The Barcelona midfielder’s work often goes unnoticed but in his selfless excellence and emergence from within his club’s ranks he shows what the Premier League’s top teams are lacking

Watching Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar surge about the Emirates turf in the late stages of Tuesday night’s hard-fought Champions League last-16 first-leg defeat of Arsenal it was tempting to conclude once again that the best career choice any Barcelona defender ever made is simply to become a Barcelona defender. A bit like Geoffrey Boycott’s advice that the best way to play top-class fast bowling is leaning on your bat at the other end, any career path that guarantees never having actually to face Barcelona’s attack is always likely to provide the most flattering light.

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And yet, even with that inbuilt parallax error perhaps the most sustained influence on the pitch on Tuesday night was a player who has taken exactly this path; who tends to operate beneath a near- invisibility cloak of selfless, loping excellence; and who has for the past seven years acted as a kind of quietly omniscient Jeeves in this team of earls and dukes.

Sergio Busquets is unlikely to feature in many post-match montage segments, or to find his night’s work droolingly Vined and gif’d across the social media diaspora. But he was familiarly excellent at the Emirates as the passing fulcrum, defensive shield and general midfield conscience of this Barcelona team. Aged 27 now, Busquets seems to have been around for ever. A quietly evolving presence, he has turned out to be key to the deep throbbing fleshy heart of this champion team as Barcelona have moved on over the years from the passing purity of the Pep years to the current front-loaded version.

Busquets completed more passes than anyone else on the pitch on Tuesday – not that you’re likely to remember many of them. He had more touches than Andrés Iniesta who seemed, watching in the stadium, to have had the ball glued to his feet pretty much all night. Busquets was lurking helpfully next to Neymar as Barcelona set off on that three-pass 60-yard move for the first goal. He was 20 metres back in space as Mathieu Flamini fouled Lionel Messi to give away the clinching penalty.

The hotdog seller in the background of history: it has been tempting for some to see Busquets as a football version of this. Fluffer to the stars, Barcelona’s own version of the Pavones-y-Galácticos model across five league titles and three Champions League wins, perhaps the most glittering trophy haul ever accumulated by a player who remains outside the star system, the least eye-catching midfield essential in modern footballing history.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barcelona’s Luis Suárez, left, Neymar and Lionel Messi hog the limelight but the work of Sergio Busquets is key to the team’s success. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

As ever at the Emirates Barcelona’s defensive guard ambled about like a great gangling son-of-a-goalkeeper, some stooping anti-athlete accidentally strayed in among the sprites. Busquets has had four shots on goal in the past year and a half. He can be physically assertive, even nasty at times. Above all though he is a player defined by positional intelligence and quick accurate passing, a midfielder who reads the movements of both his team-mates and the opposition, driving this Barça team on quietly from a space somewhere near the back of the bus.

Tying to put a pin in his exact worth remains a wonderfully fruitless business. The Meaning of Busquets: it is a fascinating topic and a thoroughly useful one even if – in a deeply Busquets kind of way – it remains entirely insoluble, a conundrum without an answer. Even now he remains almost impossible to get a really clear view of. Is he, in fact, the best midfielder in the world? Or the best player in the world, as one eminent football sage suggested at the Emirates on Tuesday night? Is he actually any good at all? Would he really stand out that much if he were playing for, say, Queens Park Rangers in the Championship?

The best of Busquets is that there is no obvious answer to any of these questions, focusing as they do on individual worth rather than team, process, component parts. Praising him in isolation is a bit like declaring Usain Bolt’s left knee to be the best left knee in the world, a left knee to transform Tyson Gay could he ever muster up the millions to buy it. The knee, the leg, the working tendons, the whole Bolt. This is the magic.

It is also one place where the Premier League might hope to learn from the example of the current club world champions. There are plenty who will insist the real difference is the failure, as yet, to hurl sufficient money at similarly alluring star attackers, and certainly £150m to spend on your second- and third-best strikers always helps. But the fact is the one truly extraordinary, indispensable part of this Barcelona team is the bit that cost next to nothing.

Look away form the glittery attacking trio. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotised by the shiny things. That home-reared spine of Gerard Piqué, Busquets, Iniesta and Messi is the extraordinary sporting triumph here.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arsenal’s Jack Wilshere, who is injured, is one of only two high-class first-choice genuinely homegrown players among the three English clubs left in the Champions League. Chelsea’s John Terry is the other. Photograph: BPI/Rex Shutterstock

By comparison the three English clubs left in the Champions League can boast just two high-class first-choice genuinely homegrown players, a catastrophic failure of development, planning and resources. One, Jack Wilshere, is injured. The other, John Terry, is on his way out. Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City all have spirit and fibre and long-serving players. But there is no equivalent career-long spine to provide a similar glue: not just loyalty to the cause, but an instinctive sense of self, the indefinable ballast of team building.

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Oh for a Busquets, if not in style or accomplishments, then at least in spirit. Not only does English football struggle to produce and nurture exactly this kind of footballer, those defined by intelligence, timing, tactical wit rather than moments of explosiveness. It struggles even to try, undermined by short-term planning and managerial turnover, the terror of even the briefest period of failure.

Louis van Gaal may have run dry at Manchester United but his basic methods remain sound. Give him two years more and United might not score another goal but there will at least be a clutch of players promoted from within and given the chance to stick and gel and form that galvanising armature. It is significant in itself – and salutary for those predicting instant overspend this summer at Manchester City – that promoting Busquets from the junior ranks was one of Pep Guardiola’s most significant early moves as Barcelona head coach.

Continuity from academy to first team, a 10-year plan, a unified way of playing: it is this that Busquets, whatever his merits in isolation, embodies so successfully. The meaning of the MSN front trio – buy the best: score brilliant goals – is clear enough. It is the meaning of Busquets the Premier League must continue to struggle with if it wants to be not just the richest and most feverishly transitional, but the most compelling on the pitch too.