Loved this Four-Four-Two retrospective on Real Madrid's "galácticos" team (but don't call them that to their face). As a 10-year-old, the idea of this team of foreign mega-stars was intoxicatingly exotic, and hearing Figo, Ronaldo, Zidane, and Roberto Carlos reminisce together is pure footballing nostalgia. If you've got any affection for early-noughties football, read it.

“It was fun on the pitch, too. “We might have been more of a team before then but there was something about that side that meant you went onto the pitch thinking: ‘I wonder what they’ll come up with next’,” remembers former right-back and FFT columnist Michael Salgado. “I enjoyed playing in that team so much,” says Zidane. “The opposition might score two, three goals ... nowadays, if that happened, you’d say: ‘we’re going to lose’. But we didn’t. No pasa nada. They scored two? We’ll score three. It was fun.” Roberto Carlos puts it in simple terms: “We were all like kids enjoying ourselves out on the pitch when we were together.”

Everyone agreed on who the greatest talent was. Well, almost everyone. “Only Zidane would say that Zidane was not the best. We would joke about the fact that he was the only one who didn’t think he was the most skilful player of his generation,” Roberto Carlos says. Whenever David Beckham was asked about the Frenchman, there was a kind of reverential hush about the way he answered, almost in a whisper. “Zidane was the best,” Ronaldo agrees, “no doubt about that. Everything came so easily to him. His control was incredible. He was the best player I played with.”

The feeling is mutual and Roberto Carlos is proven right: “Ronaldo had the most talent,” Zidane says. “Ronaldo! He didn’t need to train, the cabrón!” laughs Figo, destroying at a stroke Roberto Carlos’s politically correct insistence that you couldn’t be any good if you were a little on the laid-back side. “He was so good that he didn’t need to train.” Zidane agrees: “Once in a while he didn’t fancy training, but the thing is that Ronaldo was such a good player and such a good person that in the end no one really minded.””