Football turned Neymar’s talent toxic: Qatar 2022 feels like an end point

The morning after its seven-game World Cup lifespan was complete, Stadium 974 – the shipping container one, a kind of elite Qatari hipster project, cod-Hackney to go with the cod-Paris – was already being dismantled by men with diggers and grabbers and electric wrenches.

This is the way of things here. Indeed, as the yellow-shirted travellers streamed through the night on Doha’s driverless metro, another Brazil World Cup campaign done in a haze of tears and grief, it was tempting to wonder how long before the men who dismantle things would be out with their wrecking bars, setting about another Qatari World Cup fixture.

OK, let’s pack this thing up. Break it down to its basic parts: the magic dust and dandelion petals, the superstructure made from 974 recyclable velveteen codpiece boxes. Project €222m, also known as Neymar Jr, has run its course. Time to take down the icon.

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For Qatar 2022, Neymar has been a key building block of the past five years, one of the key public faces of this global security-outreach project. He will remain urgently present in avatar form. The Neymar actualisations will continue. Take a walk around Lusail and before long you feel yourself drowning in Neymar content, Neymar iconography, boulevards of scrolling Neymar, lighted walls of Neymar.

The most relentlessly annoying of all the World Cup TV ads – an achievement in itself in a tough field – features a mind-numbingly cutesy child squealing “Imagine the city of the future! And Neymar is there!” On cue, Neymar doggedly appears, already with a kind of glazed, hostage-scenario look. He does some skills, says “no problem” as though these are the final words his desiccated lips will ever utter, then fades out.

Except, it turns out we do have a problem. Neymar will not be in Lusail next Sunday. This feels like a kind of end point for all that. Neymar has already suggested he may not play another World Cup, has spoken of his own fragility in that glare, which is in itself quietly encouraging, a reasonable response to his entirely unreasonable existence.

As of Friday night his major-chord career, that sweet spot where a kind of ultimacy was still within his reach, is effectively done. Qatar made Neymar one of the richest athletes who has lived. Qatar has also made him into a kind of parable; a place where everyone, in the end, loses something of value.

It is five and a half years since Neymar was bought by the state of Qatar and installed at its Paris outpost. This was prime Neymar, the years still un-wasted in frolics and room-temperature domestic fluff. Lest we forget, this is a player who can, or could or might have done anything with a football on any stage, the closest of his generation to having that Lionel Messi everything-all-at-once kind of magic.

Neymar alongside Paris Saint-Germain president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, after his £200m move to the club in 2017. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Even at this World Cup, more than 600 games into his professional span, there was something almost comic about Neymar’s lightness, his feel for the ball. What is this thing out there spiralling about like a grain of cosmic dandruff, like God’s mosquito, like a speck of dust in the sun?

Neymar had a fine game against Croatia, and scored a fine extra-time goal, conceived and executed in one movement. Had Croatia’s one shot on target been saved then Neymar being his best Neymar; being, arguably, more Neymar than he has ever managed before at this level, would have been the story.

Instead, we have this: exit music. There will be chances to win things. Maybe Messi can help cajole another Champions League win. But in terms of a defining peak, that ship has now pretty much sailed off the Al Wakrah docks. And there will now be an urge to mock Neymar’s tears – so, so many tears– and to rejoice at the hubris; also to drag in the politics, his support for the despotic and dangerous Jair Bolsonaro.

Why does Neymar annoy people? Because he’s annoying. The on-pitch theatrics have been grim to watch, most notably the Total Tantrum-Ball stuff in 2018 and the habit of always appealing to the referee, something the journalist Tim Vickery says has links to growing up as a futsal kid, a discipline where fouls are called constantly and the ref is always on hand.

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Then there is the gaudy inanity of his public persona. The interminable Netflix documentary, intended to showcase the real Neymar, did exactly that, revealing in turgid, painful detail the basic boredom and airlessness of being Neymar.

A few years back, Barcelona spent €300,000 just to fly out his core hangers-on for his unveiling. More recently, one newspaper report involved Neymar allegedly threatening to “go on strike” during Paris Saint-Germain’s tour of China in order to force his own exit, a sentence so replete with toxins and bad things that just reading it feels like standing too close to football’s exposed reactor core, eyes already staring to melt. Imagine living in that place all the time, forever.

This is perhaps the key point about the sporting life of Neymar Jr, beyond the sparkle and the rage; an inescapable note of sadness. Nobody does this to themselves. Football made this thing, the Neymar identity; football will do this, will take your talent and transform it into something grotesque. This is one more reason Neymar inspires such apparently genuine antipathy. Like so many things at this grand-scale pastiche of a World Cup, he can often look like a parody of footballing joy, talent, freedom. Here is the spirit and the beauty that made you love this thing; but reproduced now as a corporate-greed avatar, weaponised as propaganda and soft power.

The best parts of his recent career can get lost in this. Pelé’s international goal record is deeply significant in Brazilian football. It is a serious achievement to equal it. And Neymar has been good at tournaments when he hasn’t been injured, as he has been too often in the Champions League knockout rounds. I once saw him score four against Dijon in Paris, including the single greatest individual goal I have seen in the flesh. It felt like feasting on a hologram. Here was a stellar talent being expressed, pointlessly.

Neymar

Perhaps in the end the most notable achievement is to express more than any other athlete the idea of divine sporting talent as something entirely lost within the machine. Here we have an elite processed human talent-unit, a walking commodity chip, his chief impact on European club football to act as an agent of financial disruption.

There is a toxic flowchart you can draw, from Neymar’s absurd £200m move to PSG, through the idiotic self-destruction at Barcelona, the smart plays and hedges at some clubs, the disintegration at others, the Super League chaos, the rip tides of pre-existing fear and greed that are still circulating. And for all the sense of stunted talent, of wings never fully spread, modern football is in so many ways his world, a place he captures more profoundly than any other individual. Imagine the city of the future. And Neymar is there!