Is Sergio Busquets Still The King of Pivots?

This player analysis was first featured on our dedicated Barcelona site, barcelonaanalysis.com.

“You watch the game, you don’t see Busquets. You watch Busquets, you see the whole game” were the famous words of Vicente del Bosque when describing a man who is one of the best, if not the very best, defensive midfielder in the whole footballing world.

Still, even those who we call “best” can have an off day (or two). Busquets is one of those players who can rarely afford a bad day at the office because when he suffers, the whole team does so too. This season we have seen “The Octopus of Badia” or shorter, “El Pulpo”, struggle to remain at his incredibly high standard with some uncharacteristic performances.

For that reason, this tactical analysis will use statistics to determine whether Sergio is still on top of the food chain in the pivot position or is the guard slowly changing.

What is a “pivot”?

Before actually diving into the stats and the analysis itself, we have to determine what are some of the roles of the defensive (or holding) midfielders. Since we will be focusing on Spain’s best CDM, we’ll use their term for that role which is a “pivot”, similar to the term used in handball.

Roughly speaking, all of them have the task to be that link between midfield and defense and to stop the opposition’s attack from making progress into the final third of the field. You can see pivots breaking up the play and roaming and usually, this would be true for most of the players occupying that position. The true examples of those “destroyers” are Casemiro and Kante.

On top of having to be ready to tackle, and stop the opposition, pivots also have the most responsibility when their team is attacking. Usually, they will be the ones who will distribute the ball to the attackers or orchestrate play. Depending on the team’s tactics, they will also retain and recycle possession.

At the end of the day, we can say there are several different roles when it comes to that one single position, and that is telling enough of the complexity of the pivots. Ranging from the destroyers to the more advanced creators, they truly represent the backbone of almost every team.

Meet the contestants

It’s difficult to judge an individual performance in a sport that is so heavily influenced by the whole team but for the sake of the analysis, we’ll take a look at some of the most prominent “pivot” names in world football and players who have similar characteristics as Busi.

Busquets’ biggest rival, at the moment, in the “world’s best defensive midfielder discussion” is N’Golo Kante of Chelsea. The little Frenchman is a true winner, a world champion and Blues’ engine from the back. He will be at the core of this analysis. Other honorable mentions will go to Luka Modrić of Real Madrid for a similar team role even though he is not a CDM, to Thiago Alcantara, Busquets’ countryman from Spain, and Casemiro, Real’s own destroyer.

What makes this comparison even more difficult is the fact that those players have distinctively different styles even though they play in, more or less, similar positions on the field. Still, they share some of the responsibility on the pitch.

Busquets is a different breed altogether. Tasked to both be the brains and the broad of the team, El Pulpo creates and destroys at the same time.  His most prominent trait is the ability to solve any problem on the spot and to completely lift the pressure off of his team. All this is achieved by reading the game properly and finding the best possible way out.

More often than not, the things he does cannot really be properly captured by stats but to say that he is heavily involved in the build-up for the goal is the closest thing.

While he may not really participate directly in changing the scoreline or the final product, he will be the one to start it all up and make the attack that leads to the goal happen.

By the numbers

When it comes to midfielders of all kinds, whether we are talking about pivots, box-to-box midfielders or even attacking ones, we mostly judge them by the quality (and sometimes quantity) of their passes. In this area, there is no one quite like Busquets.

Out of the four other mentioned midfielders, the only one that comes close to Sergio in this regard is his compatriot, Thiago Alcantara. This season alone, Busquets has completed a total of 735 passes while Thiago sits on 673. The same thing happens when we compare the number of backward and sideways passes.