What if: Lionel Messi had signed for Real Madrid?

3. Barcelona’s trademark tiki-taka would not have taken off the way it did

‘The beautiful game’, ‘The way the game is supposed to be played’, ‘This is football’ – if you have ever heard a football ‘purist’ talk about Barcelona, you’ve heard these terms of praise being thrown about with gay abandon. And for good reason.

For nigh on a decade Barcelona’s way of playing, known colloquially as tiki-taka, has been held as the high form of playing football – and for good reason, it’s beautiful to watch, the metronomic passing setting up a hypnotic rhythm. But imagine Barcelona doing it without Messi at the sharp end of it. Yeah – boring, boring Spain is what you tend to end up with. For without an element of magic spicing it up, tiki-taka is just the most aesthetic form of defensive football

On a related note, would the cult of Pep Guardiola ever have risen without Messi by his side?

Messi’s background of having learned most of his football at La Masia has helped him seamlessly fit into the taka-way too... no one else would really have been as brilliant, especially in that false nine role where he scored a ‘gazillion’ goals.

Leo Messi’s style of play itself would have been different – without the emphasis laid on passing at La Masia, he would have been a lot more direct player, more in the Diego Maradona mode and dare I say it, a touch more ‘selfish’