JUNE 24 — The World Cup group stage exit of reigning champions Spain might have come as a surprise, but the fact that they failed to match the high standards they set over the last few years was certainly not.

Warning signs for Vicente Del Bosque’s now-deposed team had been there for a while, most glaringly when they were humbled 3-0 by Brazil in last summer’s Confederations Cup Final — a minor tournament maybe, but Spain were handed a lesson which they refused to heed, preferring instead to bury their heads in the sand and pretend everything would be OK.

Similarly, the obvious weaknesses of Barcelona, whose style and playing personnel have also provided the backbone of Spain’s team for the last half-decade, should have sent alarm bells ringing for Del Bosque as long ago as last May, when they were hammered 7-0 on aggregate by Bayern Munich in the 2012/13 Champions League semi-final.

Despite having dominated the club and international scene for so many years, it had become increasingly evident that Barcelona and Spain were no longer the imperious force they once were. Del Bosque either couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to address that slide, and now his team are heading home from Brazil even though the party still has nearly three weeks to run.

However, I don’t believe any of this necessarily means that the ‘tiki-taka’ brand of football made famous by Barcelona and Spain is now ‘dead’, as many pundits have been eager to declare over the last couple of weeks.

There always has been and always will be a huge amount of debate about how football is played. Formations, strategies, tactics, philosophies… these topics are all capable of generation impassioned arguments, with many people — ranging from armchair pundits to experienced professional coaches — vehement in their insistence that there is a ‘right’ way to play.

Ever since Pep Guardiola took over as Barcelona manager and Del Bosque was appointed Spain boss within the space of a couple of weeks in the summer 2008, signalling a tremendous era of success for both teams, the widespread conclusion has been that a short-passing, high-pressing style is the way to go, sparking a plethora of copy-cat efforts all over the world by managers who happily converted to the notion that attempting to dominate possession is the ‘only’ way to play.

Now, though, we are seeing that everything has its cycle. Barcelona have been usurped in Spain by an Atletico Madrid team who are quite happy to do the opposite: surrender the majority of possession to the opposition, sit deep, defend with discipline, and then launch rapid counter-attacking strikes.

On the international scene, Spain have been ‘found out’ in a similar way, with the Netherlands and Chile both adopting physically aggressive approaches and overrunning the midfield, preventing Spain from establishing the smooth passing rhythm which has characterised their game over the last few years.

Xavi Hernandez participates in Spain's national football team training session at RFK Stadium in Washington June 5, 2014. — Reuters pic

And hence, we have the so-called ‘death of tiki-taka’.

I feel that analysis is missing the point. Any style of play can only be successful if it is well executed, and the task for any manager is to implement a tactical approach which allows the players at his disposal to perform at the maximum of their abilities.

That is exactly what Barcelona and Spain did when they effectively handed over control on the pitch to Xavi, arguably the best passer of a ball and reader of a game ever to have laced up a pair of boots.

It helped, of course, that Xavi was surrounded by kindred spirits — exceptionally gifted players such as Andres Iniesta, Lionel Messi and the under-rated Sergio Busquets — who shared their leader’s touch, vision, range of passing and hunger for possession.

The crucial point, however, is that more than just technical skills were required. The second part of tiki-taka — one just as important as the ability to pass the ball — is relentless pressing of the opposition, effectively reducing the size of the pitch in an attempt to win the ball back as quickly as possible and preventing the other team from establishing any control over the game.

Doing that requires prodigious levels of fitness and here too — although it is rarely listed among his prime virtues — Xavi excelled. As well as receiving more touches of the ball than any other player, Xavi’s incredible stamina allowed him to cover more ground than anybody else, setting the tempo for his team both with and without the ball.

To get to the point: tiki-taka succeeded for Barcelona and Spain not because of any inherent superiority within the system, but because the players who were executing it were perfectly suited to its demands. And the decline has set in not due to any weakness of the playing strategy, but because its chief orchestrator, Xavi, is now 34 and can’t run like he used to.

If different players had been at his disposal, Guardiola would never have won 14 trophies in four years by playing tiki-taka. Likewise, if Diego Simeone had attempted to instil a short-passing, possession-heavy approach with his Atletico players, it’s very unlikely they would now be champions.

Systems might be devised by coaches, but they are executed by players. The best coaches ensure the systems they implement are suited to the players at their disposal, and Barcelona’s success came because they had Xavi, Guardiola and a long-term youth development system all pulling in the same direction.

Now, sadly, Xavi is a declining force and set to leave Barcelona for a lucrative pre-retirement payday in Qatar, and the ‘death of tiki-taka’ is more a question of his demise rather than anything to do with the system itself.

However, both it and he will be back. Barcelona are continuing to develop players in the same way and they have more promising youngsters poised to make a mark on the first team (in particular a 19-year-old midfielder called Sergi Samper).

And once he’s finished his playing career in the Middle East and taken the necessary coaching qualifications, expect Xavi to return to the Nou Camp as manager, ready to prolong the traditions he knows so well.

Tiki-taka isn’t dead; it’s just sleeping while Xavi makes the transition from player to coach. Assuming he can then find the right players to execute the system — maybe even Samper — it could well dominate the world once more.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.