Manchester City fans already grieving at the loss of the conjoined creative brilliance of David Silva and Sergio Agüero will not need reminding, but in recent years City have their own secret history of world-class talent derailed by injury on international duty. In the course of a half-hour, softly spoken conversation at Bayern Munich’s training ground, Jérôme Boateng, City alumnus and World Cup winner, loses his air of deep, bespectacled cool twice. The first is when he talks with great enthusiasm about Mesut Özil, one of Boateng’s close friends in football and an opponent on Tuesday when Bayern Munich face Arsenal at the Emirates in the Champions League.

The second is when he remembers the air stewardess who pushed the drinks trolley that banged into his already damaged knee and effectively derailed his City career before it had begun in August 2010. “Oh man,” Boateng says, wincing at the memory of an injury sustained during and then after Germany’s friendly against Denmark a week before the opening week of his only Premier League season. “I had a real pain in the knee from the game. And then on the plane back I was sleeping and she pushed the trolley hard, like that, and caught it right there with the corner, right on the knee.”

So began one of the often slightly overlooked ones-that-got-away stories of recent years. Out for six weeks with collateral trolley damage, Boateng was pitched late and out of position into a City team juggling £150m of new players. He never really settled. At centre-half Roberto Mancini preferred Kolo Touré, Micah Richards and, one memorably chastening afternoon at home to Arsenal, the unfortunate Dedryck Boyata, who was sent off after five minutes. In March 2011, Boateng made the last of his 24 City appearances. A year after joining the club he was sold to Bayern Munich for a £1m loss.

“I was happy I had this experience at City but it was not a good time for me,” Boateng says, shrugging. “I came in and I was straight away out for six weeks. Then I had another injury. The manager had promised me: you are the centre-back. Instead I was left-back, right-back, and of course you do it but I was not that happy. My girlfriend was pregnant, she had a hard time and I couldn’t be there. Then, as a young man, when you get an offer from Bayern you can’t refuse”

Not that he has exactly been a stranger. Tuesday will be Boateng’s 11th Champions League match against an English club, six of them, oddly enough, against City. This time he arrives as a key central defensive peg in a team that has won 12 games in a row and conceded six goals in all matches this season. His next task is to stifle Özil, Arsenal’s chief creative influence and a player with whom Boateng came through Germany’s ranks from under-19s to world champion and whose talent as a playmaker inspires a genuine professional awe.

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“He can be frustrating,” Boateng says, grinning. “I’ve known him for a really long time. And, well … let me say he doesn’t do this on purpose [here he mimes slouching, walking slowly, looking wan and pale]. It’s just his personality, it’s what he looks like. He doesn’t want to upset people. He always does his best, but he goes through some hard times like anybody. But if he has the confidence and he gets his rhythm he is one of the best players in the world.

“He has the eye for his team-mates, he can read when you have to run. He still can do so much better too, his talent is so high, as high as anyone. When you have a good team, the right team-mates, he can play great passes.”

At moments like this there is something a little jarring about Boateng. As he talks in fluent English about how much he enjoys watching any kind of football any time (“when I was younger I watched … everything”) this oddity finally reveals itself. He is weirdly normal, strangely unremarkable. And nice too. Not nice in the way footballers often are: wary, politely tolerant. But nice in the way of everyday people, without that sheen of reflexive distance you find so often in English football’s own captive princes.

Even Boateng’s recent signing-up by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation Sports promotional agency is explained fairly reasonably as a chance to do something different with his own world champion brand, not to mention spending a little time at the summer house with Mr Z, who is, apparently, a big football fan. “He didn’t tell me which team he supports. Maybe he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

There is a musical theme here. Boateng is one of three brothers. Kevin-Prince is at Schalke. The eldest, George, once considered the real footballing talent in the family, is now a gangsta rapper. Boateng’s sister, Avelina Princess, is also in America trying her hand as a dancer.

New things, adaptation, fresh starts: if Boateng’s progress offers any kind of footballing lesson it is the importance of nurture, patience and the hunger to keep learning. He is not the most natural player at his rarified level, rather a brilliantly supple and aggressive defender with a fine brain and a system and sporting structure that has helped his talent flower to its maximum level. This has been Germany’s triumph in the current generation. Boateng has seen both sides So: why there and not here? “There are a lot of young English players who are technically good and could come to another level, but it’s a process, it takes time. I remember two, three years ago I was watching Jack Wilshere when he played against Barcelona and he was fantastic. I thought, what a player he is. In Germany young players are given more time, more patience. In England they prefer to buy already high-level players rather than spending some time building up a really talented young guy.

“I don’t want to speak for other players, but here it’s different. Young players don’t get these crazy contracts. Maybe they should work a little more on their own players, make English players, not give millions to outsiders.”

It is tempting in this context to think of Richards. At 21 there was little between the two. Boateng moved on and over the next three seasons explored the far limits of his talent with Bayern and Germany, pitching himself regularly against Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and the rest. Richards had one title-winning season, then played 33 times over the next three for City and Fiorentina on loan before joining Aston Villa in August. It seems salutary that in this period both men, one a world champion, the other capped once in four years, have been paid the same basic salary, £60,000 a week, £3.1m a year, £12.5m in total. In the Premier League, it seems, there really is no penalty for standing still.

For Boateng, Pep Guardiola’s arrival in Munich has opened another door. “I love to learn from him. He’s helped me every day. It’s a process and I have to go through that process with him in training and after the games, with videos as well as talking about tactical things. Sometimes you’ll be watching your performance in a game with him and it can be tough to take if maybe you’ve made a mistake, but it’s good.

“I’m more calm with the ball now and I can read better the game even when the opposition has the ball. I have to open the game from my position, it’s really important to play with the ball.”

This is more than just talk. In Bayern’s 5-1 defeat of Borussia Dortmund two weeks ago, he was in effect the only specialist out-and-out defender, the still centre in a weird, revolving 3-3-1-3 formation. It was, testimony to those new Guardiola stylings, Boateng’s distribution that helped change the game, his accurate long pass creating Bayern’s second goal for Thomas Müller.

Arsenal will be desperate to get something from the game having kicked off Group F with two straight defeats. Their first task will be to work out which Bayern team has turned up. Right now these are unusually fluid and versatile opponents.

Boateng has had some tough times, most notably finding himself very publicly lulled to sleep by Messi’s beguiling switch of feet in the lead up to Barcelona’s second goal in last seasons’s Champions League semi-final first leg, after which he was memed and vined and gifed into internet superstardom.

“I don’t watch about all the people laughing. It can happen to everybody. I know my own mistakes, I know when I have to do better,” he says, with some impatience, although without mentioning, as he might, that the previous year he had played Messi extremely well in the World Cup final.

“Messi is so quick, he’s so good, for me he’s the best player in the world. Barcelona had a great game, they had the ball all the time, you have to watch all the time, run and run. Eventually the concentration goes. A player like Messi, because of his position, he just waits for the ball, so the moment he gets it he can just attack. He’s going to have that moment and you’re going to be tired. That’s life, that’s football. It’s good to learn from it. You learn more from when you lose than when you just win, win, win.”