Neymar: Maverick, genius, king of the ‘could have been’
Sarah Rodriguez Neymar’s 10-year career in Europe has come to an end this month, following Paris Saint-Germain’s £80million ($102m) sale of the forward to Saudi Pro League club Al Hilal.
The move, which will see the 31-year-old paid wages estimated at $300million, has sparked debate about the player’s legacy. Here is a footballer who has maximised his earning power within the game, but there are questions about whether he ever maximised his footballing potential.
Neymar is not quite retired but has entered a strange liminal space in football. His time in Europe has seen him earn massive amounts of money and win multiple trophies, yet his time here is mainly associated with what he could have been, what he never was, and what he failed to achieve.
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How did we reach this point?
It is July 5, 2014 and Neymar is talking to camera while holding back tears.
He is 22 years of age and has been informed by doctors that he has fractured vertebrae after being kneed in the back by Colombia’s Juan Zuniga in the World Cup quarter-final. Brazil won the game 2-1 but Neymar’s tournament is over. He will play no further part in his nation’s attempts to win a sixth World Cup and on home soil. That day, media outlet O Tempo runs a headline saying Brazil “Won the game, lost the star”.
Neymar is on the verge of tears as he tries to explain the situation.
“My World Cup has not ended, it has been interrupted by a play but the tournament goes on and I told my team-mates to do everything in order to help me achieve my dream to be world champion,” he says. He scored four goals in the tournament and hundreds of fans gathered outside the hospital Neymar was taken to, greeting his arrival with chants of “Força Neymar”.
This is young Neymar. This is the player who will end his video message saying “‘My dream was to play at a World Cup final but I’m certain my team-mates will be champions. I will be there with them, and all Brazilians will soon be celebrating all of that.”
Brazil do not win the 2014 World Cup. They lose 7-1 to Germany in the semi-finals. On that day, match day captain David Luiz holds a Neymar Jr 10 shirt with goalkeeper Julio Cesar, the pair bellowing out the national anthem. It is one part pride, one part mourning for their absent player. In 2014 everyone expects that Neymar will one day play for Brazil in a World Cup semi-final, but that day is still to arrive.
It is March 8, 2017, and Neymar is about to access a realm of footballing perfection.
Barcelona are playing Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League round of 16. They’re 3-1 up on the night at Camp Nou but 3-5 down on aggregate. They need a miracle to make a comeback, but for once, things seem beyond Lionel Messi.
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Then it happens. Neymar scores a free kick in the 88th minute. Then he converts a penalty in the 91st. With the scores tied 5-5 on aggregate, Barcelona look to be exiting the tournament on away goals, and then Neymar does it again – providing an assist for Sergi Roberto. A free kick, a penalty, an assist in seven minutes and 17 seconds. One of the most fantastic sequences of attacking talent the Champions League has ever seen.
“This was the best game I’ve played,” Neymar says at full-time. He had already scored in a victorious Champions League final performance for Barcelona in 2015, but this is his moment for the club.
Yet the enduring image of La Remontada (The Comeback) comes from photographer Santiago Garces, capturing a victorious Messi surrounded by Barcelona fans (the picture is below alongside Messi meeting the photographer). Seventy million people view the photo within 48 hours. At the time, it was touted as the most-viewed picture in the club’s history; one of Neymar’s greatest-ever triumphs has been used to burnish the image of another great.
Lionel Messi a rencontré Santiago Garces, qui l'a photographié lors de la remontada du Barça face au PSG.
— Actu Foot (@ActuFoot_) April 3, 2017
That summer, he leaves Barcelona for Paris Saint-Germain, abdicating from the accepted Spanish succession plan and throwing the club into disarray.
Neymar becomes a wealthy man playing in France, his salary doubling to become the world’s best-paid player. Still, the move comes with added expectations. In leaving for a league with fewer comparable rivals for domestic trophies, his work at PSG becomes laser-focused on one thing.
“He could go to any club in the world,” said Gerard Pique that summer. “What does he want? More money or more titles? I could understand that he wants to go to be a leader, but not for a sporting project. With all due respect, he is betting everything on one hand (the Champions League).”
It is now August 23, 2020 and Neymar is again in front of a camera, holding back tears.
Despite plenty of domestic success, his plans at PSG have somewhat gone awry. The 2017-18 season saw him score 28 goals in 30 matches on the way to a domestic treble in France. However, a foot injury in February meant he missed a crucial Champions League tie against Real Madrid, where the French side were eliminated.
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In 2018-19, he again won a French league title, but another foot injury saw him miss Champions League games against Manchester United. A last-minute penalty in the second leg saw United squeeze through the last-16 tie on away goals. Neymar’s reaction to the penalty — stood in his civilian clothes, mouth agape at the chaos — later became a meme. Injuries often meant he was forced to be a bystander rather than a protagonist in his club’s biggest games.
Still, the Covid-19 disrupted 2019-20 season sees things align for Neymar. He stays healthy for the majority of the season. He scores 19 goals and registers 12 assists as PSG again win a domestic treble. He is one of the best players in the closed-door, one-legged Champions League knockout matches played in Lisbon that year, pulling his team back from the brink against Atalanta in the quarter-finals before putting RB Leipzig to the sword in the semi-finals. Supported by Kylian Mbappe and Angel Di Maria, the 2020 Champions League Final against Bayern Munich is Neymar’s best opportunity to complete the PSG project and prove to the world he was right to leave Barcelona.
He falls agonisingly short. Bayern goalkeeper Manuel Neuer wins the man of the match award for a series of first-half saves to deny Neymar and Mbappe. Mbappe is felled in the penalty area by Joshua Kimmich. It looks like a foul, but a penalty isn’t awarded. A header from Kingsley Coman is the difference as the German club win their sixth Champions League title.
American sportswriter Wright Thompson once opined the peril of professional sports came from athletes honing their skills in private for years only to be judged on a handful of moments of public performance.
There is a photo of Neymar after this final (the one at the top of this article), sat in the dugout, holding back tears, his face wracked with anguish, that paints his pain too clearly. He knows he has missed a fantastic opportunity to be seen as the best footballer in the world.
It is December 9, 2022 and Neymar is again in tears.
In a finely-poised World Cup quarter-final between Brazil and Croatia, Neymar has combined red-hot creativity with ice-cold execution to score in the first half of extra-time. The goal is remarkable, with the playmaker collecting the ball on the edge of the box before exchanging a one-two with Lucas Paqueta and driving through the heart of the Croatian defence. He fends off a block from defender Borna Sosa to receive Paqueta’s pass by the penalty spot. He has the quickness of thought and of body to round goalkeeper Dominik Livakovic to maximise his chance of scoring.
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Then he directs his shot to the roof of the Croatian net, rather than along the floor where any retreating defender can block it on the goal line.
It is one of the most spectacular goals the World Cup has seen. That the goal means Neymar equals Pele’s official goal tally of 77 for the national team gives it even greater significance.
Twelve minutes later, Brazil team-mate Fred loses the ball high up the field, leading to a Croatian attack from which Bruno Petkovic scores. Twenty minutes later, Croatia beat Brazil 4-2 on penalties. Neymar – who did not take a spot kick in the shootout – falls to his knees, a semi-final against Messi’s Argentina snatched away from him.
This is Neymar. One of a handful of players with physical tools and technical skill to execute whatever his curious and creative footballing brain wanted to do, yet someone who will go down in history sitting outside of the handful of greats to ever play the game.
Neymar’s career in Europe is more complicated than these series of vignettes, but a complex series of factors have reduced what should be (and arguably is) a glittering career into one of snippets and highlights.
There was never a complete season of European football where the Brazilian was considered the best player in the world. Any time Neymar appeared capable of putting together a conclusive body of work, he’d succumb to another injury. Part of this is because of his playing style: at 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in) tall and with an upright dribbling style, his feet were constantly twisting and turning, and his ankle ligaments could only take so many contortions, especially when so many defenders attempted to hack him down before he could return to a safe and neutral position.
Impact injuries were a reoccurring danger and hard to legislate for, no matter how many times he went to ground and asked for the protection of match officials. It should have been easier to guard against the muscle injuries that became more commonplace as he entered his late twenties, but Neymar’s enjoyment of the celebrity lifestyle perhaps meant he lacked the durability seen in Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo’s lengthy careers. Across six years at PSG, he was available only for 55 per cent of matches.
Neymar’s post-Barcelona career saw him score many goals and win trophies, but it is hard to definitively say he has a season on par with the best of Robert Lewandowski, Arjen Robben, Franck Ribery, Luka Modric or Karim Benzema — greats who found it difficult to achieve universal recognition as the best players in the world during the Messi-Ronaldo era but still found ways to triumph. That Modric won the 2018 Ballon D’Or at the age of 33, and Benezma his in 2022 at age 35 adds another wrinkle. At 31, Neymar should not feel like a man out of time, but there is a sense that he has missed opportunity.
When Neymar chose to leave Barcelona in August 2017, few could have foreseen the continued excellence of Messi and Ronaldo blocking his path to the summit of world football. Fewer still could have foreseen the rapid emergence of Mbappe, winning a World Cup with France in 2018 and gradually supplanting Neymar within the PSG project. He is not the only player to have his chances of being regarded as the best to be disrupted by these two generations of footballers (Paul Pogba and Eden Hazard can muster similar complaints).
𝗠𝗘𝗥𝗖𝗜, @neymarjr! ❤️💙
A warm farewell from the team to Neymar Jr at the PSG Campus today!
— Paris Saint-Germain (@PSG_English) August 17, 2023
He will be warmly regarded by those in Saudi Arabia, and will look fantastic in vignettes that make their way onto social media. Despite his initial belief that the 2022 World Cup would be his last appearance at the tournament, he might still appear in 2026, attempting to make good on his promise like Messi did for Argentina. There will be those who say Neymar accomplished nearly everything he could while playing in Europe and that it is up to us — the viewer/reader — to decide if we placed too high an expectation on him. Others will look at his body of work and say, despite his record-equalling goal tally with Pele and achievements with PSG and Barcelona, he sits behind even Ronaldinho in the all-time rankings of footballing greats.
He tried to become the next great individual in France but felt increasingly ornamental as injuries curbed his playing time and Mbappe grew in momentum. Together they won multiple league titles but the football felt lacking in stakes. The flicks, the tricks and the passing will live on for Neymar, and he will likely go down in history as one of the last great mavericks of this modern age. But there remains the smallest hollowness to his legacy.
Many saw Neymar win the Copa Libertadores and Puskas award with Santos in 2011 and expected him to become a footballing demi-god during his years in Europe. There are so many images of him crying and anguished after defeats as he proved all-too human and fallible. As he leaves the continent, he departs as a Could-Have-Been King.
(Top photo: Michael Regan – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
