Xavi Hernandez, the heartbeat of the two greatest soccer teams in the world right now, one of whom is also a contender for the greatest team ever – Barcelona and the Spanish national team.

At age 31, he will certainly never win the Balon d’Or (golden ball), the award which is no generally recognized as the award for the player executing the best soccer over the past year. Not gonna happen.

But he is also recognized as having been worthy and as having provided the skills and moves that made the genius of those two teams possible, as well as the genius of the player who has won the award three years running (Lionel Messi).

A few years after he retires, no one will really remember him.

Why? Because his style is both understated and inimitable.

Understated in that, unlike players like Zinedine Zidane and Diego Maradona, he never drove mediocre teams to glory through sheer force of will and genius.

Inimitable not just in terms of talent, but in terms of style, and this is the crux of the matter.

You have to build your team around a player like Xavi. He played for Barcelona for a decade before ever being seen as the talent he is. Sure, people knew he was good, but good at what? He doesn’t score goals or provide bucketloads of assists. He doesn’t dominate the midfield with key interceptions and crunching tackles that stop the opposing team from scoring. What he does is maintain possession and keep the team ticking away like clockwork.

And that’s great. That’s amazing. But… you also need to put at least two, and probably three or four players in the team who will do all those things he doesn’t do.

You need tacklers, but he simply isn’t going to do that for you. And you need a bunch of people to score goals and make direct assists because he won’t do those very often either. All of sudden, you’ve dedicated a huge portion of your team to making room for a player who neither scores, creates, nor defends.

He will be forgotten because his work cannot be captured in highlight reels and because, when he retires, you will almost never see teams utilize a player like him again nor make space for a role like his again.

I wish he’d won the Balon d’Or in 2010, when Spain won the World Cup or in 2008 when they won the Euro. But he didn’t and now he won’t ever win it and in ten years he’ll be little more than a tiny footnote, despite once having been (in truth) the greatest player in the world.