The clamour over Real’s new marquee signing, the £86 million Gareth Bale, has taken much of the spotlight away from Neymar but tomorrow all eyes will be on the Nou Camp as Barcelona meet Sevilla, and Neymar and Messi prepare to start in the same XI in a home league match for the first time. Will the dynamic duo set La Liga alight or get in each other’s way?

More worldly players than Neymar have struggled to fit in at a club renowned for their established hierarchies and strict dogmas about the way the team plays.

At 21, the new star is five years younger than Messi. He is a player who can genuinely be described as a potential heir to the Argentine and he has arrived at a watershed moment for the most admired club side of the past decade. His signing was completed very soon after Barça, European champions three times in the past eight years, suffered the chastening 7-0 aggregate defeat by Bayern Munich in the Champions League semi-final. The conspicuous feature of their impotence had been the unfit Messi, his mobility reduced when he was on the field, a gap left when he was not, evidence Barcelona had become dependent on one man.

Neymar represents a soothing solution should Barça be denied the services of Messi, whose appetite for playing 90 minutes whatever the fixture, whatever his health, is voracious. But that is not why Neymar has been invited to the Nou Camp. It is more as a stimulus and a complement to Messi, to offer alternatives to a team dogmatically committed to their pass-and-move ideology even if they have become predictable and blunted when Messi is heavily policed.

The challenge for any newcomer at the modern Barça, Messi’s Barça, is about tactics as well as status. Most of Messi’s colleagues are hard-wired to appreciate his territory on the pitch, to be its curators. Players like Gerard Piqué and Cesc Fabregas have a sixth sense of how he operates, where he likes the ball, when and where they can expect to receive it back. They started playing in teams with Messi when they were barely out of their teens, contemporaries at Barça’s La Masia academy. They still cherish him with some of the protective instincts they showed to little Leo, the timid, tiny enigma fresh from Argentina, undergoing treatment for a growth hormone deficiency, a boy whose legs dangled from the bench of the dugouts because he was so small.

Barcelona seek method to match Lionel Messi with Neymar

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