Brentford’s best chance also came from a long ball, misjudged by a defender who headed towards his own goal, letting in Brentford’s mountainous new striker, Igor Thiago. Modern football has become throwback football — a return to something basic, traditional, earthy. Across the Premier League, fussy ministrations and careful planning are out; the big man and uncompromising directness are back. Gone is the approach of cosmopolitan globalized technocracy and in its place has come something grittier, more visceral, perhaps more immediately appealing, something that — at least at first glance — feels more English. More like Brexitball. Who needs patient build-up or sophisticated theorizing when you can just get it launched? In football as in politics, the big man is back.

There will be those who think this is absurd, that it is ludicrous to discern in the way a team plays some sort of expression of a broader culture or societal trend. But if we accept that literature or music or architecture reflects the world around it, why should football be any different? Like any other cultural mode, football presents its practitioners with a series of challenges, some practical and some aesthetic: how could the way in which they answer them not be conditioned by the prevailing sensibility, even if they are willfully striking against it?

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2008, a moment of crisis for Europe’s political technocrats as they wrestled with the Eurozone crisis — and coincidentally, a major turning point in the game’s tactical evolution. Before 2008, there was only one occasion when the average number of goals in the knockout stages of the Champions League was higher than three. From then until 2020, there was only one occasion when that average dropped below three.

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As it happened, 2008 was also the year that Guardiola took over as head coach of Barcelona — but clearly something was already beginning to shift. No coach, not even one as gifted as Guardiola, can have that sort of impact in his first season. Changes in pitch technology had improved playing surfaces to the point that a player could almost take his first touch for granted; as the ball approached him, he didn’t have to give it his full concentration, waiting for a bobble — but could already be assessing his passing options. That made the game more chess-like. It was less about the ability to react than about strategy. How could players move around to create overloads or to isolate defenders? At the same time, the liberalization of the offside law meant defensive lines sat deeper, increasing the effective playing area. There was also a crackdown on intimidatory tackling, which allowed technically accomplished, creative but less physically imposing players to play a greater role. This was the era of Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, David Silva and Luka Modrić.

So Guardiola emerged into an environment perfectly suited to his approach. As a player at Barcelona under Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, he was schooled in the Total Football played by the Dutch in the early Seventies and managed to repurpose the style for the new era. He was extraordinarily successful, first at Barcelona, and then at Bayern Munich and Manchester City. His way of playing was derided by his detractors as tiki-taka — an onomatopoeic term coined in the Eighties by the no-nonsense, Basque coach Javier Clemente for passing football that went nowhere. He preferred to call it juego de posición — the positional game — though Pepism might be a more useful label, given how closely identified it is with one man.

Whatever the label, the style became hegemonic. It became broadly accepted that “good” football — progressive football, the football elite sides had to play — must follow the Guardiola template. You try to dominate possession, and when the ball is lost, you win it back by pressing aggressively with a high defensive line. But Guardiola was also a cautious coach; his priority was always control. As the background conditions made retention of possession easier it became possible to defend by keeping the ball from the opposition. When Spain, playing a particularly sterile version of Pepism, won the 2010 World Cup, they did so by winning all four knockout fixtures 1-0.

Given the globalized nature of modern football, it’s probable that there has never been such consensus across the game as to how it should be played. But not everybody liked it. A vague culture war grew up. Did you admire the level of control, the triumph of tactics and technical ability — or did you find this attrition by possession all desperately dull? Did you yearn for the old days, for big tackles and working the channels? Did you seek a footballing identity outside what the European technocracy deemed acceptable, progressive, correct?

It should realistically be possible to hold both views simultaneously, to see this degree of control as impressive while acknowledging that there was something slightly bloodless about it — but that’s not how modern media works. Various figures within the game have recently taken to claiming that Guardiola, the most revolutionary and influential figure in football for 50 years, has somehow “ruined football” — a list diverse enough to include the former England manager Fabio Capello, the former USA goalkeeper Tim Howard and the Colchester striker Lyle Taylor.

If there is an issue, it probably lies less with Guardiola than his imitators. Guardiola himself has never stopped evolving — as can be seen in the way that two of his former assistants, Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and Chelsea’s Enzo Maresca, have their sides play in such different ways having learned from the master at different stages of his career. Certain core principles have remained, but Guardiola has never stood still. He’s a pragmatist. It’s his disciples, the likes of Xavi, Jorge Sampaoli and Russell Martin who are the ideologues — who insist on playing their way however inappropriate that may be for their players or the circumstances.

Over the past year, though, Guardiola has acknowledged that he is no longer at the vanguard of the game’s evolution. “Today, modern football is not positional,” he said. “You have to ride the rhythm.” He was talking specifically about how there are now so many fixtures that there is no time to drill their players into efficient positional machines — and so, it is now external factors that are shaping the evolution of the game rather than individual coaches. Guardiola has been moving for several years now towards a more physical model of play, while against both Manchester United and Arsenal this season he had his City side sit deep, eschew possession and play on the counter-attack. Against Arsenal they had only 34% of the ball. Only once before had any of his sides ever dropped below 40% in a league game. This felt shocking — a Götterdämmerung. And as the one true faith falls away, what is left is confusion.

In the gloom, without an obvious ideology to follow, many teams have gone back to basics. Football has, abruptly, become more direct and more focused on set-plays. Over the first month of this Premier League season, non-penalty goals from set-plays rose by 21%. Long balls are up 7%. High turnovers (that is, occasions when the ball is won back in the opposition’s defensive third, an indicator of a high press) are down 14%.

On the level of personnel, inverted wingers and false nines are out, and in their place has returned something more traditional. Football at its simplest level is about putting the ball in the net, and who better to do that than an old-fashioned, physically imposing number 9? The summer transfer window was characterized by the great carousel of center-forwards: Liverpool spent £125m on Alexander Isak and £100m on Hugo Ekitiké; Manchester United spent £65m on Benjamin Šeško; Newcastle spent £65m on Nick Woltemade; Arsenal spent £55m on Viktor Gyökeres; Chelsea spent £30m on Liam Delap; Tottenham brought in Randal Kolo Muani on loan. That’s six of a putative Big Seven shelling out on center-forwards over six feet tall. The odd one out is City, who began the trend — Guardiola as usual leading where others follow — by signing the 6’ 5” Norwegian striker Erling Haaland in 2022. Not since the Eighties have big men been so in demand.

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As the dominant, often over-intellectualized, globalized liberal consensus falls away, so there is a demand for something more straightforward, more direct. For somebody who gets things done without worrying about retaining possession while a structure is established to rebuff a potential counter-attack should the ball be lost. Deal with that if it happens; for now, get it to the big man. There is a weariness with Pepism, a background sense that it is the ideology of a dominant international elite that has spent the past 20 years enriching itself at the expense of those lower down the economic scale.

The Champions League is now the preserve of, at most, a dozen sides. The superclubs dominate like never before. The gulf between the Premier League and Championship has never been so vast. Traditional fans are increasingly priced out in favor of wealthy tourists and globalization is destroying the community function of major clubs. The ticket prices for next summer’s World Cup, released last week, are just the latest example of a game that has lost touch with its roots, with most costing several hundred dollars. This used to be the working man’s ballet. And so there is a desire to go back — back to a perhaps illusory simpler past when the game was open to all, when it was possible to compete without being owned by a state, an oligarch or a private equity group, when football was a simple game, unadulterated by boffins with iPads, in which defenders defended and attackers attacked.

There are tactical-evolutionary reasons for a post-Pep reset, but it’s surely no coincidence that the form that it’s taken is this one. As politics has become more direct, so has football; as strength, unencumbered by subtlety, becomes a virtue in one sphere, so it does in the other. Football is part of culture, inevitably influencing it and being influenced by it. They may be very different people with very different views, but the turn to Haaland, Šeško and Gyökeres stems from the same place as the turn to Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Javier Milei.

But immediately after the first episode aired, it was clear that The Office would defy these mediocre expectations. I was working in the TV industry, and I remember an unusual flurry of surprised, word-of-mouth recommendations pinging round the pre-social media internet the very next day. Gervais had taken the mockumentary genre pioneered by Morton — with no laughter track and an unseen supposed documentary camera crew — and rocket-powered it.

There were big laughs to be had in The Office, but much of its excellence was found in smaller moments located in the excruciating gap between the characters’ projected self-image and the tawdry reality. Unlike the hapless Roy Mallard of People Like Us or the often-surreal Alan Partridge, David Brent, Gervais’s character, made your entire body clench with mortifying shame. He thinks he is a cheeky barrel of fun who keeps everyone else’s spirits up. “You will never work in a place like this again,” he says. “You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled-out entertainer.” Meanwhile it’s obvious to everybody that he is weapons-grade cringe.

But we loved him. After a very shaky start, the ratings for an unusually swift repeat of the first series jumped up, and the final episode got the highest figures of Christmas 2003, now on BBC1. Then, The Office’s enormous success transformed British comedy forever. While it had always had an element of cringe, from Twelfth Night’s Malvolio to Basil Fawlty, cringe now went from being one of the side plates to being the main course. Awkwardness had to be a central feature.

For the next two decades, most of our comedy successes (with two notable exceptions) have been riffing off The Office’s template. Peep Show, The Thick Of It, Gavin and Stacey, Friday Night Dinner — they are all comedies of embarrassment and verging-on-painful unease, filmed entirely in real locations with no laughter track, and greater or lesser amounts of men’s clumsiness and gaucheness. (In fact, there’s a curious cultural disconnect between how we exhort men to open up about their emotions for the sake of their mental health, and then laugh at them when they do.)

But we have cringed too much for too long. At its best (Gavin and Stacey, Derry Girls), cringe comedy revels in the silly little ways we socialise. The terrifying pub quiz and Red Nose Day episodes of The Office set the gold standard for this. At its worst, cringe comedy is ungenerous, snarky and sneering: take the passive-aggressiveness of Louis Theroux with a guileless expression, trying to trip up one of his victims.

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And this is the side that has become dominant, though also darker and snarkier to still have an impact. We are beset, today, by low-on-gags comedy-dramas, often set far from the workaday world of Wernham Hogg. The Office now looks almost sweet and innocent by comparison.

There is a weary and wearying sneer to Channel 4’s recent Back, the latest offering from Mitchell and Webb, which is almost entirely cringe and very little com. “As drearily British as Brexit!” gushed the Guardian’s five-star review, which really tells you all you need to know about this grim, wan tale of “broken masculinity”. Hi-de-Hi! it ain’t.

But British comedy wasn’t always like this. Mainstream, studio-based sitcoms with a live audience and a broad appeal were the mainstay not so very long ago, before technology fragmented society. There were hours of this stuff, good and bad, dotted around the schedules. Now, the communal, uplifting, broad belly laughs of the studio sitcom are regarded as terminally dated and naff. Tellingly, Extras, Ricky Gervais’s project after The Office, was about the cringe of making such a show — shop-floor comedy When The Whistle Blows, with its catchphrases (“Are you ‘avin a laugh?”) and stock characters (the thick one, the brainy one). Meanwhile, the astonishing ratings success of Mrs Brown’s Boys and Miranda (the notable exceptions from before) didn’t register in the zeitgeist of creatives. It’s as if their eyes can see them, and their brains register the information, but they never act on it; they never think of tailoring their output to what people actually like, rather than what they think people ought to like.

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This current lack of uplifting, mass-appeal comedy has lent a curious sheen to the forgotten staples of old. I recently revisited Me And My Girl, an Eighties ITV studio sitcom about a single father and his teenage daughter. It’s the kind of uplifting, jolly fare that seemed ho-hum back then, but which now looks like a work of staggering genius: it has a lightness of touch, likeable characters, a warm heart and, crucially, lots and lots and lots of jokes, with a very high strike rate.

Unfortunately, the supposedly important, talkative demographics who hold huge sway decided such stuff was rubbish, so we chucked it. This despite the fact that nobody much is watching the supposedly important people’s programmes: the most recent Alan Partridge struggled to raise a million viewers on Friday night prime time. Prestige has become more important than getting bums on seats. Meanwhile Dad’s Army, on its zillionth repeat, is still often the highest-rated show of any kind on BBC2.

Producing a show so bouncy and cheering — light, but with just enough ballast to keep it from floating off like an untethered balloon — turned out to be a special kind of alchemy. And it has become almost impossible to recreate deliberately what had happened by accident. But, then, TV channels can only pour out of a jug what is going into the jug. Wider cultural and social changes have ripped up the desire to make populist comedies. And you can’t produce something the viewers would like to see if nobody wants to make it.

In fact, Ricky Gervais said last year that The Office would not get made today, as any kind of nuance and context is too much of a risk in the age of the Twitter mob. We forget at our peril that laughter is a vent for the release of steam under pressure.

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When I started out in television in the mid-Nineties, it was a very different place. The prestige, progressive TV sector  — middle-class and socially conscious — was still boxed off, and regarded with some suspicion by executives whose main concern was snaring large audiences. You might still encounter “creatives” who didn’t have a university degree. Such people are now vanishingly rare.

The very idea that TV is primarily entertainment and diversion is now looked upon with suspicion. Something of supposed social value has to be attached. And it is nearly always the same thing, coming from the same middle-class, Remain-y place, with all its cemented doctrines, dished out as if it were the original and startlingly innovative telling of truth to power. Recently the Daleks, Inside No. 9 and even the BBC adaptation of The Pursuit Of Love gave us a good scolding for Brexit. This is not art, not even low art, but mutual masturbation.

There was always a gap between the people who make television and the people who watch it. But that has now become a chasm, as with many other areas of public life. Viewers are low-status and embarrassing. They need to be jolly well educated, whether they like it or not. The mass audience, though, can smell this stuff a mile away, and it finds something else to do. It doesn’t want to sit down after a hard day’s work only to be scolded. It’s no coincidence that the biggest TV hits — Strictly, Bake-Off, Love Island — are not trying to improve or lecture people; the dropping off in viewing figures is not solely the result of technology and the proliferation of choice.

So While The Office revolutionised TV comedy, it also ruined it. It wasn’t trying to improve us. In fact, it depended on us being a bit silly, a bit worn-out, a bit impatient with the way things are — but never all that committed to change. Just like its characters, that is. And if it were to want to make a comeback, it would have to sack off the sneer and snark, and start loving the office workers of Slough, again.

Sound familiar? Welcome to Russia in 1996, just after the re-election of President Boris Yeltsin, the onetime Soviet apparatchik turned champion of democracy, who then presided over the rapid immiseration of his nation on an epic scale.

It’s a little-understood period, not least because so many Western experts and institutions (many of them still going strong today) were complicit in the human tragedy that came about as a result of Yeltsin’s economic “shock therapy”. An expert class incurious about its own failures is a familiar enough phenomenon, of course, but there are other instructive parallels between Russia in 1996 and the US in 2021. And these parallels could, perhaps, give us a glance into what will become of the apparent corporate-media-political monolith that has ascended to power behind Biden.

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There are important differences of course. When somebody in Russia starts panicking about dictatorship, they know a lot more about what it means than your typical American pundit angling for a book deal. And in 1996, many Russian liberals were worried that dictatorship was on the horizon. Yeltsin’s first term had been a failure, with millions thrown into poverty and a precipitous decline in life expectancy. As a result his opponent — one Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party — looked likely to win the election, which would have been bad news for business, as well as the values and ideals of Russia’s pro-Western liberals.

And so practically the entirety of Russia’s business, media and liberal elite rallied around Yeltsin to support his re-election. Remarkably, this was despite the fact that Yeltsin himself had, only a few years earlier, ordered an attack on Russia’s parliament when it kept blocking his executive orders. Unlike Trump’s fiasco, this incident ended not with a mob in fancy dress storming the building but rather 147 people losing their lives after an assault by tanks and helicopters.

So Yeltsin was pretty unconvincing as a champion of democracy (even if Clinton’s secretary of state praised him for his “superb handling” of the parliament). But the prospect of Zyuganov was regarded as still worse, providing Russia’s “liberal” forces with a “moral clarity”: a conviction that they had to bend and break all rules and norms to prevent him from being elected. Like America’s establishment in 2021, Russia’s elites in 1996 had no time for journalistic objectivity or “both sidesism”. The future of the nation itself was at stake.

There was no social media back then, but television had enormous influence, and the three main channels railed against Zyuganov and his communists. Of those three, one was owned 100% by the state, while the other two were controlled by oligarchs. Boris Berezovsky — later to enjoy some notoriety as a foe of Putin living in exile in England — ran ORT, while a stage director-turned-banker by the name of Vladimir Gusinsky ran NTV. Certainly Zyuganov posed a direct threat to their business interests — but they may also have entertained the notion that they were fighting for liberal democracy, and that this was far bigger than their rivalry.

As a result, Zyuganov had it considerably worse than Trump. Bar the likes of Pravda, he had very few allies in the media. ORT and NTV filled the airwaves with hagiographies of Yeltsin and documentaries on the horrors of communism. The editor of the news magazine Itogi declared, “This is not a game with equal stakes,” adding that he was “willing to be unfair” and “willing to stir up a wild anti-Communist psychosis among the people”. The general director of NTV openly took a job on Yeltsin’s campaign team.

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Perhaps no American journalist was quite so honest as to take a job directly on Biden’s campaign team, but The Washington Post did retroactively edit an article that cast Kamala Harris in an unflattering light, and the LA Times has launched an ongoing series of fawning coverage of the Vice President. So it might be slightly less irritating if significant parts of the American media did openly declare what they’re up to, instead of trying to disguise it as “journalism”.

But perhaps the most interesting parallel is that Zyuganov was not only denied any kind of favourable media coverage; he was denied access even to the communications infrastructure. When the communists tried to buy advertising on state TV, their money was turned down. At least Twitter and Facebook waited until Trump was on the way out before they switched him off. But they did still eject the actual President of the US from access to social media, whereas the bosses of Russian TV were merely excluding an opposition candidate from the airwaves. The reasoning was similar: both men were too dangerous to be granted access to a channel by which they could communicate directly with their supporters.

Yeltsin, of course, won, and the oligarchs and media barons who had supported him wound up closer to the government, wealthier and more powerful than before, while preserving — for the time being — their own status quo. And if life were a movie, that would have been a great time to roll credits, with the commies defeated and all the rich people getting to keep their money and influence.

But life carried on, and it’s the next act that’s perhaps the most instructive for us. The underlying problems that had made Zyuganov popular in the first place did not go away. Russia’s economic woes deepened. The overt collusion between the media, the oligarchs and Yeltsin — combined with disappointment in an aging President who was increasingly decrepit and erratic — led to further degradation of trust in the media and Russia’s governing institutions; democracy itself was rechristened dermokratiya — “shitocracy”.

And then, four years later, an ex-KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin came to power. A more effective authoritarian than Zyuganov, he swiftly chased Berezovsky out of the country and stripped Gusinsky of his TV station. Having been part of the Yeltsin regime himself, he understood what many members of America’s current ruling class appear not to — that any weapon you deploy against a foe can also be turned against you.

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And so we turn from Russia to the US in 2021. Again, if life were a movie, then the recent inauguration would have been a great moment to roll credits — perhaps as Lady Gaga was singing the national anthem, while a tear trickled down Stephen Colbert’s cheek. But life has already moved on.

A recent poll reveals that trust in traditional media has dropped below 50% for the first time ever, while trust in social media sits at a mighty 27%. Many Americans, like the Russians before them, are adjusting to the default assumption that at best they are not receiving the full picture. At least Russian journalists lacked the comical levels of self-regard of their US counterparts.

Nor are other institutions doing that well on the trust front, even — or perhaps especially — as they all espouse the same package of received ideas. And once the relief that Trump has gone has passed, what will become of Biden? Unlike Yeltsin, he may not disappear for days on alcoholic benders, but it is fair to say that he has not, for much of his very long career, inspired a lot of confidence. As Obama himself is reported to have said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

Now I don’t think that Biden will flame out to the extent that Yeltsin did, with the result that a sinister Putin-type rough beast shall slouch forward, to be born in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But I do think that this apparent corporate-media-institutional monolith is unlikely to endure — despite the persistent belief among some American political fantasists that each victory is their chance to exercise eternal hegemony over their enemies.

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For instance, when the billionaires behind Twitter and Facebook ejected Trump from Twitter — and, under pressure from the Democrats, began censoring all kinds of opinions of which they disapproved — they crossed a Rubicon. Once the Republicans have stopped rolling around in their own mess, they will realise that large monopolies controlled by people who are closely allied with your opposition and who wield the power to switch you off at will are not a thing to be tolerated. Alexei Navlany agrees, as do Angela Merkel and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, and we can assume that many other leaders around the world sat up and took notice, too. Some kind of rebalancing will happen, and that is not a bad thing.

While we should never underestimate the resilience of Zombie Reaganism, it, too, must eventually lose its grip on the brains of the Republicans, whose leadership is likewise very old, if not quite so old as that of the Democrats. They will realise that the market does not always correct itself, and that something will have to be done. The American context will provide its own tools for change. A new interpretation of the First Amendment, perhaps. Or a redefinition of the public square. Or the application of antitrust law to certain platforms. Or a re-examination of CDA 230 — the legislation that allows tech oligarchs to have their cake and eat it by granting them immunity from liability for what users post on their platforms, while also reserving for them the right to censor or withdraw services from users if they dislike what they post on their platforms.

If that sounds like wishful thinking, then remember that far more radical political evolutions have happened. After all, today’s Democrats may be closely allied with woke tech oligarchs, but they used to be rather friendly with the KKK, an organisation with a history of violence far worse than any of those currently being purged from social media platforms.