Atletico Madrid have shown us that there will never be only one way to win a football match.

Not so long ago, Barcelona and Spain ruled the roost and football snobbery was inescapable.

These two teams won every trophy there is to win with a remarkable group of players. But there was a second thing they achieved, which isn’t spoken about so much. For the first time in my lifetime, football teams with a unique style had succeeded in brainwashing all of Europe into thinking that their way was the only way of playing.

Those of us who liked to see teams move the ball around by running with it at pace, and playing both long and short passes, were told that possession was now everything. As Jose Mourinho said last season, we were almost getting to the stage where football could be played on a beautiful carpet, with no goals, and the team with more ball possession wins.

If that’s not what you liked watching, too bad, because ‘that’s just how football is played now’. Not a fan of endless passing until the opposition finally gets bored and lets you score a tap in? Then you’re a dinosaur.

Pundits and coaches everywhere had bought into the same message. Barcelona were the establishment, and it was up to other teams to play as much like Barcelona as possible to prove themselves worthy of joining the establishment, rather than challenging it.

But one man wasn’t interested in joining any establishment.

Diego Simeone grew up in Buenos Aires during an era where Argentine and Uruguayan sides dominated South American football. In the Intercontinental Cup, which had a lot more meaning then than the World Club Championship does today, these sides would rough up the European champions until they could stand no more. By the late 70s, European teams simply wimped out, and the competition was scrapped in the two-leg format.

Simeone’s favourite Argentinian team, Racing Club, have consistently underperformed since the day he was born in 1970. At Racing games, there is one song the fans sing louder than any other. It’s not about the brilliance of any player or about winning trophies, it’s about the day the club got liquidated in 1998 and the weekend after, when tens of thousands of fans turned up to what would have been a home game and sang non-stop for ninety minutes, as if there was still a game on. There, the showboating of Barcelona must seem a million miles away.

A holding midfielder by trade, Simeone knew that if his teams had the right amount of togetherness, defensive stability and a pinch of nastiness, anything was possible. Watching Simeone on the touchline in Munich last night was like a watching a fan managing his favourite club. In the latter stages, a shove on the fourth official for failing to allow Atletico to make a substitution, told you everything you needed to know about a man who lives and breathes football.

It would be easy to see Simeone’s achievements with Atletico Madrid as simply managing resources and getting lucky. BT’s much-maligned pundit Michael Owen said that it is much easier to set up a defensive team than an attacking team, but that’s not quite true. No team in the history of the game has ever been set up to withstand as much pressure as Atletico, not even Greece in Euro 2004.

That’s before you even consider the turnover of players. Over the years the vultures have always circled for Simeone’s finest talents. Falcao, Diego Costa, Turan Arda Mario Mandzukic and Felipe Luis (who returned this season) all left. Every single time it was those players who stagnated at their new clubs, and Simeone’s Atletico who progressed.

To support Atletico is to feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up on end during every minute of every game, and the fans repay their team with more and more noise every time. That’s why I prefer it to the Barcelona spectacle, which is like watching the best actors at the most expensive theatre. You can appreciate what they are doing, but you can’t really get involved in it. How can a fan chant at the top of their voices for more passing and more possession?

The man who Simeone defeated, Pep Guardiola, will no doubt come back stronger than ever with Man City next season. But thanks to the efforts of Simeone, as well as Leicester City, who will be covered in Part 2, no team will be stupid enough to turn up at the Etihad and play directly into Guardiola’s hands by trying to emulate his style of play.

NEXT UP: How Leicester City have caught all of English football flat-footed