This is the time for lists, the last day of the year, a time to line up the best and the worst, the highs and the lows, the top tens — and all other kinds of lists. But what follows is none of these. It is merely a celebration of beauty seen through a single pair of human eyes and enacted by a bunch of preternaturally gifted and inventive bunch of footballers playing in the Spanish La Liga

Welcome the boys of Barcelona FC, a team of footballers who have played as cultured and classically graceful a brand of soccer this year as any team might have ever put on show in the long history of the sport.

In the year of the football World Cup, a year in which Sachin Tendulkar proved that age is nothing more than a state of mind as he scaled peaks that might have seemed insurmountable even to the great man only a few years ago, during a season when Rafael Nadal became the first male player since the legendary Rod Laver to win three Grand Slam titles in a row in a calendar year, to zero in on the very best objectively is almost impossible.

In the event, this is not an attempt to pick the Sportsperson of the Year, which could well be Sachin or Rafa, or even the team of the year, which is undoubtedly the Spanish football side that won the World Cup in South Africa.

On the other hand, this is this column's salute to a team that has authored a style of football that is the very definition of what Tele Santana described as Jogo Bonito (Beautiful Game).

Beauty in sport, as in life, is not an objectively definable quality, but this much is true: the Barca symphony orchestra has stirred responses that have only rarely been touched by sport. Watching them at their best is an experience quite like savouring the rich lyricism of Rubinstein's Chopin.

Prosaic into poetic

Messi, Iniesta, Xavi and Co. have turned the prosaic into the poetic while proving, yet again, that to the finest of sports teams, how they play matters as much as the result. And, for connoisseurs who believe that the journey itself is the destination, Pep Guardiola's boys have offered some of the year's most uplifting moments on the field.

If beating arch-rivals Real Madrid 5-0 was an operatic performance, then the geometric precision of Barca's short-passing game left many football fans in a dizzy state. And they have played with their customary creativity, passion and brilliance for a good part of the last three years

Jose Mourinho, the highly accomplished Real Madrid coach, said after that match that the Barcelona attack made his team feel “impotent.” Then again, seldom do we get to see such a potent attack. Barca's inventive midfield and rampaging frontline played with tremendous confidence and panache against the richest football club in the world with a hugely impressive line-up featuring Madrid's poster boy Cristiano Ronaldo.

In sport, there is always the tension between diametrically competing impulses, not the least when an individual or a team is supremely gifted. Do you follow your instincts or fall back on conservative (read that pragmatic, if you wish) reasoning? This is something that every top player and coach has had to wrestle with.

And, the beautiful game is fraught with risks, as several great sides, including Johan Cryuff's wonderfully creative World Cup side in 1974 and the Brazilian team featuring Zico and Socrates — which produced moments of sublime football before an inspired Paulo Rossi taught them a lesson in the 1982 World Cup — have found out to their dismay.

This is precisely why we should celebrate Barca, for they have consistently managed to create awe-inspiring moments on the field while courting success for the most part. They won six major titles in 2009, including a Spanish treble and the Club World Cup.

Comparisons galore

Inevitably, there are comparisons to some of the great club sides of the past — the Real Madrid team of 1960 starring Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo di Stefano, Pele's Santos in the early 1960s, Benfica in 1961-62 with Eusebio as its hero, Matt Busby's Manchester United featuring the peerless George Best later that decade, Ajax and Bayern Munich in the early 1970s showcasing the skills of Cryuff and Franz Beckenbauer respectively.

“The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose own timeless works of art go way beyond what anybody can accomplish with his legs on a football field.

But all these legendary stars have indeed produced minor works of sporting art while turning their teams into formidable, world-beating club sides. And this Barcelona team should rank right up there with the all-time great club teams.

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports”, wrote David Foster Wallace in an essay on Roger Federer, “but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.”

Barca does not consciously aspire to create beauty. Messi and his colleagues embrace it as a matter of habit.