Never go back, but sometimes going back is all that remains. Just 18 months after he joined Al-Hilal, Neymar and the Saudi club have agreed to terminate his contract, allowing him to return to Brazil and rejoin Santos. Al-Hilal paid £77m to sign Neymar from Paris Saint-Germain on a salary of £2.5m a week. He will be paid 85% of that for the remainder of this season, meaning he cost the club £322m for seven appearances, three assists and one goal. Like so much of Neymar’s career, it all seems such a dreadful waste.
His is a story almost designed to highlight the iniquities of the modern game, from the impossible pressures placed on young players to the curse of celebrity and financial excess. Neymar’s great misfortune was to emerge just after Lionel Messi. Argentina had seemingly found a second Diego Maradona, so Brazil needed a second Pelé. When, in June 2011, the 19-year-old Neymar scored the opening goal in the final as Santos won the Copa Libertadores for the first time since Pelé had inspired them to the trophy in 1963, it seemed they had found him. But, of course, nobody can live with such comparisons and so Neymar remained always a prisoner of his potential.
At first Neymar struggled to adapt to the pace and physicality of the European game, and he scored just nine goals as Barcelona won nothing in his first season. That only increased the pressure on him at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Although there was widespread sympathy when he fractured a vertebra in the quarter-final, his petulance had irritated many while the general hysteria that surrounded his injury was indicative of the emotionally fraught world elite players have to navigate.
The following season was his best as, with Messi and Luis Suárez, he won a treble, scoring the last goal in the Champions League final. But within a couple of weeks of that victory over Juventus in Berlin, he faced Colombia again in the Copa América, reacted stupidly to predictable provocation, was sent off for a backwards head-butt and then remonstrated so vociferously he ended up with a four-game ban.
International tournaments were never kind to him, although he did help Brazil end their slightly baffling yearning for Olympic gold in Rio in 2016 when most of the continent’s elite were playing in the Copa América Centenario. The World Cups of 2018 and 2022 brought quarter-final exits; in both tournaments Neymar flickered but ultimately frustrated.
His defining move, though, was his 2017 transfer to Paris Saint-Germain for €222m, more than doubling the previous world record, not only delivering for their Qatari owners a talented player but also making a show of their economic might while inflating the market, pushing up prices to a level it was very difficult for clubs without enormously wealthy state-backers to match. The collateral damage for football was vast and cemented Neymar’s position as 21st-century football’s Zelig, somehow always there as the game took another lurch into sordid absurdity.
Injuries, in the end, are what have ruined his time in Saudi Arabia, but at some point in Paris, he also seemed to lose any sense of joy. Walking out of the stadium in Kazan after that World Cup defeat to Belgium in 2018, I passed between the marsh and the car park and saw, silhouetted against the breaking dawn, Neymar standing, head bowed, by the team bus. It was a curiously intimate moment, his sadness, his awareness of the expectation upon him, his crushing disappointment palpable.
Neymar has reportedly taken a 99% pay cut to return to Santos (easier to do, of course, when you’re still getting £2.125m a week from the Saudi club you’ve just left). Hopefully that is a sign of somebody reassessing his priorities and remembering that once he played not for money or preferment or accolades, but because he enjoyed it. In our end is our beginning – but it is a very different Neymar, older, less optimistic, chewed up by football, who returns.
