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Sanchez, Suarez and Aguero - the age of the solo genius

Alexis Sanchez can see and do things that lesser players cannot compute © Getty Images

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What sort of a state would Arsenal be in without Alexis Sanchez? Just ask Liverpool.

With Luis Suarez: would have won League were it not for a couple of bits of unforeseeable bad luck. Without Luis Suarez: will be doing well to finish in the top six. How could one little man make such a huge difference? Genius, basically.

They used to taunt David Moyes with the song "football genius". Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho are accorded the accolade for real, and not just by themselves. But it is a terribly misused term, for managers.

Football fans and the media buy into the idea of the manager as architect, the smartest man in the room, shaping a football club to his will and building a culture, a team, an institution, a dynasty. Team results, however, suggest entirely otherwise: it comes down to having one great player, or if you're very lucky, a couple.

Tottenham's Hugo Lloris single-handedly stopped Manchester United at White Hart Lane © PA Photos

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Sanchez, against QPR and on several other occasions this season, has looked in a different class to the men around him. Not only is he technically superb, he has a remarkable appetite and work-rate. It's not just that he is quite a bit better than, for instance, Jack 'World Class' Wilshere: he sees things and does things that lesser players simply do not compute. This improves the players around him. The influence is incalculable.

Over at Manchester City, the reliance on Sergio Aguero has been established for a while now, and came further to the fore this season with the apparent dimming of Yaya Toure's light. If Aguero were to succumb to long-term injury, there is no supporting cast to share the burden as Edin Dzeko and Yaya did last season. It's more or less all up to their Argentine great.

For Tottenham, Hugo Lloris defied Manchester United singlehandedly in the first half of the match on Sunday. It's more unusual for a team's most important player to be a goalkeeper, but that's the state of affairs at White Hart Lane. By the second half, Lloris seemed to have blunted Man United's ambition; the rest of the match was utterly forgettable.

And at the very top of the tree, like a little Argentine angel, there is Messi. There must have been millions of words written about Barcelona's system, their style, their philosophy, their belief. All of those things may be true, but the unanswerable fact is that Messi made those things possible.

If you have a true genius in your ranks and he can stay fit and (unlike in the era of the Crazy Gang, so vividly brought to life in that Boxing Day documentary, the laws of the game protect them sufficiently that they cannot be maimed into irrelevance) then it really doesn't matter all that much how you organise the grunt labour.

It might be because the new generation of football fan comes to the sport not via going to a match with a relative, but by watching on the telly and playing football games. A lot of younger fans seem unable to differentiate between the Ronaldo they control on their PlayStation and the one doing cartoonishly brilliant, outrageously skilful things on the television. We are all in thrall to the genius player, and the increasing absence of physical tackling has allowed the genuinely skilful to thrive.

This is the age of the individual - and not just on the football pitch. The world, more than ever, is about influencers - the people, either justly or unjustly, who can make things happen by the force of their talent. Or, rather more depressingly, the force of their personality. Russell Brand gets to talk on Newsnight.

Nigel Farage is named the Briton of the Year by a newspaper. How many of us could name a second member of UKIP other than its pint-chugging leader? Attention and wealth are coalescing ever more around a smaller and smaller group of Übermenschen.

In football, as in life, this is the age of the solo genius.

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd