They have seen better nights. Quite a lot of them, in fact. In a village of La Mancha, there is a bar. The village is called Fuentealbilla and has a population of just 1,864; the bar is called the Luján and it is run, as it has been for as long as anyone can remember, by Andrés Iniesta's grandfather. It has become the home of the local peña or supporters' club, the walls covered with newspaper cuttings and shirts, a mini-museum collected by the Barcelona midfielder. Every time Andrés is in action, the bar is packed.

On Wednesday they witnessed another piece of history, it just wasn't exactly what they had in mind. The evening before, Iniesta, Xavi Hernández and Lionel Messi posed for photographs with Celtic's shirt to mark the club's 125th anniversary. The following night, the celebrations became even greater when Barcelona were beaten and Rod Stewart cried. "We have beaten the best team in the world," said the Celtic manager, Neil Lennon. Iniesta scored in the first game against the Scottish champions but not this time. This time, there were shades of Chelsea about it. Chelsea last season, that is.

They have seen better nights, all right. The memorabilia reveals as much. When Iniesta scored the last-minute goal at Stamford Bridge that sent Barcelona through to the 2009 European Cup final, it led to a 40% increase in the birth rate in Catalonia. That night his grandmother was watching from hospital, leaping up and down shouting: "My grandson! My grandson!" Others were in Bar Luján, just as they have been for European Cup finals, European Championship finals, the World Cup ... and that goal in South Africa.

"My granddad opens up for the big Spain or Barcelona games," Iniesta smiles. "I still have the boots I wore in Rome in 2009. At the Wembley final, I swapped shirts with Paul Scholes. And from the World Cup final …"

He pauses to think. That night at Soccer City when Spain won the 2010 World Cup final, Gerard Piqué took his memento when he took a pair of scissors to the net, while the vest Iniesta wore in memory of Dani Jarque, the Espanyol centre-back who died of a heart attack, is on display at the stadium of Barcelona's city rivals. Iniesta, who struck the only goal against Holland in extra time, can remember the moment perfectly. He talks about "hearing" the "silence" as he waited for the ball to drop; about knowing that he just needed gravity do its thing or as he puts it "wait for Newton", then hit it, convinced he would score. But he's not sure now what booty he left with. "I think," he finally responds, "that I kept the boots."

Fuentealbilla is deep in Don Quixote country. Iniesta left there at the age of 12 – he has been at Barcelona so long that he recently admitted that he felt "a bit Catalan too" – but he keeps coming back. When he first arrived in Barcelona he wanted to turn straight round again. He admits that when his parents came to visit he wouldn't just sleep in the same hotel room as them, he would sleep in the same bed. The rest of the time he slept in La Masía, the Catalan-style farmhouse that stands alongside the Camp Nou, looking out the window and wondering.

"Those days were the worst of my life," he says. "You're 500km away, you're without your family. You're from a small place where you can walk everywhere and the change is huge. There were lots of nights I thought: 'I want to go home.' Very hard moments. I'd think I was never going to make it. But you have to be strong. Even at the age of 12 you think: 'I have to fight. I've come this far, there's no going back.'"

Sacrifice and redemption are central to Iniesta's experience. For a player whose game seems so effortless, so natural, so smooth, the story he tells is surprisingly tough. So, in fact, is he. There is no other way to say this: Iniesta is small. Not just small-for-an-athlete small, but small: 5ft 7in and slight. But there is a steel to him, a competitive edge too easily overlooked. Leaning back on a wooden bench, Iniesta speaks evenly and rationally but every now and then it comes through in his words too.

"If there's one characteristic all players have it's precisely that," he says. "They all have that gene, that competitiveness, the ability to overcome obstacles, to fight, a willingness to sacrifice. It might look easy to reach the top and stay there, to play for your country and win things, but it isn't. All players that have achieved those things have that: the big ones, the small ones, the good-looking ones, the ugly ones, the nice ones, the not so nice ones ... they all have that will to succeed.

"When you win something, that comes to mind. I remember when the referee blew the final whistle in the World Cup final, the first thing I thought of was the pain. The suffering. Instead of thinking: 'I'm a world champion,' I thought of that. It had been a hard year with injuries and I didn't think I'd make it. If you win without sacrifice you enjoy it but it's more satisfying when you have struggled. The World Cup meant so much because of the journey there."

"The [Champions League] final in Rome [in 2009] was similar," Iniesta continues. "I had torn a muscle and I couldn't shoot with my right foot."

It is no exaggeration: Barcelona's doctors had told him not to shoot against Manchester United. But not shooting didn't stop Iniesta and Xavi running the game. "There are moments when the human body can overcome things you would never expect," Iniesta says. "I got injured 17 days before the final and all I wanted was to be there, however big the tear was. It was a 3cm tear and I fought morning and night. I had played in Paris [against Arsenal in 2006] but only as a sub so it left a bitter-sweet feeling and I kept thinking about that. In Rome I had to play. By playing despite being 'broken' I struggled at the start of the following season. I played a big price. But it was worth it."

The day Iniesta got injured against Villarreal Pep Guardiola told his staff: "Andrés is playing in the final no matter – he plays." The coach had long been an admirer and defender of Iniesta, right back to the day the kid from La Mancha joined the first-team squad for training. "Remember this day," Guardiola told his team-mates.

The feeling, by the way, is mutual: "I'm sure the day he starts coaching again, whichever team it is that he takes over will be big winners. I have absolutely no doubt about that," says Iniesta. "What he achieved here came from his ability to make us believe in his message – the results came from that."

Speaking of messages, Guardiola once famously announced: "Andrés doesn't dye his hair, doesn't wear earrings and hasn't got tattoos. That makes him unattractive to the media but he's the best."

In fact, it ended up making Iniesta even more popular; somehow closer to fans. Iniesta seems more like one of them; not long after the World Cup he recalls a woman coming up to him while he was leaning against the bar. "Excuse me," she said. "Yes," Iniesta replied, expecting the next line to be the usual request for an autograph or a photo. Instead she said: "I'd like an orange Fanta, please."

It is impossible to talk to Iniesta and not like him. "I get the feeling people respect me and that there is affection for me. That makes me happy," he says. "But it's not about being good or bad. Everyone's different. You're not the bad guy if you've got tattoos and you're not the good guy if you don't have tattoos. Everyone tries to protect an image that reflects what kind of person they think they are. Some people like you, some people don't. In the end you just have to be yourself.

"The thing people sometimes don't see is that football is a part of life. In life you have different sorts of people, why should it be different in football?"

Iniesta does not just represent a shift in perceptions of footballers but in perceptions of football. Barcelona and Spain have challenged preconceptions. Along with Xavi, Iniesta is the embodiment of the style, an ideologue – even if Xavi is a more vocal, more unwavering defender of the faith. "We feel part of something: we generate the football," Iniesta says. "People say that it is in the midfield where the style of play of a side is established and in that sense we feel responsible.

"The 2008 Euros were so important because they showed you could win that way with a group of players who weren't physically imposing in any way – if anything, we're the opposite. Maybe that's the point at which the idea starts to change. It's the same with Barcelona, who always had that philosophy but have now added titles and trophies. Without the trophies it would all mean a lot less but it proved that it was possible."

Talk of philosophy draws admiration; it also draws criticism. If Barcelona felt as if their style was dismissed then, some believe that the success of their style means that other approaches are dismissed now, treated almost as if they were immoral. Against Celtic, Barcelona racked up 84% of the possession but were unable to find a way through; it was similar to the semi-final against Chelsea last year.

Afterwards, one Spanish journalist asked Jordi Alba something that has become a recurring theme: wasn't it a pity that some teams don't want to play football? As if what Celtic did was somehow not allowed, wrong, not football. That has created a backlash against Barcelona's style and their steadfast, almost evangelical commitment to it, which came together in the Spain-are-boring debate of Euro 2012, one that appeared in Spain, not just abroad. It was as if Spain were obliged to win and anything else would be a disgrace.

"It's not that now we are saying football is a science and playing this way you will always win," Iniesta says. "The other thing is that we play the way we do because it suits us. We don't have the players to pull it off playing a different way. People talk about 'pragmatic' football; well, for us, this is pragmatic. It's the way we like to play and it's the way we believe we have the best chance of winning.

"But the football that Spain and Barcelona play is not the only kind of football there is. Counterattacking football, for example, has just as much merit. The way Barcelona play and the way Spain play isn't the only way. Different styles make this such a wonderful sport. But what we do is not easy, either."

During Euro 2012 even Vicente del Bosque, a man normally so measured in his discourse, was critical of accusations that Spain were boring; that people were not valuing what they had achieved. "We've gone from poor man to rich man in five minutes," the manager said. In the final, Spain responded in the best possible way, defeating Italy 4-0. "We needed that," Iniesta admits. "It was the most complete match we played – in the way we moved the ball quickly, the speed and the aggression we showed getting forward.

"We are now being judged according to a level of performance which is almost impossible to reach. But we've earned the right to be judged that way. It's a double-edged sword – the better you play the better you're expected to play all the time. When it doesn't happen then people start asking questions. We're not complaining, we wish things had gone that well for the last 50 years that the expectations had always been so high. But maybe people don't appreciate the difficulty sometimes."

Iniesta was voted the man of the match in the final. It was his third award of the tournament and Uefa named him European football's player of the year – ahead of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. "Winning that was special," he says. "To even be standing there between Cristiano and Leo was a prize for me, so to be there on the podium and actually win it … If people like the way I play so much that they put me above Leo and Cristiano, that's incredible. I feel like people respect me."

So how about the Ballon d'Or? Iniesta smiles. It is a kind of resigned smile. "Anyone would love to be there," he says but he knows it will be Messi or Ronaldo that wins it; that arguably the greatest national team ever may never have a winner of the award. "Recognition is the World Cup and the European Championships," Iniesta says. "It's a team sport and they are the team prizes." There's a pause and he grins: "But of course it would be nice."

There may be one last chance: the 2014 World Cup. "It's massive, especially because it is in Brazil with all that means. A World Cup in Brazil is unique. It could be that after winning two European Championships and the World Cup, when maybe you would think there would be nothing else to strive for, this is a gift. Something to fight for. Another title and an achievement that would be very, very special."