AND SO WE bid farewell to Neymar, the latest slightly-past-prime-but-hardly-twilit footballer to whom Saudi Arabia’s riches have proven too great to ignore.
He joins Al-Hilal at 31, signalling an end to his top-level career and a start to the sportswriters’ obituaries of his career. Across all of these these there is an undeniably a sense of dissatisfaction at Neymar; a lament for a luminous talent that, if it was not wasted, was certainly not fulfilled.
At least we are at the stage of using the past tense, because up to now, Neymar has been European football’s favourite metaphor.
The individualism and the petulance; the brilliance and the brittleness; the wealth and the chaos; the clothes and the partying and the diving and the Twitch streaming and the skewing of established sporting values: nobody encapsulated the modern age of football quite like Neymar Junior.
His €222 million move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017 will be remembered as one of the most important moments in the sport’s history. This was the greatest nation-state flex in the transfer market that had ever been seen, a move which inflated the market to the point that Barcelona pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin and then tried to build their own offramp in the form of the Super League.
That the move appeared to be motivated by Neymar’s desire to win the Ballon D’Or led to the heralding of a new age of individualism in football. This was a jarring shift in emphasis. At the time Neymar was part of the most exciting front line in the world, playing alongside Messi and Suarez in a Barcelona team that had conquered Europe once and looked likely to do so again. This was the very apogee of the sport. Why would anyone want to trade this for the backwaters of Ligue 1?
Was the Ballon D’Or really that valuable? Didn’t Michael Owen win it?
In the end, Neymar didn’t win the Ballon D’Or at PSG. He finished third in 2017 – largely for what he achieved at Barcelona – and from on then finished no higher than 12th, not even making the 30-man shortlist in two of the three most recent awards.
There was also no new age of individualism because it remains as true now as it ever was: in football, even the greatest individual talents must be sublimated to the collective. Football is now primarily a game of strategy and systems, in which everyone and everything is subservient to the manager’s philosophy.
This is what the best Premier League clubs understood. As Neymar was going to Paris, English clubs were importing Europe’s greatest coaches rather than its greatest players: Guardiola, Klopp, Conte, Mourinho, Pochettino. And where PSG bought Barcelona’s stars, Manchester City bought their ideas, hiring their best executives and ultimately their genius coach.
In this context, Neymar leading an ensemble cast in Paris was never going to be successful. But as tempting as it is to reduce the whole thing to a morality play, it has to be acknowledged that Neymar was unlucky too.
At PSG he was always going to be judged on the Champions League alone – this narrowed stage was a consequence of his decision to move – but he missed too many knockout ties through injuries, many of which were a result of bruising contact in France rather than muscle twangs.
He was outstanding in the behind-closed-doors climax to the 2020 Champions League – assisting in both the quarter-final and semi-final – but these performances are forgotten because PSG narrowly lost the final to Bayern Munich. Any individual legacy is contingent on collective performance which, sometimes, has nothing to do with you.
This happened on the international stage, too. His deadlock-breaking goal against Croatia in the World Cup quarter-finals was a moment of genuine inspiration, but a deflected goal from long range and a penalty shoot-out loss meant that has faded from memory, too. It doesn’t require great feats of mental torsion to imagine Brazil going on to win that World Cup, with Neymar’s intervention forever enshrined. But Messi got that prize too.
He was crassly petulant, of course, but this was a sport that has taught him he can usually get his own way. When he was still at Santos, for instance, he disobeyed orders by taking a penalty off the assigned taker, missed it, clashed with his captain, and was then given a 15-day ban by his manager. Rather than see Neymar serve the suspension and miss an upcoming derby, Santos sacked the manager.
The Neymar parable shows this is no era of individualism but one of individual wealth. Neymar as a money-making machine has been a roaring success, and a reported annual salary of €150 million in Saudi Arabia is its latest triumph.
But the price of such riches has been a seemingly endless state of chaos. Both of Neymar’s previous transfers have ended up in legal wrangles: he and Barcelona settled a claim over alleged unpaid bonuses and a counter-claim over alleged breach of contract, while a Spanish court acquitted Neymar and Barcelona of fraud and corruption charges last year in relation to his 2013 move from Santos.
This move to Al-Hilal is comparatively frictionless and as he slips off to the Gulf, it is hard to imagine anyone bewailing Neymar’s absence from the Champions League next spring.
Unlike Messi and Ronaldo, Neymar’s significance to the sport lies in what he did not achieve, and the version of the sport he did not represent.