What does Raphinha leave at Leeds?
Raphinha's spinning nutmeg through the embers of Gary Cahill's career did not depend on the game situation or seasonal targets: it was just pure delight, a thing to admire in its own moment.
As Raphinha leaves Leeds at last for Barcelona, we're left behind in West Yorkshire to pick through the dust blown off this inevitability and mull over an over-asked modern sport question. What is Raphinha's legacy?
Matters of legacy are becoming ever more important, boosted by the social media con trick that makes people think like brands, even while our personal significance is being revealed as illusion. Ten hours before I started typing this out, Kevin Durant tweeted to ask, 'Did u add to your legacy today? If so, what did u do?' A day before that, NASA published the first photos from the James Webb telescope, images of light that is thirteen billion years old, from billions of stars and galaxies shown in a viewable area equivalent to a grain of sand held at an arm's length. I wonder if Kevin realises that, despite his 20.1m followers on Twitter, there are people reading this blog on the same planet as him who don't even know he's a basketball player. But still, he's free to gaze out into a hardly known universe of impossible to imagine scale and decide that the important question is about what we added to our legacies today. The answer is dust, Kevin, the answer will always amount to dust.
As for Raphinha, I think what happens at Barcelona will have the biggest bearing on his place in the cosmos in the end. It feels like a mad time to be going there — last season, with Martin Braithwaite and Adama Traoré in the team, they were a Bamford, a Harrison and a Howson away from recreating Tony Pulis' Middlesbrough at Camp Nou. But that is Raphinha's opportunity. If he can be a guiding light for Barca's return to greatness, maybe leading them to their first post-Messi Champions League, he could become a Catalan legend.
At Leeds? Here he'll always be limited in our memories by what the team did with him in it: 9th and 17th. There were some special nutmegs along the way, and his coolness assisting Joffy Gelhardt for the goal that got us out of pure hell against Norwich was very important to that 17th place. (Did it also inspire Gelhardt's own genius chill when he set up Pascal Struijk's equaliser against Brighton?) But because it didn't come to much, like a trophy or even qualifying for Europe, the best player Leeds have had since probably Harold Kewell is destined to be forgotten. At least that's a better legacy than Kewell's.
Forgotten is maybe overstating it. As he goes on and does whatever he does, Raphinha will keep reminding us of what we could be watching if he'd stayed at Elland Road. Hopefully the contrast with our future players will not be too stark. Then in decades to come he'll become a sort of Tony Currie, the post-Revie dilettante whose thrilling shoulder-length blonde hair combined with the tallest floodlights in Europe and a beautiful late 1970s Admiral kit to make the teen fans of Leeds visibly swoon, and their elders pretend they weren't just as impressed. 'He was only with us for a couple of seasons before he moved to London, but if you saw him, you'd know...' Alternatively, if Raphinha piles up trophies and a Ballon d'Or in the rest of his career, that might make his time at Leeds a footnote for trivia games. Over the years, it feels like fewer people know that Eric Cantona played for Leeds first, and I'm comfortable with that version of history. I'll have to wait to find out how to feel about any future association with Raphinha.