When Neymar broke onto the scene in 2009, many fans anointed him as the future of Brazilian football, an expectation that he carried for the rest of his career, as both a goal and a burden. Nowadays, as his career enters its final stages, Neymar’s public image is affected by both his professional shortcomings and his amazingly charming style of play.
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011: on a rainy night in Santos, two of Brazil’s most important clubs, Flamengo and Santos, took to the pitch for what would be considered one of the greatest matches in Brazilian football history. The game, a riveting 5-4 win for Flamengo, featured a plethora of amazing goals, but is memorable for the duel between two generational talents: Ronaldinho Gaúcho and Neymar.
At that point, Neymar was already a substantial cultural presence in Brazil: a month prior, he had won Santos’ first Copa Libertadores (South America’s most prestigious competition) since Pelé and beyond that his flashy dribbling had earmarked him as Brazil’s most recent star. In particular, his flair was compared to Ronaldinho, the greatest showman in football history. As the match unfolded, it was clear that both players felt challenged by the other’s abilities, and in their own way both came out on top. Ronaldinho won the match with a free kick he charmingly sent under the wall, but Neymar came out with the game’s best goal, in which he dribbled five Flamengo defenders until he chipped it over the team’s keeper. This play eventually won the 2011 Puskas Award, given to the year’s most beautiful goal.
To a large extent, both Neymar and Ronaldinho are exponents of the great ideal of Brazilian football: jogo bonito or “the beautiful game”. Stereotypically, Brazilian football should be free-flowing, expressive, dribbling, joyful, and in general aesthetically pleasing. While this stereotype is not a totally accurate representations, there may be no two players who embodied it as well as these two. This 2011 game represented an official passing of the baton of Brazil’s great footballing traditions. Neymar was now the star onto whom the Brazil would project all of its footballing fantasies.
This is of course quite a tall task. Brazil is a country accustomed to footballing glory and nearly all of its greats – Pelé, Garrincha, Romário, Ronaldo – have previously led the country to World Cup titles. Any praise to those who didn’t, like Zico or Sócrates, is always accompanied with the caveat: “but, of course, they didn’t win a Cup”.
With this burden in mind, Neymar donned Brazil’s historic number 10 jersey as he entered the field on June 12th, 2014, against Croatia, for the opening game of the 2014 World Cup. The game, in his hometown of São Paulo, inaugurated a tournament for which Brazilians held much expectation, to which Neymar did, for the most part, live up, scoring four goals in five games. Yet, this maiden campaign came to a heartbreaking close: in the quarter-final matchup against Colombia, he suffered a challenge which fractured his vertebrae and ruled him out of the World Cup. From the hospital, Neymar watched a destabilised Brazil squad be humiliated in a 7-1 trouncing against Germany in the semi-finals. The national team’s collapse only intensified Neymar’s myth: this is what that squad looked like without its star player.
While the 2014 World Cup was far from the farewell Neymar hoped for, the future still looked bright for him. The summer before, he had completed a move to Barcelona, where he was part of a star-studded roster led by Lionel Messi. In the 2014-15 season, this iconic team won the Champions League, with Neymar scoring a goal in the final. In 2015 and 2017, Neymar finished third in Ballon d’Or voting, signalling the consensus that he was the third best player in the world at that point. In the meantime, he also won gold with Brazil at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Further, as his footballing prowess grew, so did his media presence. Considered Brazil’s star since his teenage years, Neymar now became a global superstar, rivalling the popularity of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
With such immense popularity and success, the notion that Neymar was overshadowed by Messi at Barcelona began to grow. Neymar’s play at Barcelona confirmed his greatness, but Messi’s presence deferred the promise that Neymar could be a protagonist, rather than just a sidekick. While next to Messi, his success would always be seen as derivative. This tension pointed toward a natural destination for Neymar. Paris Saint-Germain was probably the only club who could afford his astronomical release clause and was nonetheless the perfect project: a well-built team with greater European ambitions that needed a final piece to join the elite of club football.
However, from the moment Neymar moved to Paris, in the summer of 2017, the veil of adoration around him broke. Previous criticisms levied at him, such as diving or indiscipline in training, had mostly been brushed aside. He was only a kid, after all. Now, however, Neymar was 25 and it was far harder to insulate himself completely from the consequences of his actions. More than that, he had made an undoubtedly bold choice to move from Barcelona, one that effectively said: “I am the best player in the world”. From then on, Neymar would no longer be judged only by his potential, but from what he actually delivered, with the explicit expectation of a Champions League title with PSG and a World Cup with Brazil.
The increased scrutiny on Neymar’s activities, both on and off the field, had a clear impact on the public’s opinion of him. He fell out with teammates, had constant injuries, and suffered accusations that he was negligent in training. Such accusations were only worsened by his bohemian lifestyle; Neymar often appeared in parties even while injured or suspended from matches. At the 2018 World Cup, Brazil faltered again, with claims Neymar was more focused on his popularity than team’s success. PSG ultras turned against him, and he was at various points booed by his own fans. At PSG, Neymar was judged as someone who chose to be the main man, and he could no longer hide behind his youth or Messi’s protagonism as he had at Barcelona. In this capacity, Neymar’s public image transformed into a player whose talent was inextricably tied to distraction.
This is not to say that he was performing badly on the pitch. At PSG, Neymar excelled, winning the French league every year he played for them. He led the club to a remarkable campaign in the 2019-20 Champions League, although they were ultimately beaten by Bayern Munich in the final. It would be cynical to deny Neymar’s brilliance, but it was nonetheless increasingly surrounded by caveats.
The chaos surrounding Neymar’s time at both PSG and the Brazilian national team reached a critical point in 2022. PSG, which had signed Lionel Messi and boasted the most star-studded attacking trio in the world, were knocked out by Real Madrid in Neymar’s last full Champions League campaign. Later that year, in the 2022 World Cup, Brazil was eliminated on penalties to Croatia, despite an extra time goal by Neymar. To his fans, Neymar’s story was becoming repetitive: his talent always kept the hope alive, but it never seemed enough to actually silence nagging doubts about him.
In the beginning of 2023, Neymar suffered a season-ending injury, which also spelled the close of his time at PSG. That summer, he left Europe and moved to Al-Hilal, where he barely played due to constant injuries. Last year, he rejoined his boyhood club Santos to help the team in a relegation fight. While Santos ultimately did avoid relegation, Neymar’s performances were below what had been expected of him, and he was again involved in a number of new controversies, such as kicking a fellow teammate and a deliberate handball.
Yet, despite four years of lacklustre play and spotty fitness, when Brazil manager Carlo Ancelotti announced the team for the 2026 World Cup, Neymar was in the squad, quenching months of speculation. Many, including his teammates, vehemently defended his call-up, perhaps, a traumatic reflex of a country that remembered the scoreline when Brazil had last fielded a World Cup squad without him. One could snarkily dismiss Neymar’s call-up as the product of political and media pressure or that the insistence of his teammates was an attempt to deflect blame from their own shortcomings. These may be true, but it is undeniable that, despite this, Neymar’s inclusion in the Brazil squad generated a wave of hope among the country’s supporters, as well as a general feeling of nostalgia among football fans worldwide. Neymar’s flair still held a grip on the footballing world at large.
At the World Cup, though, he decidedly underperformed. He was unfit for Brazil’s first two matches and, during the country’s elimination against Norway, he weakened the team when he came on. After scoring a last-minute penalty, with Brazil still trailing 2-1, he taunted the goalkeeper instead of restarting the game. What was once seen as irreverence and confidence now looked like vanity and immaturity; Neymar seemed to prove his haters right. Many blamed him for Brazil’s loss, and many others say that he was egotistical.
There are certainly other possible scapegoats for Brazil’s elimination, but the disappointment with Neymar seems proportional to the expectation created around him, a product of all of the hope he generated throughout his career. To reject today’s Neymar as a mediocre player would be akin to rejecting everything that he symbolises. It’s a rejection of jogo bonito. It’s a rejection of the whimsy and flair of football. It’s a rejection of the notion that football can be not just a game, but a cultural expression that translates a country’s passion and creativity.
Alas, it is wilful blindness to deny Neymar’s decline in quality. And, bitter as it may be, the fact is that he did not live up to the expectations placed upon him. He won no major tournament for Brazil and was incapable of being the main man in a Champions League winner. Despite this underperformance, Neymar has still behaved himself as someone who had achieved all of this. When playing for Brazil, he demonstrates a self-centredness that would only be justifiable by champions like Pelé or Ronaldo. At the club level, he shunned Barcelona because he believed himself to be better than Messi, and his oversized ego helped weigh down the PSG superteam. Even when his fitness is decidedly subpar, he stalls his teams with the belief that he is always the best player on the pitch.
Sport is filled with feel-good and heartbreaking stories; Neymar’s is certainly the latter. Despite his disappointing career end, his legacy to football will always be tied to how most people still remember him: a young, charming, amazingly skilled kid who could enchant anyone with his play. Nevertheless, when the nostalgia for that period fades, looking at Neymar becomes a sorrowful experience, full of if-onlys, rather than remember-whens. The aged version Neymar is just a melancholy shell of the man who charmed the entire world.
