Celtic's defensive display against Barcelona at the Camp Nou two weeks ago was heroic.

It was, in the words of Neil Lennon, "magnificent". It was also practically doomed to failure.

When the final whistle blew, Celtic had ceded 74% of the ball to Barça, one of the highest ratios of possession a team has accrued in the 20-year history of the Champions League. It would have been preposterous for Celtic to gain a draw in these circumstances.

True, the winner from Jordi Alba came agonisingly late, but Barcelona have a habit of turning over teams towards the end of games. They have scored nearly half their league goals this season (13 from 32) in the last 15 minutes of matches, a time when their opponents are out on their feet.

There are specific reasons why Barça covet the ball. The opposition can't score without it, and holding on to it is the best way to regroup and recharge, to "rest in possession", as the saying goes. The other team having possession wears opponents down; it was notable, for instance, how quickly Alba blazed past James Forrest to poke in his goal at the back post a fortnight ago. When the opposition manage to wrest the ball back, they are usually too knackered to do anything useful with it. When Barça players sit on the ball, it enables them to probe for openings, pulling opponents out of position by spraying the ball about the park. Their game is built around reverence for the pass, particularly the short pass, and an appreciation of the need to create space.

Barça take this philosophy to the extreme in forsaking counter-attacks, the chief scoring method of all of Europe's other great teams. If a Barça player regains possession – unless he is close to the penalty area – he will regroup and pass to his nearest team-mate, the thinking being that he's done well enough to get the ball back, and is probably off balance and without a good enough view of the pitch to give a decisive pass.

Barcelona's style goes back to one man: Johan Cruyff, who played for the club in the 1970s. When he returned in 1988 as manager, he brought some youth development ideas he had been tinkering with at Ajax.

He rounded up old team-mates from Barcelona's 1974 league-winning side, including Charley Rexach, Juan Manuel Asensi and Antonio De La Cruz, to help run the various teams at the club. Every team, from under-eights to the senior side, adopted the same keep-ball type of play. Under-age teams played against teams a year older so Barça's emerging players couldn't rely only on natural skill, but had to cultivate cunning as well.

The club's glorification of the small player is an extension of this thinking. Youth teams are there to feed the senior team, not to win matches and tournaments. The club have the confidence to blood the home-grown talents of Sergio Busquets and Pedro, both World Cup winners, who, it seems, came from nowhere.

A good sense of positioning is prized at Barça. They reckon the average player is only on the ball for two minutes in a game; for the other 88 minutes he needs to take up good positions. Club scouts look for players who can see triangles, especially in the middle third of the pitch.

Cruyff famously plucked a skinny 19-year-old, Pep Guardiola, from third-team obscurity and parachuted him into Barça's first team because he had that sense of geometry. There is a ferocity to Barcelona's pressing, which is an innovation of the Guardiola management regime, borrowed from his understanding of Italian defensive systems. They have specific prompts for tackling: the second the ball is lost; when an opponent controls the ball badly; or when he is facing his own goal, with his view of the pitch impaired.

You rarely see a Barça player slide-tackle, with the possible exception of Busquets and the Argentine Javier Mascherano. Tackling is treated with disdain in Spain. In an interview before an international friendly against England at Wembley 12 months ago, Xabi Alonso, who, of course, played alongside Mascherano at Anfield, said: "I don't thing tackling is a quality," he said. "It is a recurso, something you have to resort to, not a characteristic of your game.

"At Liverpool, in the matchday programme you'd read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They'd ask: age, heroes, strong points, etc. He'd reply: 'Shooting and tackling'. I can't get it into my head that football development would teach tackling as a quality, something to learn, a characteristic of your play. I don't understand football in those terms. Tackling is a [last] resort, and you will need it, but it isn't a quality to aspire to."

Ironically, Barça's attacking game can be traced back to the 1967 European Cup final. That evening in Lisbon, Celtic overwhelmed Inter, the dominant force in football at the time, with a buccaneering display, epitomised by full-backs Jim Craig and Tommy Gemmell, who relentlessly swept forward, often creating a six-man attack.

As Jonathan Wilson points out in his seminal book on football tactics, Inverting the Pyramid, Celtic showed teams that the best way to overcome the blanket defences which prevailed then was to launch auxiliary attackers from deep. Ajax, who won three European Cups in a row in the early 1970s, used this as the central column of their total football philosophy, a precursor of the system Cruyff installed at Barcelona.

Celtic will hope the ghost of Jock Stein – and the roar from the belly of Celtic Park – will help to unsettle Barça's dazzling passing game tonight.

Richard Fitzpatrick is the author of El Clásico: Barcelona v Real Madrid, Football's Greatest Rivalry, which is published by Bloomsbury