If you want a picture of the future, imagine Michael Kayode winding up to take a long throw – forever. Or at least that was how it seemed in October. Already, though, the picture has begun to change. This was the year of the backlash, and then a bit of a backlash to the backlash.

For almost two decades football had accepted the guardiolista consensus. Football was about possession, about the press, but most of all about position, about the careful manipulation of space. Much-improved pitches meant first touches could be taken for granted: players receiving the ball didn’t have to focus on getting it under control but could instead be parsing their options. The game had become chess with a ball, a matter of strategy more than physicality.

Into which environment enter Nicolas Jover, Austin MacPhee, Bernardo Cueva and the fleet of set-piece coaches who have transformed the Premier League this season: 21.8% of goals have come from corners or throw-ins, up from 13.9% last season.

Nicolas Jover and the fleet of set-piece coaches have transformed the Premier League. Photograph: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC/Getty Images

To an extent that is a result of referees being far more prepared to permit challenges on goalkeepers. The era when any contact was considered a foul is, thankfully, over but the degree of licence has perhaps gone too far when players can grab an opponent’s arm – as, say, David Brooks did to Gianluigi Donnarumma in the buildup to Bournemouth’s goal at Manchester City this season – and not be penalised on the grounds that he released his grip before the ball arrived in the penalty area.

But it’s also about a more general trend of tactical history, which is the reinvention of old methods in new circumstances. This does not mean, as is often claimed, that tactics are cyclical. That would imply they followed a set pattern – winter, spring, summer, autumn – when it’s more that changing priorities can lead to vulnerabilities emerging that, once recognised, can be exploited.

As the game became increasingly about possession, the focus for defenders, at least at elite clubs, became less about their heading, marking and tackling, the old-fashioned defensive virtues, than their ability on the ball. Which, it turns out, offered an opportunity if you could put them under aerial pressure.

That led to a minor moral panic. How could football survive if it just became a series of set pieces, the fluidity that can make football so compelling swept aside by a generation of gurus with iPads and playbooks? The International Football Association Board, which sets the laws of the game, murmured about forcing teams to take set plays within 30 seconds of them being awarded.

This is a telling reveal: officials awarding a set play can often take several minutes using VAR to make a decision, while those taking them are to be chivvied and harassed? Which is only right: why would anybody want to see the person best equipped to take a set play, who may have to jog 50 yards to take it, set themselves and take it to the best of their ability? Far more important to get the ball back in play as quickly as possible so we can get to the real business of another penalty appeal or hair’s-breadth offside call.

Robert Sánchez was able to claim throws with comfort against Tottenham with the box less crowded. Photograph: David Klein/Reuters

Over the years, though, football has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to stabilise, to maintain the balance between attack and defence, between technique and physique, without the need to tweak the laws in the way other sports have felt the need for adjustment.

Defenders started remembering how to head. Against Tottenham, Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea left three players upfield. Spurs, wary of being caught on the break, left men back to cover. With the box less crowded, the goalkeeper Robert Sánchez was able to come and claim throws with a degree of comfort. It’s not that throws or set plays are no longer a weapon, merely that already they don’t seem quite as devastating or impossible to combat as they did even a couple of months ago. The proportion of goals from throw-ins and corners has fallen 5.2% from the end of October.

It seems not unreasonable to assume this is the way football will be for a time. The sport is 160 years old, it is mature. If there are revolutions to come, they will be rare and almost certainly predicated on a technological advance akin to the change in pitch technology that underlay guardolismo; it’s possible to imagine the data revolution and AI having a similarly profound impact. What Pep Guardiola did, re-invoking the principles of Total Football for a world of flat pitches, creating a worldwide revolution, is exceptionally unusual.

Dominic Calvert-Lewin is in the best scoring form of his career. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

Even Guardiola has stepped back from the radicalism of his Barcelona days. In part that may be because once a strand of thought has been pushed so far, the only way to go is backwards, just as many artists, having pursued abstraction to an extreme, end up returning to something more representational, although filtered through the lessons of that process of radicalism. Revolutions once experienced are never forgotten.

But it’s also, as Guardiola explicitly said towards the end of last season, about the crowded nature of the calendar. He would prefer a small squad he can indoctrinate in his theories, a philosophy to underlay the specific plans he comes up with for each game. The hectic schedule, though, means there is no longer time for such bespoke preparation, while the physical demands on players mandate a larger squad.

That encourages an approach of tweaking and adaptation, aided by the data revolution, perhaps raiding the past for approaches modern sides have forgotten how to deal with. Leeds’s upturn since Daniel Farke switched to a front two at half-time in the defeat by Manchester City is a case in point. Centre-backs pairings used to having one to mark and one to cover have had to adapt to both marking and the result has been Dominic Calvert-Lewin hitting the best goalscoring run of his career.

This is a fascinating period for tactics. The monolithic belief of guardiolismo has fractured and nobody is entirely sure what is to follow. It’s a little like English football after the defeat by Hungary in 1953. The old ways are over and in their place has come an age of small-scale experimentation and counter-experimentation from which, eventually, the new era will be synthesised.