Sergio Busquets will enter next Saturday in the select group of footballers who have been able to reach 500 matches playing at FC Barcelona. The Badia midfielder will meet them in a match at the height of the event, in Madrid against Atlético. In the club’s almost 119-year history, only six players have surpassed that bar. After Xavi Hernández (767 games), Andrés Iniesta (675), Leo Messi (650), Carles Puyol (593) and Migueli (549), Busquets’ closest goal is his former teammate Víctor Valdés, who defended the culé goal in 539 occasions
Time will have Busquets to go climbing in that ranking after having signed its last renewal until 2023 in September. At 30 years of age and fulfilling the eleventh season in the first team, Busquets adds 28 titles in his culé palmares, including the two triplets harvested in the 2008-09 season, his debut, and 2014-15. Busquets was a personal bet of Pep Guardiola, who practically made him a starter in the first team promoting him directly from the Third Division. His debut could condemn him, that 1-1 against Racing at the Camp Nou, but luckily for Barça there was no way to move him, first of the squad and after the lineup, and with his first number, on 28, the second, the 16th, or the current one, the 5th, which he inherited from Puyol. Second captain after the legend Messi, he put on the bracelet for the first time in Seville in the 2014-15 academic year.