Across two shiny pages, the teenage Lucas Moura gazes quizzically at a brown leather football — the kind your grandfather might have played with, and dreaded heading.



It’s not immediately apparent why, but the mind, ever willing, soon suggests a set of complementary juxtapositions: the past and the future; the earthly and the skybound; the old world and the bright new thing.



These are lofty notions, to be sure, but they did not seem out of place in June 2012. Lucas was Brazilian football’s next big thing, a powderkeg of a footballer laying waste to opposition defences in the colours of São Paulo. Already, he was a full international. Europe was not so much beckoning as banging his door down.



Yet it is the headline that accompanied this profile, published in Placar magazine, that really resonates at seven years’ remove.



“To be, or not to be a superstar: that is the question.”



It was a good question...