It’s easily forgotten that Raphinha was so close to being remembered very differently by everyone at Leeds United. If the not-so-quiet whispers are to be believed, Raphinha was the highest-profile name in a small cabal of players at Leeds who lost faith in Marcelo Bielsa and weren’t afraid to let members of the club’s hierarchy know. Subbed off at half-time in an insipid 3-0 loss at Everton that kickstarted the run of seventeen goals conceded in four defeats that cost Bielsa his job, before long Rapha was being forced to play at wing-back under Jesse Marsch, reduced to taking the occasional not-so-long throw as Leeds were coached to avoid the touchlines at all costs as they sunk towards relegation.

But after his mid-season sulk, Raphinha reawoke just when Leeds most needed him — sparking the delirium of Joffy Gelhardt’s last-minute limbs against Norwich, scoring the opener in a win at Watford, and dragging United to victory on the last day of the season at Brentford. Like so many after him, he had every excuse to phone it in, let Leeds get relegated, and pack his bags for another team paying the price of a release clause well below his value. Instead he fought to the end, danced in the away terrace, crawled across the pitch on his knees while Leeds fans rejoiced and Brentford fans fumed, and got his dream move to Barcelona after turning down Chelsea.

Judging by the way Raphinha and Bielsa embraced both before and after Brazil’s quarter-final against Uruguay at last summer’s Copa America, there are no hard feelings, so that’s good enough for me. I’m not going to harbour a grudge; especially when he was one of the most spectacular players I’ve ever seen wear a Leeds shirt. After all, Bielsa absolutely loved Raphinha, too. He was a hard-running machine of intent and intensity, no doubt, but first and foremost a street footballer who has never forgotten the thrill of making a defender look like a fool.

“To be a professional player, an important contribution is to possess a high spirit of amateur[ism],” Bielsa said while in charge of Leeds. Amateurism might be a dirty word in the hyper-serious world of modern sport, but it derives from the Latin verb ‘to love’. “I am referring to what a player develops when they play for nothing, without expecting any recompense apart from the victory. They are the future professional footballers, they consolidate the most important parts of that to then become professionals. Raphinha is a clear example of this, he hasn’t lost anything of what you get when you play for fun.”

Which is why Raphinha’s first two seasons at Barcelona felt so dispiriting. For all their glamour and ‘Mes Que Un Club’ bullshit, Barca are one of football’s biggest professional soap operas. Stuck in a financial crisis of their own making, they signed Raphinha with money they didn’t have — their latest accounts showed they still owe £35m to whoever lent them that money — then spent the next two years seemingly trying to sell him. Despite a league title in his first campaign and a healthy return of goals and assists, their fans never seemed particularly arsed about him either, constantly fixated on replacing him with The Next Big Thing — which is how they ended up in a financial mess in the first place.

“There was a lot of self doubt,” Raphinha told ESPN earlier this season. “I have a nasty habit of criticising myself heavily, so to speak, so that pressure made me think about leaving.” He admitted it “crossed my mind to leave the club” as early as his first season after leaving Leeds and he felt “disrespected” and “hurt” last summer when Barcelona fans were pictured wearing shirts with his number 11 and the name of Nico Williams, the Athletic Bilbao and Spain winger who was rumoured to be joining to take his place in the team.

Yet the appointment of former Germany boss Hansi Flick as manager in the summer has changed everything for Raphinha at the Camp Nou. As the Brazilian told France Football, one of the first things Flick did after getting the job was to contact him and say, “I was one of the players he was counting on, without knowing me or having ever seen me train. This was important in my decision to stay and allowed me to work in complete serenity to reach the highest level.”

Since then I’ve spent all season picking up my phone to Sofascore notifications that Rapha has scored or assisted another goal. At the time of writing, he’s scored 24 himself and created another fifteen for teammates in 35 appearances. The Guardian’s Spanish football writer Sid Lowe was recently asking whether Raphinha is the Player of the Season so far in Spain. The answer seems bleeding obvious, given right now he’s the best player in the universe.

And he owes it all to Leeds United. Or at least that’s what I’m claiming. It certainly seems like Rapha hasn’t forgotten his time at Leeds, and I’m not just talking about the photo he posted on Instagram of his dog wearing a LUFC dog lead. He’s been settling our scores all season. Picked by his teammates to be one of the squad’s captains this term, while wearing the armband on his 100th appearance for the club he struck a high-calibre hat-trick against our old foes Bayern Munich in the Champions League and was subbed off to a standing ovation from the same fans who wanted him sold a few months earlier. (As things stand, he averages a goal or assist in the Champions League at a better rate than Lionel Messi.) Meanwhile, his latest strike was pinged from the edge of the box into the bottom corner of Sevilla’s goal in a 4-1 away win. Sevilla are rubbish, so it wasn’t exactly remarkable, but it will have made their oh-so-familiar sporting director Victor Orta’s evening that bit worse, so it was good value all the same.

After the tiresome Lionel Messi vs Cristiano Ronaldo debates of the last two decades — there is no debate, it’s Messi every day of the week and twice on a Sunday — this was supposed to be the era of Erling Haaland vs Kylian Mbappe, or perhaps the hipster’s choice of Vinicius Jr vs Lamine Yamal. All four of those players were teenage phenoms, test tube footballers earmarked for greatness before they’d finished puberty. As a result, they don’t feel particularly real, existing more as video game cover stars or Twitter avatars rather than living, breathing human beings.

Raphinha, on the other hand, had to use football to fight his way out of a favela in Brazil, shining in “Wild West” várzea tournaments in which he’d be threatened by mobs beforehand or gunshots would go off during games. “Let me tell you, it can kind of put you off!” he told The Players’ Tribune. “The fireworks too, man. That’s why I always say that if you can play in the várzea games, you can play anywhere.” And that’s why in comparison to some of his more fawned-over contemporaries who he is currently outshining, there has always been something more real and visceral about our Raph.

At Leeds he had the brooding intensity of a gunslinger plucked from a spaghetti western, and he retains that spirit to this day. After scoring a 95th-minute winner in a hectic 5-4 victory at Benfica, he sparked a scrap in the tunnel that had to be separated by the police. “I’m someone who respects everyone. When I was leaving the pitch, people were insulting me. I returned the insults,” he said afterwards, having played for Benfica’s fierce rivals Sporting Lisbon earlier in his career. “I know I shouldn’t. It got heated with the Benfica players — they preferred to insult me. I’m someone who doesn’t let anything lie. I respect them if they respect me, but I don’t shut up if they insult me. It’s normal after an ending like that to a match.” Suddenly he was sounding like one of the gangsters who frequented the sidelines of his street tournaments in Brazil. “I will kill and die for this team.”

If the ultimate test of a Barcelona player is their performances in El Clasico against Real Madrid, that might explain why Raphinha has finally won the hearts of their supporters. In their first meeting this season, he set up the third and scored the fourth in a 4-0 win at the Bernabeu, then scored two more in a 5-2 victory in the Supercopa in January. But while the goals and assists were good, his best moment was taken straight from Mateusz Klich’s playbook of shithousery. During a series of stoppages throughout the first half, Rapha lost patience with Kylian Mbappe going down purporting to be injured, sneaking up behind Madrid’s medical staff, pinching their equipment bag, and dropping it off the pitch so that Mbappe had to be treated by the dugout and let the game continue. When the half eventually ended, Raphinha had scored the first of his brace, and Barcelona were 4-0 in front.

Given the difference in trajectories that Raphinha and Leeds have headed since he left Elland Road, it might feel perverse to be enjoying his ascent to superstardom while United spend a second consecutive season in the Championship. But the lack of direction that has scuppered Leeds was never his fault, and if anything he gave his all to help make it easier for those responsible. In truth, from the moment he came on to make his Leeds debut at Aston Villa, shimmied his hips, and played one of the best passes I’ve ever seen, we all knew he might not be a Leeds player for long. I’m just grateful we got to see him play for Leeds at all. And even more grateful he didn’t leave to join fucking Chelsea. ⬢