This probably was a global trend, but it was certainly got a boost from the Barcelona club and the Spain national team.

To wit: Soccer is increasingly the province of tiny men with high technical skills who can run forever. Big is out. Muscles? Not really necessary, aside from those needed to move your almost frighteningly skeletal frame.

We saw more evidence of it over the past few days, when Jurgen Klinsmann, the U.S. national coach, called for quicker and faster players … and Eric Wynalda was quoted saying that Landon Donovan is with Everton right this minute because Klinsmann told Landon he couldn’t take five weeks off and expect to play for the natjonal team during World Cup qualifying.

Some links.

Fifa.com did a long Q&A with Klinsy, and broke it into two parts. Here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.

Here are the key quotes pertaining to playing style and “modern” soccer.

“The most important part is to work and train the way you want to play. It’s not done in words or on a blackboard, but out on the training pitch. You have to work on the fast transitions, getting back behind the ball when you lose it. [You have to] bang these impulses home so that they become second nature.”

“This is not something I have come up with in my brain, or on a wish list. It is something dictated by the global game and those teams that play at the highest levels in Europe. Spain are a prime example, and FC Barcelona perhaps the best example. Germany and Holland are doing it to a lesser extent – they are driving the game forward, changing the way it’s played. I was in Brazil recently and it’s amazing that there is this sense that maybe they missed the boat a little bit in the kind of development that is going on in places like Spain. And here we’re talking about a five-time World Cup winner. The trends are set in Europe and especially in the Champions League. Now we must analyse that and figure out how best to get to that level and that way of playing.”

And, asked the U.S. players’ reaction to his goals …

“I think they’re getting the message. They’re taking to the idea of training harder, doing double sessions. I ask a lot of them from a tactical perspective, but also things like nutrition and lifestyle. It’s important to show them that they need to go further all the time, that it is up to them to drive themselves forward.”

Also, the site nationalsoccerwire.com posted nearly all of the quotes from Eric Wynalda, former national team player who now is a very fun (if often quite random) TV analyst.

During his rambling remarks, which you can find en toto here, he made this observation about the types of players who are viewed as winning players, these days:

“Let’s take the top three teams in the world, last World Cup, who were they? All right, all right, stop talking about Spain right now. It’s just not fair [chuckles]. It’s true. It’s like, there should be a beacon to the rest of the world, and to America, I swear to God, they have the top five players in the world and they’re all this big” — holds hand about five feet high, drawing laughter from the crowd. “And one of them [David Silva] plays for Man City in my opinion. Spanish midfield – that other guy who tweezes his eyebrows. There’s your top five.”

The point being that if we all now aspire to find players like the Spain/Barcelona stalwarts, we are talking about extraordinarily small men, half-starved, of the Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, David Silva, Pique sort.

Soccer has never been about big guys. Not in a sense football or rugby would recognize. But the game seemed to have room for a couple of guys who were 6-foot and weight, oh, 175. The hard men.

Now, even playing even one guy like this seems to be an invitation to disaster. Or so the coaches thing — and coaches run in packs as much as any group of junior high students you’ve ever seen.

This is good for Landon Donovan, and guys of his size. Landon is about 5-8, 150. He can run forever. He still has most of his speed, as anyone who has watched the Galaxy can attest to.

What has changed for him, and everyone, is that coaches now also seem to believe that players should play all the time. None of this “take off a few months, maybe gain a couple of pounds, not kill yourself daily” stuff. That is so five minutes ago.

Here is Wynalda, saying Landon was, basically, ordered to play, somewhere in Europe, during the MLS offseason, by Klinsmann, and that is why he is with Everton of the Premier League:

“The problem with Landon was, Jurgen Klinsmann said, ‘Don’t sit on your ass for five weeks and expect to come back here.’ Keep playing. I commend Landon for that. Landon’s a complex guy, but I think he’s in a situation right now where they’ve lost two games on the balance, we’re going to figure out his character. We’re going to find out what he’s all about, because those guys aren’t going to be like, ‘Hey, it’s good to have you again.’ What happens if they lose six in a row and he’s like, ‘Bye guys, gotta go.’”

Wynalda is talking about Everton there. Though I imagine Klinsmann is less interested in Everton results than he is in David Moyes talking up Landon — his individual performance, that is.

So, more about this later, but we’re heading into the Age of Tiny. Which is really interesting. Most of us grew up being told we couldn’t play this sport, that one or the other because we were too small.

Now, some of us may well be too big, for the Global Game, anyway. We are carrying too much muscle to be able to sprint for 90 minutes. We weigh more than do Xavi and Iniesta.

I worry for the likes of Carlos Bocanegra — and for a batch of England’s players. Just too big and too slow. That’s where we’re going. Not sure I like it.