The Manchester City ace is not impressed with the move towards more defensive tactics from certain teams and increasingly feels game play is less “open” than it used to be.

Asked how he sees football in the next few years, he told FourFourTwo magazine: “It’s something I speak a lot about with my friends.

“I think it’s going to be very similar to handball. Do you know about handball? They stay all across their own area, just blocking. They don’t try to man-mark, they just stand there.

“In my opinion it’s a mess, but we see now that when a team feels they’re maybe worse than the other, they are so defensive with almost 11 players in the box. It’s the new football.

“The team that’s defending play counter-attack, and the team trying to open them up are very spread out.

“That’s how I see football in the future.

“Even between two big teams, it used to be that the game was open, but now it doesn’t matter if the level of the two teams is similar. When they defend, they move back.”

The defensive midfielder always relishes playing Liverpool because they are “not conservative” in their tactics.

He said: “That’s why I enjoy most of the games we play against Liverpool.

“It’s great because we think, ‘I don’t care, I want to punish you’ and they have the same feeling.

“They’re not conservative, they go with the same mentality.”