David Villa has been the coming man in European football for so long it can still be a little surprising to note how resoundingly, after four years of unbounded ascent, he has now arrived. Villa is currently, all things considered, the finest out-and-out striker in the world. It is a position he has reached with the kind of stealth you associate with his playing style, where he operates almost as two forwards in one, a superbly well-balanced and mobile creator and the most severe of finishers. Endearingly, almost obsessively, humble away from the pitch, Villa has also enjoyed a simultaneous late-blooming incarnation as one of Europe's most marketable footballers, a rise propelled solely by the substance of his playing achievements, most notably two years of steamrollering success with Spain, for whom he scored four goals in the triumph at Euro 2008 and five at the World Cup in South Africa.

Combined with this summer's €40m (£33.3m) move to Barcelona, it is the kind of vertiginous ascent that might perhaps spook a less sure-footed individual. Reclining on a beige leather sofa in the 26th-floor glass and steel Sky Bar of the monstrous W hotel – which looms Dubai-style above the Barcelona seafront – Villa still seems to be positively glowing with the multifarious thrills of his ongoing Barcelona honeymoon.

"I have settled very well. I am already really happy here," he says of a move that has united him at club level with the rump of Spain's World Cup-winning team. "I am also very lucky because I know most of the players and also I know the system we play because it's so similar to the way we play with the national team.

"I feel very proud to have been born in this great generation of football players. We have been playing together for so long most of the players are like family. The system is standard for us, we have practised it for so many years and you can see how much we enjoy playing together on the pitch. It is automatic the way we pass and how we attack."

Three matches and two goals into Villa's career at Camp Nou, the move from Valencia still looks like the most risk-neutral big-money transfer in modern history. The chances were always good the new man would rub along fairly well with seven of his world champion team-mates plus the added sweetener of the best player in the world. Lionel Messi currently occupies the right-hand channel opposite Villa's inside-left in a new-look Barcelona front three. On Tuesday night Villa scored the second goal either side of a brace for Messi in an almost indecently playful 5-1 Champions League dismembering of Panathinaikos.

The following morning he looks understandably tired, a slight, wiry, slouching figure with a notable absence of the kind of star sheen often to be found lacquered about the person of far lesser players. Villa is chasteningly polite as he mooches about, demonstrating for the benefit of assorted media and corporate types his apparently genuine affection for a new iPad and iPhone game (called, disastrously in this city, Real Football 2011).

Face to face he is startlingly modest. Even the sculpted beard and diamond earring seem like a concession to his trade, a footballer-disguise for a defiantly grounded man from the village of Tuilla in the Langreo area of north Spain, a rural community built around a now moribund mining industry.

If Villa seems almost alarmingly free of nervous energy it is worth noting that this season does still represent something of a personal frontier. The pressure of extreme expectation has been largely absent at his previous clubs. Villa was a late-starter, initially dismissed by youth coaches at Real Oviedo as too slight to make it as a professional. A fanatically hard worker, he went on to get his break at Sporting Gijón, making his professional debut in 2000 and taking almost three seasons to establish a regular first-team spot. The step up came with a €3m (£2.5m) move to the top tier with Real Zaragoza in 2003. A year later he scored all four goals in a 4-4 draw with Sevilla and Spain began to take note of a new star in its midst. That year he got his first international call-up, and in the summer of 2005 financial pressures at Zaragoza led to Villa signing for Valencia for €12m (£10m). Here he scored 107 goals in 166 matches and played in the quarter-finals of the Champions League in 2007.

Villa now finds himself for the first time at a club where success is not hoped for but expected. Essentially Barcelona have added him to their ranks in the hope he can help make them champions of Europe for what would be the third time in six years. There is a mutual hunger here: already a great international player, Villa has yet to accumulate the kind of medal haul that would mark him out as a similarly great club player.

"Playing in a team like Barça you always feel pressure," he says, shrugging. "The demand is to win everything but this is good for you as a footballer, it makes you play better. I'm happy with that pressure. I don't know which is the biggest trophy right now. The World Cup was the biggest thing ever for the national team but the Champions League is the biggest thing for clubs."

Ah, yes: that World Cup win, still only nine weeks old. After flying back from South Africa, Villa eschewed elaborate summer holidays in order to retreat to the calm of home. "I took time to celebrate with friends and family in my home village," he says. "It's such a big thing that we will go on celebrating it for a while yet, I'm sure."

In many ways Villa now has nothing left to prove internationally. One more goal will see him surpass Raúl's record of 44 goals for Spain. He has been arguably the most important player in those triumphs of 2008 and 2010, even more so than the ball-hog fulcrum Xavi Hernández. Villa is often brilliantly simple in his finishing; a cutting edge in a team of lily gilders.

He is, however, still cut from the same diminutive, nimble-footed template as the majority of his all-conquering team-mates, a potential weakness that was targeted by an overly physical Holland team in the World Cup final, perhaps providing a template for what may lie in store as the world adapts to Spain's soft-shoe ascendancy.

"I always say the same to this – football is a physical game, it is a tough game and until the referee decides it is a foul you must just play," Villa says. He also refuses to be drawn on Howard Webb's notably lenient attitude while refereeing the final; specifically the issue of exactly how Holland managed to keep 11 players on the field in the first half. "I don't like to criticise referees because I believe it is a very complicated job and what they do is very beneficial for football. But I believe the referee himself in an interview acknowledged that [leniency].

"At the World Cup most teams changed their style when they played us and maybe were more defensive. In the final we didn't know if Holland were going to do the same. But the important thing was that we beat them in the end."

No doubt club football will soon predominate and memories of the World Cup will fade, but for Villa it still seems natural to dwell on the joy of forming the attacking spearhead for what must now be considered one of the great national teams. "With Barça and Spain we find that now many teams try to replicate and imitate our style. A lot of teams are trying to play like that to keep the ball at the back, changing their own style. I guess in the future many teams will look to us as reference points and that is something we must be very proud of."

Imitation, and also flattery, have come Villa's way this summer. When Sir Alex Ferguson said this week there was only one player in the world he had been desperate to buy in the close season, informed opinion later confirmed that this was indeed Villa. "Of course it is flattering to hear that a coach such as Alex Ferguson, a coach who has got to the top, would be interested in signing me," Villa says. "I still think Manchester United is one of the greatest clubs in the world and for Alex Ferguson to like me as a player is a great thing."

There is plenty of respect from Villa for the English league. Asked to name the best defender he has played against, he answers, perhaps unexpectedly: "Maybe John Terry. Not just because of his reputation for being tough, but because he is a great defensive player."

Villa is unable to resist rising to the suggestion Cesc Fábregas might play alongside him at Barcelona. "I wish! Cesc really is a great player and a great person. I hope I can have the chance to have him as a team-mate on a daily basis. He was born here and raised here. Barcelona will always be in his heart so I guess at one time or another he will want to play here."

It is a particularly Villa-esque attitude, tinged with a sense both of deep-rooted loyalties and an unwavering focus that suggests this is a man unlikely to lose his footing on even the steepest summit.