Maseru, March 23 -- In his 2008 book, Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics, Jonathan Wilson famously argued that it is the English, perhaps more than any other people, who are "unwilling to grapple with the abstract".

Despite hosting a cosmopolitan league, its teams have routinely, through multiple eras, demonstrated susceptibility to novel and inventive tactics. How many champions have we seen crowned after foreign managers came in with new ideas and the open-mindedness to implement them?

This is not limited to the Premier League, of course. Having bred his Liverpool side on English shores, Jurgen Klopp successfully translated his innovations to the European stage - capturing the Champions League in the process.

But ...