Neymar: Gravity's Fugitive
What will become of the mercurial Brazilian in the lead-up to World Cup 2026?
Neymar is one of the most captivating players I’ve seen in my lifetime. He’s also one of the most frustrating. There’s magic spilling out of his boots. His limbs are blessed with the weightlessness of a ghost. But for stretches of his career, he just didn’t seem to care.
When he sprints with the ball, unleashing skills that take him into avenues ninety degrees from his previous route without loss of momentum or an audible crunch of protest from his unsuspecting ligaments, he appears as a twinkle-toed deer dancing between oncoming monster trucks, always a shake of cinnamon away from the mud and the blood and the collisions that were only ever meant for those tethered to the physical plane, which he expressly is not.
He makes me feel like I’m watching someone at the cutting edge of movement.
A genius at play.
He can play with such audacious and improvisational abandon that he seems to regularly slip out of the grasp of gravity, a grease-wristed prisoner idly leaving behind a bereft set of cuffs.
See his Puskas nominated volley against Villareal. One of the most satisfying goals to watch, it’s like something you’d dream up lying on the couch thinking about five a side. It showcases everything that makes him Neymar - elasticity, agility, imagination, and crucially the technique to execute the most daring things.
A perfect pacy mid-height cross comes in from Suárez on the left wing as Neymar, central, nears the edge of the box. He cushions the ball with his stomach, directly facing the direction the cross came from. As the ball drops he nonchalantly flicks it backwards, over his right shoulder. He’s got an incoming defender about six feet behind him. The flick he’s just made would not bother that defender in most instances, however as the ball leaves his right boot, Neymar peels away to the left, the opposite direction, like a cell dividing, in the process turning his back to goal, the defender and the ball. This odd and unexpected movement is the decoy in this whole exchange; an extended body feint. The defender, who had been monitoring everything and gauging his momentum, is suddenly pulled in two directions.
Neymar, in on the act all along, finishes his 180 degree turn to find himself on the other side of the defender and facing the other wing. The ball now gaining speed as it drops towards the grass finds Neymar, waiting expectantly - he knew where the ball was going to be all along.
The volley is struck at the very last instant, the defender has recovered just in time to give up, his body language collapsing in on itself. Keeper statuesque, ball in net.
As a third of the most effective and exhilarating attacking trio in the history of the game there was a sense that he was stepping up to assume the full grandeur of the career that was promised.
When an athlete actively embraces fulfilling their potential, it’s an act of respect to fans. They’re taking the whole charade of professional sports seriously and saying ‘we’re in this together, let’s see how far we can take it’. It’s essentially a quest to see how magic the magic is. Fans and athlete are bonded by this journey. It’s sacred. When it comes to sport what else is there except talent and it being fulfilled?
Then he moved to PSG. The fee inflated the market, peak Neymar began to fritter away seasons that should have been spent with Messi and Suárez dominating Europe. A legacy was soured just at the point it should have begun to ripen.
The knowledge of what could have been must have stalked him through the years. He has enough money for one thousand lives but it may feel empty, who really knows?
From Al-Hilal, the nadir of his story, he moved back to Brazil. He’s been putting himself in the trenches, playing through a torn meniscus to help keep boyhood club Santos, the team he led to their last Libertadores victory, from relegation. That would be a great addition to any player legacy; helping his club to the highs and through the lows. These pursuits are at least a sign of him chasing meaning and getting the bit between his teeth again, a charge for momentum perhaps.
Helping Santos stay up seems like a much more tangible thing than collecting wages each week in the Saudi Pro League. He’s returned and helped his boyhood club, with World Cup 2026 next on the list.
If he can find fitness, form and crucially, inclusion in the Seleção, each match would build the type of narrative football is made for. As Argentina gained momentum in 2022 each fixture attained mounting significance and added a narrative through line that made it the best World Cup in living memory.
Victory would provide show-stopping cinematic closure to a career that sometimes hit the heights of Messi, but spent many years in an almost self-imposed exile. How wonderful it would be to see a fit and flying Neymar adding a happy and fulfilling chapter to bookend his career.
I, for one, hope the ethereal dribbler lights up another tournament and leaves gravity in his wake one last time.
