The greatest of all time debate needs no introduction. But what if there were another dimension to it? What would a hybrid of Cristiano Ronaldo’s and Lionel Messi’s qualities with a ball at their feet look like? The answer is Ricardinho. But his game is not football. It’s futsal.

“If you joined Ronaldo and Messi, that’s how Ricardinho is in futsal,” Jorge Braz, the coach of Portugal’s futsal seleção, told the Guardian shortly after Ricardinho helped his team win the Euros in 2018.

The man nicknamed O Mágico (the magician) is a scaled-down micro-genius of the small-sided game, the personification of a bulging bag of tricks.

The numbers are staggering. Nearly a goal a game in 160-plus caps. The best player in the world a record six times. Aged 33 yet still the standout superstar for club and country, the proud captain of the history-making seleção.

Does he feel the pressure of his status at the pinnacle of football’s little brother? “No,” he says. “It would be worse if you compare me with [any] António or Pedro. Comparing me with Ronaldo and Messi just gives me reasons to be happy.”

Sitting in the futsal hall at Rio Maior sports complex, 40 miles north of Lisbon, Ricardo Filipe da Silva Braga explains how he copes with being the biggest star in the Fifa-sanctioned version of five-a-side now the Brazilian Falcão, Ricardinho’s idol known as “the Pelé of futsal”, has retired.

‘I haven’t chosen futsal; futsal chose me.’ says Ricardinho. ‘I’ve tried to play football and they told me that I was too small.’ Photograph: Christopher Ryman/The Guardian

“I don’t have to be scared,” he says. “I have to be the example here and abroad. I’m an example for a lot of people in futsal. I’m one of those people that are helping to get more people to play the game.”

In countries where the indoor sport is well established, his brand matches up to all but the elite band of A-list multimillionaire footballers. The sport is in a good place too: Fifa noted a 100% rise in participation to 60m from 2010 to 2015. Ricardinho wants it to become an Olympic sport and has hopes that one of his friends, the Brazil left-back Marcelo, will return to his futsal roots once he finishes at Real Madrid.

My biggest strength, is the speed with which I send information from the brain to the feet

“Some people say the futsal pitch is way too small for me but I say we have just a few futsal idols. The examples we see people showing to kids these days are Neymar, Ronaldo and others – they are all football players.”

At 1.67m (5ft 6in), Ricardinho stands half an inch shorter than Messi; he is half a year younger than Ronaldo. All three grew up with the fundamentals in common: dreaming of playing professional football while forging their sublime skills and ball mastery on the futsal court. Messi and Ronaldo testify to its role as a laboratory of creativity, learning and purposeful practice in their youth.

Ricardinho’s path was different. Dismissed as too small for football, he was cast aside by his boyhood club, Porto, aged 14. “I have always said my dream was to be a football player,” he says. “However, I haven’t chosen futsal; futsal chose me. I’ve tried to play football and ‘they’ told me I was too small. When futsal chose me, I said: ‘If this is what I’m going to play I want to be the best at it.’”

In the sport renowned for imposing acute limitations on time and space – it’s the equivalent of playing 37-a-side on a football pitch – he is the gamechanger most able to eke out pockets of air and breathe life into contests played out under suffocating intensity. He is the one v one king. The team player like no other.

Ricardinho made his debut for Benfica’s futsal team in 2003 aged 17 and four years later turned down overtures to switch codes from the club’s football team manager, the current Portugal coach Fernando Santos. Ricardinho eventually earned a big-money move to Nagoya Oceans in Japan (equivalent to the lucrative path to China in the modern 11-a-side game). After rejecting their attempt to more than quadruple his salary to €30,000 a month, he “gave them a crazy price”, he says. “I thought they would never accept but the answer was yes.”

High-earning spells on loan at CSKA Moscow and back at Benfica followed before he sealed a dream move to Madrid’s Inter Movistar, the main rivals to Barcelona in the strongest professional league, Spain’s Liga Nacional de Fútbol Sala. There he has excelled for the past six seasons, winning the equivalent of the Ballon d’Or for the past five years.

Ricardinho kisses his gold medal after

Portugal won the 2018 European Futsal Championship in Slovenia. Photograph: Jure Makovec/AFP/Getty Images

Ricardinho says his biggest strength is the “speed with which I send information from the brain to the feet”. His array of goals and fleet-footed wizardry are social media gold. Still revered in Japan, he is a cult hero in many other futsal-playing nations, including Serbia, where his outrageous goal against the hosts in the 2016 futsal European Championship went viral.

He has come a long way. His autobiography, La magia acontece donde hay dedicación (Magic happens where there is dedication), chronicles his journey from using oranges or taped-up socks as a ball on the streets of Valbom to his eminence today, likened to the best footballers on the planet. But who does he prefer watching: Messi or Ronaldo?

He laughs loudly, smiles, then quickly turns serious, saying this is “one the biggest problems we see in humanity”. He adds: “We take too long comparing instead of enjoying.”

“Please enjoy,” he implores. “We will never know when we are going to witness players like Ronaldo and Messi again.”

The request to enjoy sounds sensible – and definitely applies to the sight of Ricardinho, the Portuguese micro-magician of the small court.