Lionel Messi is undeniably the most effective player in the world. While a lot was made of his early season scoring struggles, he was contributing in other major ways for his team have amounted to promising victories.

Now Barcelona will have to cope without the superstar in a rather painful way. Messi will be out for the next seven to eight weeks leaving an already battered Barcelona side without its most important player.

So the big question is, how will Messi's absence hurt the team?

Messi was the team's leading goal scorer to this point in the year and led the squad in assists with two in La Liga. He ranked second in the team in key passes per game and was the most dominant dribbler in the world.

His dribbling ability has always been his ace in the hole and likely his best differentiator. The moment Messi decides to take on a player he unbalances the opposing defense forcing players to either take fouls or get other defenders out of position to take the ball from him. From that point forth he can cut the ball to an open teammate or continue dish past other defenders to find himself a shot at goal.

No one else on the team can do that. No one in the world can, to be honest, but it was a huge part of what was making Barcelona click early on. Click is not necessarily to the best way to describe much of how Barcelona has played in 2015-16 with the MSN trio of Neymar, Luis Suarez and Messi combining for a whopping nine goals in six games.

Barcelona has averaged 17 shots per game this season; Messi has accounted for over five of them. Having Messi out likely puts a greater onus on Neymar and Suarez to find the net more often, something they have not been particularly successful at for most of the season thus far.

In La Liga, Neymar has scored on 13 percent of the shots he has taken while Suarez has been a more successful converter; however the Uruguayan has taken far fewer shots on goal than either Neymar or Messi and has shown a necessity to rely on the play of the others to get his chances.

Messi has only converted on nine percent of his chances in 2015-16, but he has a career conversion rate of around 20 percent and would have seen those numbers go up quite significantly.

While Suarez and Neymar are huge goal producers, the real question is who does Luis Enrique use instead of Messi on that right wing of 4-3-3? Munir El Haddadi was the option on Saturday when the Argentine went down and the youngster was largely ineffective throughout. The youngster was hyped last season and wound up scoring one goal in 10 appearances. Still 20, he's still pressured a lot at this juncture to succeed as the team has no Rafinha to be the obvious replacement for Messi.

It will be interesting to see how Barcelona copes with the injury to player so vital as Messi. The team has never really had to face such a prolonged absence of its star man, but now time will tell if this team has sufficient depth to take on such a serious challenge.