England has long relied on imported players, coaches, and best practices. Now it is trying something new

Real Madrid’s players did not seem especially concerned about this state of affairs. They would have known as they prepared for their Champions League semifinal that there would be phases when there was little they could do beyond watch City move the ball around. The danger, in those moments, is allowing your concentration to flicker, just for a moment, to be mesmerized by the swirling patterns.

The crowd did not like it one bit. The modern Real Madrid might be a dichotomy of convenience — simultaneously seeing themselves as the game’s greatest statesmen and nothing but a scrappy underdog — but there are some boundaries their fans are not willing to cross.

The idea that a visitors should come to the Bernabéu and look as comfortable as Manchester City did, in that spell Tuesday night, was clearly one of them. Guardiola’s team looked so thoroughly at home that they might as well have had their feet on the coffee table and a wash in the machine.

And so the crowd started first to whistle, and then to jeer. Boos washed down the stands, designed to encourage Real’s players to break out of their defensive phalanx, to reassert their primordial right to dominance.

It was hard not to be struck by the oddness of the scene. The idea that English teams arrive at Europe’s great citadels with a technical deficit is horribly outdated. The idea that English football lacks refinement when compared with its continental cousins is, at the elite level, such an anachronism that younger readers might struggle to believe it ever existed.

The Premier League’s emissaries have between them conquered all of the most revered territory in Europe over the last couple of decades. It was as long ago as 2006 that Arsenal became the first English team to win at the Bernabéu. A couple of years later, Arsène Wenger’s team did the same thing to AC Milan at San Siro.Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and City itself have all won at Camp Nou or the Allianz Arena or one of the European game’s other sacred spaces.

Some of these victories have been rooted in defensive obduracy and surgical precision in attack. Sometimes, they’ve been won by greater physicality, higher intensity — England’s traditional virtues repurposed as weapons. One or two of them might have been a little bit lucky

Increasingly, though, they win by inflicting on Europe’s great and good the sort of treatment that England’s teams had to endure for so long. They have, with mounting frequency, displayed a level of tactical sophistication and technical deftness their opponents cannot match.

City’s display in Madrid might not have led to a victory — not yet, anyway — but the scale of their superiority was noteworthy. In part, that could be traced to the individual excellence of Guardiola’s players. The coach, too, deserves credit for the work he has done in shaping and molding this team. City’s real advantage, though, was in the novelty of their ideas.

There should be nothing controversial about the suggestion that the Premier League, in its current incarnation, isn’t identifiably English, not in any real sense. It bears about as much relation to the century of English football culture that preceded it, in fact, as the modern Manchester City do to the club that occupied the stadium on Maine Road for all those years.

But for the most part, what the Premier League sells is imported. The players, of course, and more and more of the coaches, too, but everything else as well. The training methods, the organisational structures, the playing philosophies, the strategies, the tactics: All of them have been sourced elsewhere and added to the mixture.

That is not a criticism. It is the Premier League’s openness — both to ideas as well as to investment — that has helped transform a backwater league into the most engaging domestic competition on the planet. The transformation in England’s football culture, once so insular, is something to be admired.

But while the Premier League has long been a crucible, it has rarely been a laboratory. The football its teams play now is, of course, substantially more complex than it was 20 years ago. There are wing backs and false nines, low blocks and high presses, inverted wingers and sweeper-keepers. Every trend has washed up on these shores eventually (sometimes a little reluctantly). It is a showcase of football ’s contemporary thought.

Rarely, however, have any of those ideas actually emerged in England. Perhaps a degree of skepticism is an enduring streak of Englishness, or perhaps it is a function of the league’s wealth: Why experiment when you can, in effect, pay someone else to take those risks for you?

All of the innovations that have changed English football have been developed elsewhere, in the startup cultures of Europe: from Wenger’s decree that perhaps athletes should not drink the whole time all the way to the high press preached by Jürgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa.

It is then entirely possible that Guardiola has done something unique this season. He had already pioneered the idea that a fullback might actually be a wing (at Barcelona) or an ancillary midfielder (at Bayern Munich). Now, though, he has gone one step further, and introduced the concept that perhaps a central defender does not need to be held back by a label.

At the Bernabéu, it was the presence of John Stones — both a defender and a midfielder — that allowed City to exert such control. It was the numerical advantage he gave Guardiola’s team in the center of the field that meant Real Madrid had to be so passive that they risked the wrath of their home crowd

Nothing in football is ever truly new, of course. All of these positional switches are — as journalist, historian and Ted Lasso product-placement expert Jonathan Wilson has noted — simply the game reverting to the formation known as the W-M, played as orthodoxy in the 1930s.

Anyone hailing Guardiola’s imagination might be pointed to Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United, for example — a team that regularly allowed its defenders to moonlight as midfielders without any risk at all of being presented as football ’s cutting edge.

That Guardiola has done it, though, matters. It gives the concept his seal of approval and turns it into best practice. Where he treads, others will follow. For once, the Premier League will not find itself adopting the ideas of others, perfecting and reflecting them to be admired, but with a contribution of its own that it can send out into the world, something that will forever be a little slice of England.