Sergio Busquets: the unique talent who changed Barcelona and the game

Timing was always Sergio Busquets’ greatest gift, and now he has decided it is time to go. “It wasn’t an easy decision but the moment has come,” the Barcelona captain said. In two months he turns 35; in four days he leads his team into the derby against Espanyol, knowing that a win would make them champions again. The ninth La Liga title of his career will also be his last. At the end of this, his 15th, season he will leave the Camp Nou and “the club of my life”, an era closing with him.

Xavi Hernández, once Busquets’ teammate and now his coach, had wanted him to stay, just as Luis Enrique had wanted him to continue with the national team. But Busquets retired from international football after Qatar and he is departing Barcelona too, destination as yet unknown, after negotiations over a new contract failed to end in agreement. There is no one left in the Spain team who won the World Cup, no one left in Catalonia from the team that won it all, the generation that changed everything, including the game itself.

It has been a long time. Busquets joined Barcelona in 2005 and made his first team debut against Racing Santander in September 2008, 719 games ago. The Racing coach later admitted that he didn’t know much about him; almost no one did, except Pep Guardiola.

A tall, skinny kid, son of the former goalkeeper Carlos, who once claimed to have burned his hands on a falling iron, diving to “save” it from hitting little Sergio on the head, Busquets played under Guardiola with Barcelona’s B team in Spain’s regionalised tercera division. Few could understand why he had been promoted but soon he was a treble winner, a season that started at Santa Eulalia ending with the European Cup final in Rome. Just over a year after that, he was a world champion. Another Champions League and the Euros followed in successive seasons. He will go with nine leagues, seven cups, three European Cups and 34 trophies in all. He has played 864 games; there will be five more.

Not that it’s about the numbers; Busquets is almost the anti-stat, the footballer who can’t be measured or so easily deciphered. He had begun as a forward, coming on to score on his debut for Barcelona B but as a senior player he didn’t dribble, didn’t score goals – 20 in total – and didn’t provide assists. He was a defensive midfielder who didn’t “defend”: he was not all heroic tackles, preferring to step out than dive in. He wasn’t a great athlete, or didn’t look like one. He didn’t cover countless kilometres and he didn’t move fast. The ball did, though, when it was supposed to. And when it was supposed to slow, it did that too. So did his mind. Busquets just knew. He saw.

2:05

He redefined a role playing in two teams that shifted the paradigm, the essence of an idea. “He is one of the best midfielders in world football and the best defensive midfielder in Spain’s history,” Xavi said, only defensive midfielder always felt like an inadequate, inaccurate description. Pivot works better; that piece upon which it all hinges, a player for whom pace is in the mind, something to be imposed upon the ball: who knows when to apply a pause, when to hold on and above all when to release. Who quietly makes everything else work around him. And it worked, all right: his midfield, alongside Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, may well be the midfield.

The whole team was of course, for club and country. In a team with Iniesta and Xavi, with Lionel Messi and David Villa, Fernando Torres and Sergio Ramos, with Gerard Piqué and Carles Puyol; in teams that had Thierry Henry and Samuel Eto’o, Villa and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Luis Suárez and Neymar, others might be more exciting, more attractive, more present. No one wanted to be Busquets, which was fine by him. Well, almost no one. In South Africa, at a time when many questioned what he was doing in the team, Vicente del Bosque declared: “If I could be a player now, I’d like to be like Busquets.” Coaches and teammates embraced him, Johan Cruyff calling him a gift, Guardiola priceless. Guardiola recalls Messi turning to him just after Busquets had begun training with the first team and saying simply: “He can play.”

“I don’t want people talking about me,” Busquets said. “I don’t do many interviews. I don’t have Twitter. Forwards get the plaudits but I’m not selfish like that, I don’t long for praise or the lead role. I’d rather the strikers scored; they live off goals. I don’t care. If I did, I wouldn’t play in this position. I love my role, I love the job I do.” He did it unlike anyone else, the anonymity appropriate as it wasn’t about him. There is a line attributed to Del Bosque, which may not even be real but which works perfectly, summing him up: “Watch the game and you don’t see Busquets,” it goes, “watch Busquets and you see the game.”

“He is unique,” the former Spain coach Luis Enrique said not long ago and that is a good word. Think back and it is hard to think of a player quite like Busquets, a footballer who changed the way the role is seen, who did it differently to others and came to define it. He seemed counter-cultural but came to embody a newly dominant culture, the game rethought. “Being a pivot is more about being tactically astute than physically dominant: thinking, calculating, offering solutions, defensively and offensively, controlling everything,” he said. For so long, he made it all make sense.

At his age, it was natural that some doubted that was still the case, himself included. There have been bad days too and the cost of keeping him amid Barcelona’s financial crisis was high, his departure a weight removed, and the time was right. When the World Cup finished, Luis Enrique set himself the task of convincing Busquets to continue until USA 2026, insisting: “I think he’s misunderstood, maybe because he has been around for years and people have seen enough of him now.” Xavi, meanwhile, kept calling him “fundamental”, even now, and tried to convince him to continue right to the end. But if there’s one thing Busquets has always known, it was when to let go.