The tale of Neymar, soccer homebody.
Image by Clive Brunskill / Getty Images
Neymar has scored more than 100 goals in his career, exceeding 40 in a season twice. He's led his club, Santos, to the Brazilian championship and its first South American title since Pele did the same in 1963. He's been on the cover of a video game. He's sponsored by Nike. He's the seventh-highest-paid player in the world. He has an appallingly "fashionable" haircut. And he's only 21. By about every standard, he's what you would call a "worldwide superstar."
Except this one: We're not sure if he's that good. As in, no one has any idea. He might be the greatest soccer player in the world not named Messi, and he might just be another talented 21-year-old Brazilian, of which there are enough to populate a small European principality. No one knows, because a combination of caution and coincidence has kept Neymar from playing almost any meaningful games against top world-class competition.
Not knowing is weird, especially today when toddlers are presumably being recruited by USC and Real Madrid is actually signing 7-year-olds, and the longer Neymar stays in Brazil, the weirder it'll get. Right now, he is Kyrie Irving if Kyrie Irving stayed in school — and that school was the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Brazilian soccer is in a strange place. The national team hasn't won a World Cup since 2002, which, for any other country wouldn't be long, but in Brazil it is, and they didn't even advance past the quarterfinals in 2006 or 2010. Meanwhile, their club teams are the soccer-world equivalent of Division II, or Triple-A, though they have become slightly bigger players on a world scale of late, as Tottenham coach Andre Villas Boas bemoaned after Brazilian club Internacional declined his $19.5 million offer for striker Leandro Damiao during the January transfer window. The fact that Neymar is still playing in Brazil is considered by many to be a sign of national pride and health. (Although, the president of Brazil — as in, you know, THE PRESIDENT — supposedly had to help Santos attract new sponsors and cable partnerships to afford Neymar's contract. So who knows how true this actually is.)
The league, at least, is doing well enough financially, and it's fun to watch, and a lot of people care about it — but it's in a bubble. The soccer played in Brazil is different from what's played in Europe. There are positions that don't exist anywhere outside of Brazil. (See: Chelsea's David Luiz, who in Brazil played as a "quarto zagueiro," a freelancing midfield-defense hybrid who sort of roams wherever he wants.) Defense is an afterthought. Time on the ball is plentiful. It is — and this description is totally overused, but there's merit to it — soccer as a means of expression. The individual is the focus, rather than the team. Which is unique and interesting in the context of every other professional sport, but also just not the best way for 11 people to transport a ball into a goal.
Neymar is great at this type of game — maybe better than anyone in the world at it. Watch any clip of him on YouTube, which, for most of the world, is where he exists. He plays like he doesn't have knees, or any bones in his legs, and his hips are vaguely hips. His lower body all just kind of moves, pulling and rolling the ball in one of 360 ways. There's no discernible pattern to anything he does (sure, he likes to cut in from the left side of the field, but that's too general a notion to be helpful to a defender, like saying that Derrick Rose likes to drive to the hoop), and the ball's moving through your legs or over your shoulder or just back and forth in front of you and then he's gone. He's so fast, the ball looks like there's backspin on it when he dribbles. He'll take a big touch, and the ball should keep rolling away, but then he'll be back on it within a step. It looks fake, almost — or just incorrect.
He's maybe the most exciting player in the world to watch highlights of. But the question that still hasn't been answered is this: Could he do this anywhere else?