At the dentist's last week, I flicked through the magazine rack. There, in the January issue of GQ, was Bradley Wiggins, his hair styled with the lustre and density of a chinchilla bedspread. The article was his bullet-pointed advice on how to conquer the Tour de France. Just in case any GQ readers had not decided what to do with their summer holiday, I suppose. But one aside jumped out at me: "If I never win it again, in a way it doesn't matter," Wiggins said. "So I can go into next year with all the self-belief but none of the pressure."

Really, Bradley?

On Sunday Wiggins will spin his pedals with serious intent for the first time in 2013. He has selected the Mallorca Challenge for his return: four one-day races in which Team Sky will rotate a squad of 10 riders. His preparations, as usual, have been meticulous. Poor Cath – the name of choice for the long-suffering sports wife (see Botham, Ian) – will have lugged his suitcase out to the car, so her 32-year-old husband does not put his back out. Wiggins will not race to win – though that may happen anyway – but at an intensity that best enables him to achieve his main goals for the season.

What are those goals? We know he wants to win the 2013 Giro d'Italia, a race that resonates with all serious cycling fans, a category into which Wiggins very much falls. A month or so later, he will go back to the Tour de France. Only seven riders in history have won the Giro and the Tour in the same year – the last of whom, Marco Pantani, in 1998, was almost certainly doped up to his shiny bald dome.

But in the past few days, Wiggins was not ruling out the double. "I'd love the challenge," he said. "I think there's five weeks in between. There's an element of the unknown but we managed it at the Olympics."

That noise? It's just Chris Froome choking on an energy bar. Froome spent 2012 as Bert to Wiggins's Ernie, and probably would have left Team Sky in the off-season had he not been given the impression that he would be the top Froomedog for this season.

Just as Wiggins was outlining his dreams of the double, the 27-year‑old lookalike for Red Dwarf's Kryten was telling the Guardian that he was "100% certain" that he would be leading Team Sky at the 2013 Tour de France. "The team's success depends on that – that everyone buys into that plan," Froome said. "If everyone's off doing their own thing it's going to be a circus."

Such tensions have precedents in the hierarchical world of cycling. Young upstart Greg LeMond helped his venerable La Vie Claire team-mate Bernard Hinault win the 1985 Tour de France on the understanding that Hinault would return the favour the following year; instead Hinault attacked LeMond relentlessly in 1986. There were similar succession disputes between Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador at Team Astana during the 2009 Tour de France and between the British riders Nicole Cooke and Lizzie Armitstead at the 2011 world championships.

In 1986, Hinault summed up the truculence of the ageing stag: "If we have a war, it'll be a fair war and the stronger one will win."

Great sports teams tend to be either Real Madrids or Barcelonas. The Real Madrid approach, particularly in the galáctico era, involved assembling the greatest talent and overpowering the opposition with their wealth and splendour. Barcelona, in recent times at least, have been defined by a less ritzy, communal ethos that does not allow individuals (even the finest player of the modern age) to overwhelm the identity of the club.

Team Sky started out as a Real Madrid: flashing the cash, cherry‑picking an obscene roster of talent; including Mark Cavendish, ostensibly to stop their rivals from having him. But, over time, the performance director, Dave Brailsford, has set about transforming his squad into a Barcelona. Every rider has to subsume his ego for the greater glory of the team. In October, Cavendish was released from his contract to head up Omega Pharma-Quickstep.

Sky do not see why they should not win every major cycling race: the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España, too. They also want the Classics: the storied, ancient races in the spring such as Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo. Brailsford pithily described Sky's performance in the 2012 Classics as "shit" and this year has developed a bespoke Classics Project squad, led by the one‑day specialists Geraint Thomas and Edvald Boasson Hagen.

You might imagine that, as Team Sky zero in on world domination, the last thing they need is an ugly spat between their two star riders. Brailsford knows that this looks terrible and could be disruptive. Yet he chooses to do nothing outwardly to resolve the dispute – why?

One reason is that having two options at the Tour de France keeps other teams guessing. But second, he knows that team harmony is overrated. Nice, sure, but not essential. If Team Sky can somehow manage the chaos, then the potential rewards are enormous. Wiggins and Froome clearly do not have a harmonious relationship and that rivalry will drive them on obsessively over the next six months. At the 1996 Tour, LeMond and Hinault may have been "at each other's throats" until 4am, according to their team boss, but Brailsford will not need reminding that they finished first and second, and La Vie Claire won almost every classification going.

The cycling season may just be starting, but reading that Wiggins quote in GQ I felt that the psychological battle is already well advanced.