Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.

That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of football analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.

The answer was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all the other players combined. The best way to win in football, Jeandupeux discovered, was to ensure that as little football as possible was played.

He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action.

His timing was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International football Association Board — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organisation, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.

A few months after that World Cup, Blatter created what he called Task Force 2000, precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of making the game more dynamic and dramatic.

Jeandupeux’s letter crystallised many of their thoughts. Jeandupeux suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a football cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.

The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.

Everything in modern football flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.

It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at football’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.

But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of football itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The football that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.

It is important to remember that as, once again, the sport finds itself discussing change. UEFA, European football’s governing body, has already rubber-stamped a new format for the Champions League. This week, it confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified on what has been called, a little euphemistically, “historical merit.”

Even that, though, did not go far enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as chair of the European Clubs’ Association — rather than president of Paris Saint-Germain or chair of beIN Sports or chair of Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation — Al-Khelaifi has other changes on his mind.