed his team to simply stall Barcelona’s potent forward line. Defending became a cynical art.

At the same time, Atletico demonstrated enough tactical and technical refinement to probe and pester the Catalans. French striker Antoine Griezmann was the pivot in Madrid’s first goal. Yet the game lacked that undulation of free-flowing football. Power prevailed.

In the other part of town, Real Madrid waltzed Wolfsburg out of their way, courtesy Cristiano Ronaldo. The Portuguese embodies the idea of a super-athlete – even in this Messi-centric world – but he is rapidly becoming an outcast in a team of blue-collar players. Ronaldo dribbles less nowadays, so does his Madrid teammate Karim Benzema. Even at Madrid, once so regal, brawn supersedes more noble game approaches.

Those Teutonic tendencies reveal an evolution towards power football, ignited and initiated by Germany in the second half of the noughties. It yielded success: in 2013, Bayern Munich won the Champions League in an all-German final, and a year later, Germany’s national team triumphed at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Space, the final frontier

But power football is not the future; advanced exploitation of space is – eleven players informed by the interchangeability of things; players who seek out that spatial freedom to roam in and dictate the play from that bubble. Across Europe, technical directors and youth coaches are already desperately trying to source and recruit young players to hone the ballet dancer they dream of.

Optimised space utilisation is neither a furtherance of the Dutch “Total Football” philosophy, nor a betterment of current Bayern Munich manager Pep Guardiola’s “Tiki Taka” football which he swore by during his days at Barcelona. Those philosophies are modelled on the 4-3-3 system. They adhere to a given field formation, even if Guardiola has demonstrated a lot of flexibility in using a dozen of different formations at Bayern Munich. Football of the future would be skimmed of systems, but revolve around players who mould space to their own device.

Guardiola’s teams have come closest to doing so on a permanent basis. Bayern Munich boasts of the world’s only Raumdeuter, German for “space investigator” or “space interpreter”, in Thomas Muller. The 26-year-old German coined that term himself and is both an anomaly and enigma: he does not excel in ball control, dribbling or pace, but, yet, he frequently simply beats his opponents. How? Muller is constantly in search of football’s most precious commodity: space. His avocation sometimes renders him invisible, but he constantly remains suffocatingly dangerous.

Here’s hoping that Bayern show us a glimpse of the future in their Champions League semi-final against Atletico Madrid on Wednesday.