Jorge Jesus winced as he read what sounded a lot like the last rites.
“The truth is that he has not been able to keep up with the team physically,” the Al Hilal manager said after their 9-0 win over Al Fateh. “It’s not an easy situation.”
The situation belongs to Neymar. The cloudy future, too. In that small Riyadh press room, Jesus confirmed he would not be registering the forward for the second half of the Saudi Pro League season, effectively drawing a line under this latest chapter of his career.
It is not clear what will happen next. Neymar is 33 in February. As Jesus was at pains to emphasise on Thursday, his ability is not up for debate. His recent injury record makes for grim reading, however: the Brazil forward has not started a match since suffering an anterior cruciate ligament injury playing for his country in October 2023. Zoom out a little further and it is just 733 competitive minutes in 23 months.
Maybe a franchise in MLS will gamble on him. A return to Brazilian club football is another possibility. Even an immobile Neymar would probably still give good marketing material, after all. At this precise juncture, though, you have to wonder whether we are shuffling towards his epilogue.
Neymar has had a string of injuries since moving to Saudi (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
To butcher the old Cormac McCarthy line: if it’s not the end, it’ll do until the end gets here.
Neymar has always evoked strong feelings, many of them negative and most of them irrational. Some will look at this week’s developments and argue that Neymar has been done for some time; that he became irrelevant when he chose to move to Saudi Arabia in the first place; that the injuries since have only rammed home the point. The more stringent will probably want to view this as an appropriate ending, in step with a career defined, as they see it, by drift and decadence.
The first point: yeah, OK, fair enough. A player of Neymar’s talent should never have ended up at Al Hilal at 31. That he did so was a factor of football’s idiot logic — if no top Champions League team can match your stratospheric wage demands, and you’re already incredibly rich, maybe consider lowering them — and the fact that he stayed at Paris Saint-Germain for too long, allowing his career to stagnate along with the project.
We should, however, resist the wider argument, ignore the whiny siren song of the Anti-Neymar League. Those who will paint this as an inglorious sign-off to an inglorious career aren’t looking hard enough.
For seven or eight years, spanning the bildungsroman-with-mullets days at Santos, the golden Barcelona era and perhaps even his first campaign in Paris, Neymar was unquestionably one of the best footballers in the world.
He emerged as a kind of brat prodigy, a twiggy little waif with absurd technique and an anarchist’s disregard for authority. He scored goals that made you burst out laughing. Defenders detested him. “We’re creating a monster,” was the memorable line from veteran coach Rene Simoes after one act of indiscipline. He was right, but not in the way he intended.
Neymar did not instigate some kind of moral collapse. The kid who had the words “joy” and “daring” stitched onto his boots embodied Brazilian football, ennobled it. He immediately ascended to the status of national hero. Even today, you will struggle to find a Brazilian with a bad word to say about him.
At Barcelona, he might easily have bridled at the notion of playing second fiddle to Lionel Messi, of dimming his star power to suit the needs of the collective. Instead, Neymar kissed the ring. The result? Four years of superlative football and, after Luis Suarez was added to the mix in 2014, one of the best attacking tridents in history. It was a testament to his talent and humility.
Neymar, flanked by Suarez, left, and Messi in 2015 (Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)
Even the decision to join PSG, which looked to some like folly, made sense through a certain lens. Neymar had served his time at the Camp Nou, was more than justified in wanting to be the leading man rather than a supporting actor. For all the money, it was a decision born of ambition rather than its opposite.
We know now that it was a misstep — and not a small one. As the seasons wore on, PSG’s upstart charm curdled into bloated self-parody. Neymar, the talisman for the whole enterprise, was tarred with the same brush.
But consider his luck for a second. For one thing, he was immediately joined in Paris by Kylian Mbappe, another superb footballer with a gravitational ego and the dual advantage, over Neymar, of being thrillingly young and incontrovertibly French. Already, his position at the top of the hierarchy — his entire reason for being there — was up for debate. And then who shows up a few seasons later? Messi, the man whose shadow he moved there to escape. Talk about tragicomedy.
Then, of course, there were the injuries. Neymar has been vilified — often fairly — for his propensity for play-acting, but it is hard to think of another player who has been kicked around so much. As he moved towards his late 20s, the knocks clearly began to have an effect, slowing him down, taking away some of the elastic snap that made him such a brilliant dribbler in the early years. No one chooses to get hurt. Neymar deserves the same sympathy that we extend to other players who have been similarly affected.
Neymar missed the final stages of the 2014 World Cup — his coming-out party — after a nasty foul by Juan Zuniga in Brazil’s second-round victory against Colombia. Misfortune has defined his international career, too. Neymar has been his country’s best player for well over a decade but was absent for their only major trophy success in that time, the 2019 Copa America. No player in history has scored more than his 79 goals for Brazil, but the feeling remains that he could — maybe even should — have achieved more.
This, really, is the crux of it. No career is judged in a vacuum. Expectations colour everything. Neymar has enjoyed plenty of success, but has it been commensurate with his immense talent? Clearly not. And so a little barb of discomfort remains.
Neymar scoring against Croatia at the home World Cup in 2014 (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
The temptation is to turn this into a kind of ethical position, to posit that Neymar has in some sense betrayed the gods of potential, maybe even himself — and to resent him for it.
This is a dead end. Sure, Neymar has always been a bit of a Peter Pan figure, a flag-bearer for arrested development. At times, he comes across as a manchild, surrounded by giggling sycophants who enable him. He has never hidden his fondness for poker and parties. If other elite footballers are putting on cruises mid-season, they are certainly keeping quiet about it.
But here’s some news: it’s his life! Could Neymar have squeezed a couple more percentage points out of his gift by going to bed at 8pm every night? Possibly, but he didn’t owe that to anyone. To argue otherwise is pious. Hypocritical, too, given the extent to which, say, Ronaldinho and Romario were widely indulged — deified, even — for their commitment to the nocturnal arts. And neither of those players shone longer than Neymar did at the summit of the European game.
The moralising will subside when Neymar calls it a day, be that next week or — here’s hoping — in a couple of years, after a joyous swansong with Chicago or Santos or Flamengo, maybe even one final tilt at the World Cup. When the dust settles, we will be left with a career worth celebrating, not to mention a highlight reel up there with the very best of them.
Neymar may be limping out of the spotlight but deserves to be remembered for what he was — not just as one of the great Brazilian players of the modern era, but as one of the great players, period.
(Top photo: Lucio Tavora/Xinhua via Getty Images)
