I’d mentally shoved the football after-effects of Raphinha’s transfer to Barcelona into some future month where future me could deal with it better than present me might, a week after he left, mithered by a heatwave. I could easily imagine the season getting underway then one weekend realising, oh, the clásico will be on, I’ll watch Raphinha; or checking him out in the group stages of the ill-timed and placed World Cup. That all seemed fine.

Instead, the only good things I can say about his debut for Barcelona last night are that, well, at least Raphinha is happy, and at least he embarrassed a Neville. Meanwhile his immediate ascension to heir of Messi, saviour of Camp Nou and world star of all football is just absolutely wonderful to hear about, and £50m looks a great transfer fee for the second coming of Pele and Ronaldinho combined, just super business.

And he only played the first half!

Checking YouTube for videos mentioning Raphinha and uploaded today produces countless results already. I hope this is somehow linked to the add-ons Leeds put onto his transfer to Barcelona: if the highlights videos reach a certain level of ???????????? per hour it triggers another half-million that Barca can’t afford. In the meantime, his performance in this 6-0 win over Inter Miami supports Joan Laporte’s madcap scheme to mortgage the club’s future stability for a very cool and exciting present. It was 3-0 at half-time when Raphinha was taken off, and he’d scored one of them, assisted the other two, and created a missed chance for a fourth. If Barca’s bet is that, instead of a few boring seasons rebuilding, they can keep sponsor, merch and television revenue rolling in if they keep being exciting to watch, then Raphinha looks a very sound investment of their economically leveraged summer gains.

I’ve only watched the highlights but our guy is getting a lot of the ball, arguably more than he ever got at Leeds. He’s playing for Barcelona the way he plays for Brazil: toes on the right touchline, ready to either dribble into the middle or run there to get the ball, he’s a constant outlet for a pass and a triangle, and he’s a horror for defenders trying to stay in their shape. He’s a problem for the left-back (Kieran Gibbs here), the left midfielder and the left centre-back, all at the same time. The first goal came from Raphinha pinging one-twos in from the touchline into the penalty area until Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang took the ball and dinked it over the goalie. Then comes his goal, and it’s lovely — watching a chipped cross to the back post, as it drops over the last defender he shuffles his feet and cushions a left-footed volley under the ‘keeper. Then the assist for the third goal — in the middle of the pitch, Raphinha takes a lay-off from Aubameyang and chips a perfect first-time ball forward for Ansu Fati to smash past the goalkeeper.

“I’m very happy to have scored my first goal. It was a good game. I tried to have a good game. I’m very happy and hope to continue it,” Raphinha said afterwards and, great, just great, very glad you’re very happy. Mate. “One always tries to score against anyone, but if it’s in a derby, even more. The most important thing is the win — but for me we’re better than Real Madrid,” he added, not idle razzing, because there is a clásico coming up this weekend — Barcelona vs Real Madrid in Las Vegas. Raphinha hat-trick incoming, then, and that’s great! We can all be very glad about that.

I mentioned another reason for gladness about this match. Inter Miami, nicknamed The Herons (Peacocks are obviously better), the losers beaten 6-0, are the team owned by David Beckham and managed by Phil Neville. You could tell this because Romeo Beckham (David’s son) came on for the last four minutes, and Harvey Neville (Phil’s son) played the whole second half. He replaced Gibbs, but because Raphinha also went off, we were denied seeing him embarrass the son as well as the father. Looking up Harvey Neville’s career so far, I found a headline from last November’s Daily Mail asking, ‘Harvey Neville is a risk-taker who quit Man United for America but can he make it to the top?’ Well, the ‘risk’ he was taking was signing for the feeder club for his dad’s team, after the ‘risk’ he took of signing for Valencia’s youth team when his dad was the assistant manager there, and the first bullet point of the article says, ‘Phil Neville has axed 10 players from his squad but promoted his son Harvey’. So I have a few problems with the premise of the piece.

In that light, I don’t feel so bad anymore about seeing Raphinha scoring goals for the club of his dreams after playing his way back into professional football the hard way. I’d still rather he was doing it for Leeds, but we could have solved that by signing nineteen-year-old Ronaldinho from Gremio in February 2000 when we had the chance, so Raphinha’s dad’s samba band would have been travelling to entertain Ronaldinho in Yorkshire, not Catalonia, and he’d have fallen in love with Briggate instead of La Rambla. So in the end this is all Peter Ridsdale’s fault. ⬢