Captain Tsubasa Photo: IC

Who is the greatest footballer ever is the type of question that has dominated pub talk between football fans for years. There is a generational bias - Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi certainly dominate social media conversation now, while Neymar also has ardent fans.

For generations before the names of Diego Maradona, Pele, Johan Cruyff and George Best are non-negotiable, depending on club bias and the era those fans first watched football. That is without contemplating whether the greatest footballer ever is yet to be born.

But what if they never were? What if the greatest player to play the game never actually existed? What if they were completely fictional?

Many fictional footballers have been created throughout history and here are some of the finest examples.

Roy Race

The star of the Roy of the Rovers comics was the hero many in England and abroad grew up with. Race was a hero at Melchester Rovers, where he scored 200 goals in 245 games in his first spell with the fictional club before moving to the equally fictional Walford Rovers.

He also survived two comas before becoming Melchester's manager following a terrorist attack. He won 10 league titles, 11 FA Cups and three European Cups, scoring 481 career goals along the way. A helicopter crash saw his famous left foot amputated in 1993 but he lives on in a revived comic book series starring his son and daughter.

Janco Tiano

When the very first FIFA International Soccer game came out in the run-up to Christmas of 1993 the video game world changed forever. EA Sports had launched a title that would become as popular as the sport it simulated within two decades and the developers deserved some credit. 

They got it in the unlicensed original version where many of the staff put versions of themselves in the game. 

Brazil's crack striker Janco Tiano was in fact Chinese developer Jan Tian, who worked on the game for EA in Vancouver after moving from Beijing.

To Madeira

Legend has it that a Portuguese Championship Manager (now Football Manager) scout saw an opportunity to make his own frustrated dreams of a football career come good by putting himself into the 2001-02 season of the popular game. 

The problem was a little too good and European football clubs started ringing the lowly Portuguese side Desportivo de Gouveia and game publisher Sports Interactive to ask about the 70-goal-a-season striker. Antonio Lopez was the man responsible. 

Madeira was removed from the game but at least he had predecessors: Developers had put themselves into the original Championship Manager game for Cambridge United. He lives on in the name of the developers' Sunday League team, FC To Madeira.

Masal Bugduv

A very modern story surrounds the creation of Bugduv, a supposed Moldovan international destined for the very top. His name was featured in a round-up of promising youngsters and some of the most trusted media outlets. 

There was one problem: He was entirely fictitious. There were clues. His name means "my little black donkey" in Irish Gaelic, the subject of a fable where a man is tricked into ­overpaying for a donkey ­in the ­village hearsay, and the original reports cited a newspaper that meant "Kiss my arse" in Irish. 

The whole thing was the work of a Galway-based journalist who wanted to comment on the nature of modern transfer rumors.

Billy The Fish

Half man, half fish - or at least a man's head on a fish - Billy Thompson was the hero of a sporadic comic strip in the left-field Viz comic. 

The Fulchester United keeper was a hero between the sticks but succumbed to the oddest circumstances. 

He was killed in an FA Cup final before being replaced by his equally amphibious son, also called Billy.

Jack Scully

A character from Australian soap Neighbours, Scully was meant to be a promising footballer at the equally fictional Barnsford FC in England. 

He returned to the soap's ­Erinsborough neighborhood and after a brief love triangle with some of the local ladies decided that playing in the Premier League was not so bad.

He was dropped by Barnsford and returned to Ramsay Street in 2002 - played by a different actor like many soap characters before him.

Kev King

The subject of the darkly comic Premiership Psycho, a football-based reimagining of American Psycho by CM Taylor, Kevin King was a murderous multi millionaire nightmare for football's fearmongers. 

He won a treble and then went on to "Kev" his way into a successful sequel, Group of Death set, with England at the Euros.

Didier Baptiste

A player in the Sky One show Dream Team, Baptiste mixed art and life when he became the subject of transfer rumors from Liverpool in 1999. 

That caused embarrassment for all involved as he instead moved from Monaco to Harchester United.

Jimmy Muir

Sean Bean's character in the 1996 film When Saturday Comes exudes the football dream of working class England. 

He plays his way from Sunday League to then Premier League Sheffield United and becomes a Blades hero along the way, overcoming a drinking problem, family trouble and social deprivation along the way. Inspiring.

Santiago Munez

Somehow Munez was missed by the game until he was spotted by a Newcastle United scout playing in LA - and so begins the three-movie goal franchise. 

He moved to Real Madrid after impressing with Newcastle, and overcoming his asthma and cultural sensitivities along the way, before a truly bizarre third installment centered around the World Cup. Star-studded frippery throughout, bring on Goal 4.

Captain Tsubasa

Asia's greatest ever footballer? Captain Tsubasa cannot be far off. 

Comic book fans will need no introduction to the swashbuckling football hero. Inspired by the 1978 FIFA World Cup, Yoichi Takahashi's creation remains popular to this day.

Alex Hunter

A member of a footballing dynasty, Hunter is the only one we could hope to control, a star as he was in the FIFA video game's "The Journey" segment from 2017 to 2019.
Newspaper headline: Fictional Footballers