How soccer loves its little numbers! No discussion of the sport gets very far these days before the three-digit codes surface, and off we go into a discussion of the relative merits of the 3-4-3 and the 4-4-2 and the 3-5-2 and so forth.

The numbers represent tactical formations, a way of indicating how a team arranges its defenders, midfielders, and forwards on the field. Only 10 players, not the 11 of a full team, because the goalkeeper is not included. His position is fixed, we always know where to find him on the field.

Which reveals a basic flaw in the whole idea. Soccer is very definitely not a positional sport. Arguably, it is the archetypical anti-positional sport, with players in constant, rapid, position-switching motion.

Probably the only time a team can be seen to resemble the shape suggested by its tactical code is when it “lines up” just before the kick-off. The three lines of players, stretched across the field, can be clearly seen; but once the opening whistle blows, soccer’s version of Brownian movement takes over and suddenly the 3-5-2 becomes a 3-4-3 and then a 4-6-0 and then a heaven-knows-what.

In 1993, when Johan Cruyff was coaching at Barcelona, he attempted to break the rigidity suggested by the three-digit codes, and described his team formation as a 3-1-2-2-1-1.

But, said Cruyff, “… that’s just for the journalists.” Maybe Cruyff – one of the greatest and most mercurial of players – believed that coaches spurned the use of numerical aids, but the weight of evidence is against him. The number-codes and the formations they depict have become an essential part of the coaching vocabulary.

Indeed, one of the current buzz phrases among English soccer coaches refers to a team’s “shape.” A team keeping its shape – i.e. its 3-5-2 or whatever – is doing well. A team losing its shape is in trouble.

Cruyff’s “just for the journalists” gibe was an excuse for even mentioning numbers, because he knew that they could not tell the whole story. Not least because of the vagueness that surrounds them.

After the 1994 World Cup, both FIFA and the United States Soccer Federation published technical reports analyzing the games. Both reports were compiled by experienced coaches, yet on basic matters of team formation they flatly contradicted each other.

According to FIFA, Mexico played with a 4-3-3, while the USSF said it used a 4-4-2; the Netherlands used a “traditional 4-4-2” according to the USSF, while FIFA had them with “a basic 3-5-2”; Romania was a 3-5-2 team, said FIFA, but the USSF said they used a 4-4-2.

More recently, the FIFA report on the 2002 World Cup had winners Brazil playing a 3-4-2-1 – a formation that suggests a massive revolution in Brazilian soccer. Any Brazilian coach or fan will tell you that Brazil always plays with a back line of four players, so the formation was really a 4-3-2-1, with center-backs Edmilson and Lucio and outside backs Cafu and Roque Junior as the four defenders.

Such massive contradictions among the experts are easy to ridicule, but they are probably inevitable. The speed of the modern game and the technical flexibility of its players make rigid classifications almost impossible.

Looking at that Brazilian lineup in 2002, were the FIFA experts wrong to assume that the attack-minded Cafu was more of a midfielder than a defender? Hardly – but to Brazilians he was quite definitely part of the traditional, almost sacrosanct, back four.

Provided they are not taken too literally, the number codes have their use, conveniently providing what Cruyff called “an approximate idea” of how a team plays. But there is also a sense in which the numbers are not merely harmless shorthand, but an expression of a dangerously distorted version of the sport.

Numbers are impersonal. By removing the very idea of personality, they imply a sport in which positional role-playing is more important than the individual player.

This insidious process carries off the most unlikely victims. Like Gordon Strachan, once an impish, individualistic midfielder for Scotland, then a lively coach, and now a contributor to the Guardian, where he recently pondered the runaway success of Chelsea in the Premier league.

The starting point for his analysis of Chelsea is its 4-3-3 formation; he concludes with a suggestion that the way to play against Chelsea is to use a 4-4-2, leaving no doubt that he considers tactics and formations to be the key to everything.

But Strachan – who surely knows and appreciates the value of skilled players – also heaps praise on Chelsea’s Arjen Robben and Damien Duff, who are the wide players in that 4-3-3, along with Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney, who play the same role with Manchester United (he could have added Arsenal’s Jose Reyes and Thierry Henry to his list). In particular, he points out the problems these players cause for the opposition when they desert their wide positions, and start “roaming all over the place and running at people.”

Sadly, what he does not do is to point out that it is the individual brilliance of these players that is at the heart of their trouble-causing activities. This has little, if anything, to do with tactics. An average player “roaming all over the place” would not cause much concern among good defenders.

Robben, Duff & Co are not average players. They possess brilliant, unique, individual skills; surely those qualities cry out for recognition before the talk of tactics begin. They are, in the words of the Brazilian national team coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, players who make a difference.

That is Parrera describes Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and Ronaldinho, the brilliant attacking trio who inspired Brazil’s 2002 World Cup triumph. And that surely gets far closer to the essence of this dynamically protean sport – because it focuses on players, not numbers.

Once the talk turns to individual players, the sport is no longer a mathematical formula, and it comes alive with the names and faces and playing styles and skills that tell the real tale of those three-digit codes.