Carlos Corberan puts Huddersfield Town at the vanguard of football's latest revolution

Strange, isn’t it, that Football Manager will nowadays expect you to know the French term for an attacking midfielder, the Spanish for a box-to-box midfielder, or the Italian for a creative playmaker, and yet it cannot replicate the tactics of a Championship football club.

This complaint became apparent during a recent but fairly short-lived dalliance with the world’s favourite time-eating spreadsheet: “Why can’t I set one formation off the ball and another on it?”

The game goes off – nothing to do with going out in the FA Cup to lower league opposition, of course, simply the stupid game being stupid unrealistic (and not letting us stupid win.)

And now, in reality, we are watching Huddersfield Town from the stands. It’s the opening minutes of a game, and after taking a few minutes to just sit and see how things are playing out, the shape is set into the player ratings: it’s a 3-4-3, on this February night. In comes a message from a fan watching at home on WhatsApp. It reads: “4-3-3?”. A correction is sent back; the sender is flummoxed. But that’s clearly a four at the back? That wing-back is clearly a winger? And they’re not wrong, and yet they are wrong, all at the same time.

To an extent it always has been this way: a 4-4-2 always became a lopsided 3-3-4 as one full-back and both wingers would push forward, and so on. Formational notation has always been a vague and elusive art at best under all but the most structurally rigid of managers, who enjoyed particular success in England in the mid-2000s: stern sheriffs from Spain and Portugal arriving in a tactical wild west and finding a populous in need of ordering and controlling.

Football has moved on a bit since then, though, and as an instructive Tifo video spells