Leeds v Manchester United best bets and tactical preview: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's men worthy favourites

Throughout English football history the measure of a manager’s success is tangible progress, be it points tallies or trophy wins, and with Man Utd one point away from beating their 2019/20 points tally of 66 Solskjaer is undoubtedly achieving his goal.

But the sport has changed considerably in the last five years, the landscape of English football shifting dramatically thanks to a new wave of hyper-tacticians in the dugouts of elite clubs and thanks to the impact of the Premier League’s growing financial divide.

Kick-off time: 14:00 BST, Sunday

TV channel: Sky Sports Premier League

Year-on-year improvement, measured by points tallies, may not be enough: just because United are on an upward trajectory doesn’t mean it won’t level off before they reach a title-challenging 90+ points.

The distorting effects of swelling Champions League revenue has created an upper-class so unassailably powerful their owners believed – briefly, wrongly – that they deserved to pull away into their own closed-shop Super League.

For now that threat has diminished, but the problem of monstrous wealth disparity remains, the biggest tangible impact of which is a tactical re-imagining of how football is played.

How have Premier League tactics changed?

Most Premier League matches are now attack versus defence. The big team has 65% possession and is faced with a deep block that looks to hold firm and counter-attack in small bursts in behind a high opposition line.

This is what happens when the quality gap is allowed to get so big, and the consequence has been a half-decade of uber-structured attacking coaches like Pep Guardiola constructing intricate set plays to pull those defensive shells apart.

The buzzword of the moment is ‘automatisms’: a series of pre-ordained passing moves etched into muscle memory on the training ground.

What is fascinating about Solskjaer is that, despite lacking the clear possession structure of the elite coaches, he is beginning to make us question whether we really need that level of tactical detail after all.

As the wealth gap gets wider and wider, Solskjaer’s reign makes us wonder if perhaps we are simply passing through a transitional period in which tactical nous is needed to turn forced possession dominance into goals, and once through the other side having better players can win the day through brute force alone.

Man Utd are a peculiar team to watch. Game after game there appears to be little semblance of a wider plan, the players drifting about in formation but rarely making runs in twos or threes, rarely repeating patterns of play, and rarely appearing to think more than one step ahead.