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The Invisible Artistry of Sergio Busquets

Sergio Busquets is not Barcelona's flashiest or best-known player, but he is its most essential and representative one. So how is his genius so easy to miss?
Photo by Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

Soccer is something like Werner Herzog's jungle. It's not quite something created by God in anger—that would be the other football—but it's an entropic game that mocks intention. An 18-pass attacking move evaporates as the ball skips under a midfielder's foot; a defender's desperation clearance takes a fortunate bounce and suddenly a forward is in on goal. Matches are usually decided by strategy and skill, but in an evenly contested one, there is always the possibility that some cosmic accident will come thunderbolting out of the sky, leaving one team stupefied and the other elated. It takes a supreme arrogance to understand the sport's chaotic nature and set out to impose order upon it anyway.

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This is what made peak Barcelona a unique squad. Their intricate, patient possession play was the best tool anyone has yet devised for controlling a soccer match. For weeks at a time, they would seem, at their most rankled, mildly perturbed by the 11 opponents with which they shared the pitch. They scored with the grace of a commuter easing her Volkswagen into her company parking spot on a weekday morning. Soccer just didn't seem difficult for them. It was as if they were sashaying to some hidden rhythm of the game no one else had figured out how to dance to.

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Present-day Barcelona, on the other hand, at least breaks a sweat. Matches occasionally slip away from them. They appear out of ideas for extended periods. This isn't because they're not a great team, but because that is what even very talented human beings look like when they play soccer. Circa 2010 Barça were a dream; now they inhabit the corporeal realm.

If there's one blaugrana who still exudes the sort of calm that typified Barcelona in their heyday, it's Sergio Busquets. Luis Enrique has described him as "almost perfect," and Pep Guardiola has said "[Busquets] understands messages immediately, knows the team's needs and adapts to them discreetly: he sees problems and provides solutions. He plays with simplicity and clarity." What's most remarkable about him is how he continues to provide simplicity and clarity even as his responsibilities become increasingly complicated.

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In 2011, Sam Fayyaz wrote "Busquets seems slightly embarrassed whenever he dribbles for more than a touch or two," which is both an on-point observation and an indication of the extent to which the now-26-year-old midfielder's game has grown. Last season, Tata Martino encouraged Xavi to go forward with alacrity, which meant Busquets was asked to play the role of offensive hub: finding space, moderating the pace of attacks, and keeping the ball above all else. This wasn't a radical departure from the job Busquets performed under Pep and Tito Vilanova, but it required him to move around a little more and play faster. It also necessitated him taking those extra touches he is loath to take. He'd just as soon not take them not because he can't dribble, but because he believes so firmly in the Barcelona ideal that the ball should always be moving. Even as a pass rolls toward him, he is looking, looking, looking for an open teammate. He would be happiest if all he ever did was distribute with one touch. If he does not do much running, his eyes do.

As Xavi has deteriorated further and been replaced in the starting lineup by Ivan Rakitić, who is less apt to sit back and spray the ball around the way his predecessor once did, Busquets has become the fulcrum of Luis Enrique's Barcelona. He plays more passes than anyone else in the squad—than anyone else in the world, for that matter—and dictates the tempo with which attacks build. When Barça are spinning themselves into the ground in search of a goal, it's Busquets recycling the ball back to Andres Iniesta and Leo Messi. Once in a while, he will hold possession for a tick longer than usual, tilting his body in such a way that suggests he's going to play it short, but popping it out to the wing or trying a cutely curling through-ball. This is about as flashy as he gets. For what it's worth, those sorts of maneuvers often result, four or five passes later, in a scoring opportunity.

Busquets does all this with no one but center backs behind him. He is a lone pivot, which means he's called upon shield the back line or interrupt the opposition's build-up more or less by himself. He has that clock in his head that excellent defensive players do; it tells him when to step in to intercept a pass and when to take a couple steps back, keeping himself between the ball and the goal. He persistently disrupts the counterattacks nearly every team tries against Barcelona, either by snuffing them out before they become dangerous, or by slowing them enough that his teammates—many of whom are given license to attack high up the pitch—have time to reorganize themselves.

Barcelona are so deep and require so much work from their entire squad that no single player, perhaps save Messi, is absolutely crucial to what they do, but Busquets is the anchor around which both the attack and defense revolve. The team is not the same when Javier Mascherano—a terrific holding mid in his own right—fills in for Busquets. The mechanism still works, but it doesn't hum.

This is why news that Busquets won't be fit for Barça's second-leg Champions League match against Manchester City on Wednesday and will probably miss this weekend's Clasico has hit the Nou Camp hard. Barcelona will likely handle City without much trouble, but the prospect of staring down Ronaldo, Benzema, Kroos, and the rest, in a match that might determine La Liga, without Busquets protecting the back four and lending his composure and keen positional awareness to their midfield could make even the most confident culé squirm. It's like venturing into the jungle half-drunk. You might make it out alive, but you'd give yourself better odds if you had your wits about you.