The Brazilian striker for Paris Saint Germain is one of the most polarizing players in recent football history. Its immense quality is undeniable, but its behavior on and off the field continues to provoke hostility from rivals and fans. We analyze the game and the personality of another football player
“Isn’t rugby a team sport? So please go out and give Jonah Lomu the ball. “The phrase, one of the most eloquent (and paradoxical) increases in the collective game remembered, was apparently uttered minutes before the 1995 rugby World Cup final between New Zealand and Australia. He is credited with New Zealand coach Laurie Mains one of his assistants, although some say it was actually a young fan’s message that was read out to motivate the players.
Jonah Lomu was the greatest athlete in the history of his sport, a portable jet-powered wardrobe that, with its simple and deadly way of playing rugby, smashed defenses with physical exuberance alone. It was good business for his teammates to give him the ball, the most sensible way to put a sense of responsibility and herd discipline at the service of individual talent. If Lomu wins, we all win.
This simple lesson also applies, albeit with nuances, to football, one of the most complex and currently most choral sports in the world. Even Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández, two virtuosos of associative play, understood that in Josep Guardiola’s FC Barcelona (between 2008 and 2012), very often the recipe for success was to give the ball to Lionel Messi, and something similar has happened since football Football in teams that were fortunate enough to have individual verses that can offer superhuman advantages, such as Peles Brazil or Diego Armando Maradona’s Argentina. No questions or requirements are asked of talent of this caliber. They receive the ball with humble pragmatism assuming that they are the ones with all the answers.
Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior (Mogi das Crizes, Brazil, 1992) lives on the edge of this intersection, that point of no return where the extraordinary individual rises above the group forever. His career has been on the path to excellence since he made his professional debut for Santos, one of Brazil’s flagship clubs, when he was just 17. The ball belongs to him almost from the start. No discussion, no fuss. In both Santos and the Brazilian national team, this unrepentant, skillful and clever dribbler, light as a feather and sharp as a bee, was responsible from an early age for turning on the lights and putting himself in the limelight.
In contemporary football, where physical preparation and tactical abundance limit the most extreme individual talents, Neymar, a countercultural footballer who owes almost everything to technology, has been making a difference and raising the bar for more than a decade. competitive of the teams he plays in. Despite everything, a large part of the fans and specialists continue to discuss the inviolable status that Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and even rising stars like Kyllian Mbappé, teammate of the Brazilian in Paris, recognize.
Neymar is of course a controversial player who arouses admiration and amazement, but also antipathy and rejection. Their defeats are sometimes celebrated with militant zeal by militant fans, as if they were victories in a noble, pure and genuine way of understanding the sport. In the constellation of heroes and villains of modern football, he played the role of an (almost) universal antagonist, despised even by part of the fans of the Parisian Saint Germain, to which he switched in 2017.
For British journalist Tim Vickery, who has followed his career very closely since 2009 and was one of the earliest supporters in the international press, “some of this hostility stems from a certain hatred of excellence: it falls very hard because it does too is Very Good, and at least a portion of football fans are prone to this populist logic, which is falsely egalitarian, of increasing effort and commitment, love of colors and contempt for true talent, as if an excessive gift were some kind of unforgivable affront. “Despite everything, Vickery also realizes“ that there are great talent with a relatively flawless image and a trajectory that is evidence of criticism, like Messi. Neymar was unable to put himself above good and evil like his former teammate in Barcelona because of his personality, demeanor and career with a lot more edges. “
As early as September 2010, an article for Sports illustratedVickery reiterated that Neymar’s decision to stay in Brazil and turn down a millionaire offer from Chelsea, the first of Europe’s major squads to show interest in his services, was “a good decision for the player, but perhaps not for Santos”. Neymar was 18 years old at the time and had become a fetish player for both his club and a Brazilian league who had not fully resigned himself to his role as a major export power. To keep him, Santos was forced to forego a millionaire transfer and make him an off-market renewal offer that wasn’t even fully written off with money from sponsors willing to be linked to the operation.
In addition, as Vickery explained, they paid the athletic tribute for the dismissal of their coach Dorival Júnior, a competent professional who had made the mistake of facing the team’s star. Neymar had missed three almost consecutive sentences and Dorival decided someone else would take them. According to Vickery, the player who is now a “youthful goddess” responded by pleading for the author’s abrupt end to such a lack of respect for his sports hierarchy. He has it.
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