As Thierry Henry, seated in the back of a chauffeured limousine, draws out of Barcelona airport today, he will quickly gain a sense of the importance of the football club to his new home city. Less than one minute onto the highway, he’ll see a huge billboard featuring the face and prominent teeth of Ronaldinho, advertising chewing gum. Not too far down the road he’ll whizz past a pair of Samuel Eto’os, twin images of the Cameroonian being used in a poster campaign for a car. This is a place with plenty of va-va-voom in it already.

The most urgent question put to Henry when he is presented to Barcelona’s press and supporters – probably tomorrow – goes along the lines of: Does this club, this team, have space for Ronaldinho, Eto’o, Henry, plus the brilliant, rising phenomenon that is Leo Messi? First, it is a tactical question and Henry yesterday cited the work of Barça’s head coach, Frank Rijkaard, as a decisive factor in his choosing to join the Catalan club from Arsenal. Rijkaard insists that he wants Ronaldinho, Eto’o and Messi with him and Henry next season and the Dutchman has been a clever and daring planner of strategies and lineups over the past three years. But some imagination is required for him to create a balanced team accommodating all four of his excellent strikers.

Some sensitivity is also asked for. Politically, Barcelona needed a fetching recruit after a confusing campaign: Henry, long sought-after, is a name to vividly please supporters judging from the local blogs and the phone-ins yesterday. The club have had a bad season, while playing some very good football for much of it. The defence of the European Cup failed before the quarter-finals. Their defence of the Spanish league title fell short on last Sunday’s final evening of the championship. But Barça’s sense that are they the still best equipped team in La Liga had taken less of a dent than perhaps it should have done, the principal charge against them one of complacency, and an underlying theme of indiscipline.

The club president, Joan Laporta, has set out his manifesto for the recovery by calling for tougher, less indulgent management. And as Henry was sorting out the final details of his four-year contract, some of his new teammates were responding to the president’s end-of-term message.

Deco, the Portuguese-Brazilian midfielder, intimated he did not like the suggestion that the players were taking it too easy, especially in their evenings. Eto’o, whose season has been defined more by the damaging absence his knee injury did to the potency of the team and the unsettling effect of a couple of verbal outbursts than by his goals, was telling reporters at a junior tournament in Leon that he had a “love-hate” relationship with Ronaldinho.

Henry, the senior and most authoritative player by a distance during his last two seasons at Arsenal, is joining a dressing-room where there are a number of strong voices, not always singing from the same songsheet.

Eto’o, around whom there is interest from Serie A and the Premier League, says he wants to stay at Barcelona, that any ups and downs with Ronaldinho are like “those of any couple, we have our quarrels and reconciliations”. Deco says of Eto’o, “we know his character, and he sometimes says things and then thinks, but he doesn’t mean any harm”.

Back in January, Eto’o felt harmed enough to refuse to take the field as a late substitute on his return from the five-month injury lay-off, criticised Rijkaard for making public his refusal and aimed another dart at players not working hard enough, a statement widely taken as pointed at Ronaldinho.

To a man, the Barcelona players sound delighted that Henry is joining them. Eto’o calls the Frenchman “a good friend” and the Cameroon striker looks forward to having one in a dressing-room where, again, he has bluntly said his closest ally is the kit-man. Eto’o’s public statements have become an easy touchstone for the impression that Barça’s squad politics tend to divide between a group of Brazilians on the one hand, the clutch of local players – such as captain Carles Puyol and Xavi – on another and the independent spirit that is Eto’o.

Henry will at least find help making sense of the place from his compatriot Lilian Thuram. He and the defender have been close for well over a decade, having been colleagues at Monaco in the 1990s.

Giovanni van Brockhorst and Sylvinho – the latter of whom may be on his way out of the Nou Camp – knew Henry at Arsenal and Van Bronkhorst led a succession of tributes yesterday. “He’s a fantastic player, and I know that first-hand from having trained with him every day. He’s very special and although we’ve got a strong squad he’s going to compete with the strikers we already have.”

Rijkaard will have developed an idea how that will work. When Henry turned down Barcelona just over 12 months ago, the head coach described it as a “big blow”; he had been keen then to unite Henry with the so-called REM – Ronaldinho, Eto’o, Messi – trio. But how? Henry and Eto’o as joint centre-forwards with Ronaldinho and Messi on the wings? Ronaldinho closer to midfield? Henry at outside-left?

But Rijkaard has been ready to confront orthodox tactical thinking before. His first-choice midfield at Barça for much of the past two seasons has been without the sort of muscular retriever that most coaches now regard as essential. On Ronaldinho’s arrival at Barça from Paris Saint-Germain, Rijkaard and his staff gradually developed a game plan around a new position for the Brazilian, a flexible outside-left. On Deco’s arrival from Porto, Rijkaard asked him to retreat from his playmaker role and operate in a midfield three. In the past six months, Rijkaard has even experimented with a back three, sometime successfully, often not.

More new recruits are on their way and Barcelona have already lost one striker this summer, Javier Saviola coming to the end of one of the most expensive contracts awarded in the club’s history. Saviola was once Barça’s record signing, has earned close to £4m a year since 2001 and spent two of those seasons loaned out elsewhere. The Argentinian had a sound goalscoring record here, though he was never to Rijkaard’s taste and Henry has certainly joined not to simply cover for Saviola’s meagre 719 La Liga minutes last season, nor to have the sort of marginal role given to the last centre-forward Barça signed from the Premiership. Eidur Gudjohnsen’s opportunities seem further compromised by Henry coming to Catalonia.

Eto’o will be away for the best part of a month next January and February at the African Cup of Nations, so when Henry talks of his first months at Barça “as a learning time”, he is being polite, respectful, but also sensitive to Rijkaard’s need to rotate his resources. “I will give my best whatever is the starting XI,” he promised. But £16m does not buy a substitute, not one who has four times been the Premier League’s leading goalscorer.

Henry played 17 times for Arsenal in the last Premier League season, having been badly hit by injury. Barça believe he has some of his best years yet to come. They would not much care to look back at the precedents of Arsenal doing business with them. Seven summers ago, Barça paid more than £30m for Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit. Petit had gone within 12 months, Overmars’s legacy at Camp Nou is a position at the head of most fan surveys about the most expensive flop in the club’s history.

Henry, who turns 30 in August, is costing almost as much as Ronaldinho did at the age of 23. He would, say the buyers, have come cheaper and, of course, younger 12 months ago, when a deal was all but done. “There has been some inflation since,” said Ferran Soriano, who negotiated the deal for Barcelona. “There are players who cost £10m a year ago who now cost £15m.”

Barça expect a great Henry for their investment, and one still at his peak.

What the papers say

— The Spanish press splashed the Thierry Henry signing all over the front and back pages. ‘Henry, At Last: Better Late Than Never’, said the headline in La Vanguardia. While under the banner ‘A Dream Attack’ the Sport daily insisted ‘Henry is a superstar, and if he maintains his wonderful change of pace, so reminiscent of Johan Cruyff, the Nou Camp will enjoy him’. The positive reaction continued with El Mundo Deportivo saying: ‘The fi rst recruit of a New Barça promises great things’ and El Peridico hailing the acquisition of the ‘world’s greatest goalscorer’

— At least Marca offered a note of caution. Under the headline ‘Another galactico for Barca’ the paper reported that Henry’s signing would be ‘a hot potato now for Rijkaard. Barça have a forward line with four of the world’s best players, so there will be problems with who starts. Neither Messi, Eto’o, Dinho or Henry will stand for being on the bench and only an unnatural system can fi nd space for all of them’