There are always plenty of candidates when it comes to identifying a "lost generation" in English football. Current lost generations include the recent output of slightly baffled-looking Premier League academy graduates and beyond this that long-standing generation of indolent Premier League underachievers, embodied best by somebody such as Shaun Wright‑Phillips whose life for the past decade, on the back of a few brilliant goals for Manchester City, has basically involved being ferried between skyscraper and nightclub in an ostrich‑skin helicopter wearing a suit woven from parmesan cheese shavings and a solid gold hat.

My own favourite lost generation is a bit more niche. I've often wondered what happened to schoolboy footballers of the 1970s and 1980s who grew up wanting to be a sweeper, who trained and practised and insisted they were going to become a sweeper against despairing parental advice, before being cast into instant obsolescence when the English sweeper disappeared almost overnight some time in late September 1982, like a colony of doomed bees.

In truth the English sweeper was always a bit of a fudge, most often a co-opted centre‑half goaded and spooked into bolting forward indiscriminately every now and then like some heroically doomed lieutenant haring out of the trench with an unexploded mortar shell under one arm. But the word itself lingers in the lexicon. Often a player doing something slightly unusual or hard to categorise will be described as "playing almost like a sweeper" – Hugo Lloris, who likes to come off his line, or Michael Carrick, who seems jarringly under‑panicked – usually in a crowing voice, as though identifying some appalling cultural transgression.

The reason for talking about this here is that the ghost of the sweeper was summoned again this week in an interesting piece of analysis in Uefa's own Champions League magazine, in which Bayern Munich's Philipp Lahm – perhaps the single most achingly hip footballer of the European season – was described as "a modern libero". Lahm, of course, has been relocated into the centre of midfield by Pep Guardiola, where he is playing not simply as a run-of-the-mill defensive midfielder – that would be far too simple – but as something more fluid, a little more involved: a forward sweeper, a sweeper-holder, a man able to make full use not just of the brush, but of the dustpan too.

It has been one of the more fascinating positional shifts and not just because it involves Lahm, a brilliantly upright, throbbingly intelligent all‑weather footballer, or indeed Guardiola, football's incumbent seer, monk, prophet and positional fetishist. Mainly it is another significant mark in the rise and rise of the holding midfielder, elite modern football's own coming man, cultish glamour boy and general prom king in waiting. Previously a snuffling, backwoods kind of figure – but ubiquitous where the sweeper was at least elegantly scarce – the holding player has emerged decisively into the light in recent years, brushing the leaves from his beard and beginning, cautiously, to stride about on his hind legs.

It has been an ascent-of-man-style rise from the old-style holding midfielder as embodied by the excellent Peter Reid, whose role was essentially to appear alongside more skilful players as a kind of scowling enforcer, epitome of the prison-warder midfielder, so much so that you half-expected to look down and notice he was playing with a cosh in his hand and a bunch of keys dangling from his waistband. A few years later Carlton Palmer became famous for "covering every blade of grass", albeit with the proviso that he was covering every blade of grass, just not necessarily in the right order. Meanwhile, other nations filled football's in-between place with deep playmakers, double-pivots and scowling ponytailed men whose expertise lay in the armpit-pinch, the arm-hair yank, the unexpected rabbit punch to the kidneys.

This runs right through to the current elite incarnation embodied first by Sergio Busquets, who is not so much a holding as a giving midfielder, acting as a kind of ever-present overflow desk to the man in possession and a claustrophobic obstacle in retreat. Now we have Lahm, the starriest addition to the ranks and a player whose presence in the traditional midfield bog-hole above all signifies that this is a very different position at the top level.

There are good reasons for this, not least the related rise of inside-forwards, gentrifying a previously neglected pocket of space into a modern-day hot spot. Plus of course possession of the ball is now everything, with the holding midfielder its guardian, no longer a defensive sandbag but a quartermaster, a roving supply depot, a general in the field.

With this in mind I was excited to see Lahm play in Munich this week, although as it turned out he didn't play in his new role, instead appearing at full-back, from where I have a single vague memory of "the most intelligent player" Guardiola has ever managed booting the ball really high in the air at one point. This was of course a bit of a disappointment after the performance at the Etihad, where in Lahm's hands that central-shuffler role really did look like something new, and where he seemed always endearingly persuasive and bright-eyed, prompting and steering and interjecting expertly, the footballing equivalent of the kind of precociously assured schoolboy who quietly manipulates his parents into being nice at Christmas in a TV advert for a major department store.

There is always a chance that the rise of the holding midfielder to his current status as midfield concierge, midfield maitre d' – or something more technophile: the midfield router, the midfield network hub – may simply turn out to be an example, above all, of the overriding Pep principle of sticking your best player in the most important position and letting him get on with it. Perhaps the dawning of the age of the deep-lying platform-facilitator may even turn out to be an object of slightly giddy journalistic invention. But Lahm in the middle, whatever its outcome – subplot or decisive masterstroke – remains a quietly fascinating spectacle.