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What’s your favourite Neymar advert? This is a tough question to answer. The body of work is huge and varied. The foot deodorant ad perhaps, which depicts Neymar’s feet literally on fire, ablaze with some kind of divine eau de toenail.
Or the new one for a brand of açaí berry death-gloop sorbet product, which shows Neymar holding up twin cones, like phials of luminous unicorn-sperm, and looking as though he’s just been hit over the head with a rock and it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him.
For me the real No 1 is his turn as the face of Brazil’s leading car battery provider. In part because of Neymar’s take on the role of battery installer guy, which is sexy-moody maverick genius. Tailored green overalls. Hair perfectly feathered. A stare into the camera which is steely and masculine, but also tender and playful.
Mainly it’s the basic premise of a Neymar-branded car battery. How long before the misgivings set in as your mechanic comes twirling out of the toolshed, cheekbones glittering? How far down the road will you actually get with this thing before your steering wheel flies off and your wipers start whizzing round like novelty bow ties? Er … I usually have Dave. Is Dave around? You know what. I might just go to Autobloke on the ring road.
You may ask at this point: do we need to think about Neymar? Is Neymar still a thing? The answer to which is yes. We live in a Polycrisis World, and Neymar is still the most captivating of polycrisis footballers, one who is now entering perhaps the final lurch in his own narrative arc.
In another version of the present Neymar would be playing at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium against Senegal on Saturday, one of Brazil’s few remaining fixtures before next summer’s World Cup. Instead he has spent the week banished to a kind of internet rage-dungeon, driven there by footage of his comeback appearance for Santos, who made the terrible mistake of signing Neymar in January and are now in danger of being relegated with six games to go.
The clips range through: Neymar miskicking in front of goal; Neymar doing bad, slow skills; and Neymar being a really terrible guy, apparently hooked up to a wireless electric shock machine that keeps forcing him to flail his arms at his increasingly bedraggled teammates. At one point he walks back from halfway like the world’s most awful PE teacher to scold his defenders over knocking it long, performatively passing short to one of his centre-backs, who then hoofs the ball upfield in comedic fashion.
He even looks in bad basic physical shape. It is genuinely disturbing to see this perfect sprite, a footballer made entirely from dandelion spores and rainbow dust, now with the classic inflated head of the mid-30s man beginning to go to seed. Not that there’s any great concern in the immediate response. This is where we are in the life cycle. It’s time to punish Neymar. Pile it on. Let’s burn this thing to the ground.
And yet it seems next summer’s World Cup is still not considered a total no-go zone, at least not by everyone in Brazil. This may be a classic sporting delusional state. Neymar hasn’t played for Brazil for two years. Even Carlo Ancelotti, the great pragmatist, football’s ultimate aura-dad, sounded sketchy this week, advising Neymar to give up playing on the wing and turn himself into a false 9, which sounds a bit yeah-you-do-that-catch-you-later.
For all that Neymar was selected as recently as March before puling out injured. This workmanlike Seleção could probably still use some kind of functional late-stage version. Brazil remains a sentimental country. And there is always space for genius.
Mainly though, it is easy to forget how good he is, or was. Neymar is one of four out-there, everything-all-at-once football geniuses to have appeared in my lifetime, the other three being Diego Maradona, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi.
For all the absurdities of his career he has also remained an absolute footballing machine, with 445 goals and 286 assists in 742 games to date, according to Transfermarkt. But its not the numbers. It’s the light and the beauty, the ability through it all to make this look like a kind physical art, to compact an entire narrative of preternatural skill vision and heritage into 10 seconds of an otherwise forgettable afternoon.
It is a vanishing quality of fantasy and pure expression. The industry can’t produce it. The harder it tries, the further it recedes. And perhaps this explains why the base note of late Neymar, beneath the internet mockery, is sadness.
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This week Nilton Petrone, a famous Brazilian physiotherapist, described Neymar as “the last genius” of Brazilian football. After the Flamengo game Santos director, Alexandre Mattos, wrote on Instagram: “Geniuses are misunderstood, it has always been that way in human history … everything is bigger for you, but you are bigger than everything.” This may or may not be true. But it is the key thing about Neymar, the sense of an entity trapped within the machine. For all his histrionics and poor behaviour, no single figure embodies so perfectly the horror and brutality of modern football.
Neymar’s career has been above all a relentlessly disgusting thing. Every move has been destructive, through the oddities of his Barcelona transfer to the emptiness of the PSG propaganda move that disrupted an entire transfer economy, those peak years when he really could have been anything, but which were spent instead dancing on crutches in a solid gold top hat, dining on butterfly wings, leasing a yacht made entirely from parmesan cheese.
The move to Al-Hilal was an absurdity, with its guarantee of three dedicated supercars, a house with three saunas, a pool at least 40m long, plus a private plane and all expenses paid for his 30-strong entourage; in return for which a footballer who talks about love and Jesus and justice would provide his second great career turn as a beard for repressive Gulf state.
The frustration comes from the glimpses of something else through all this, of an essentially limitless basic talent, that figure made from silk thread and sherbet, twirling in the light like a flake of god’s dandruff.
The standard response is disdain and disgust at the sense of waste. But this is also a confusion of cause and effect. Because above all Neymar is our monster, our own shared cartoon showman. He didn’t make this world. He has simply lived inside it, taken it literally, a funfair mirror reflection of the way Big Football takes that thing you love and transforms it into something else, a commodity, a product, a geopolitical tool.
For all his wealth and fame his existence has also been brutal, from a childhood in the glare of expectation, to the rolling televised colonoscopy of his home World Cup, to the existential emptiness in his fly-on-the-wall Netflix documentary, which details in brilliant close-up detail the basic boredom and pointlessness of Neymar’s daily existence.
“No one knows anything about me,” he says at one point in this man-as-commodity horror story. This will probably remain the case now. Barring some dramatic reversal in fortune there is only the tiniest chance of one last World Cup for this most divisive, beautifully gossamer talent. But it could still feel like a small note of human redemption; and not just for him.
