Neymar was as good as his word. As he stepped off Paris St.-Germain’s bus a couple of hours before his team’s Champions League quarterfinal against Atalanta, all the pieces were in place. He had his sunglasses perched on his head. He had a speaker blaring “Hoje É Rave,” by the Brazilian D.J.s Bárbara Labres and MC WM. And, as he had promised, he had his hair cut into a mohawk.
The origin of that particular personal styling choice lies in the opaque, sometimes tortuous, logic of a social media inside joke. Given that Neymar — the personality and the phenomenon and to some extent the player, with his style perfectly attuned to the age of GIFs — is as much a creation of the online world as the physical one, though, it bears explanation.
For years, Neymar has been known in Brazil as “menino,” the boy. At first, it was admiring, a nickname acquired while he was a superstar under construction with Santos. Later, the meaning changed: It referred to the idea that Neymar, cosseted by his father/agent and indulged by his coaches and his clubs, was living a sort of permanent pubescence, a lifestyle described by the journalist Diego Torres as that of a “teenager on a perpetual summer vacation.”
At the turn of this year, though, news stories emerged that Neymar was planning to forgo his lavish annual birthday celebration. It was taken as a sign that, as he turned 28, the boy was buckling down and growing up. “Adulto Ney” became a meme on Brazilian social media.
In recent weeks, it has led to a slew of photoshopped images of Neymar the teenager in recognizably adult settings: in a bland suit, or the honorary sash of a Brazilian lawmaker. In many of them, he has the peroxide blond mohawk he boasted at Santos, now recast as a symbol of the lost freedom of his youth.
Neymar’s haircut for Lisbon, where on Sunday he will lead P.S.G. against Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, was his acknowledgment of and contribution to the meme, proof that the membrane separating the virtual from the real is a permeable one.
More than that, it showed a player comfortable enough, even on the cusp of what may prove to be the defining two weeks of his career, to play with his own identity just a little. A man self-aware enough to reference, with a touch of irony, the boy that he once was.
It is hard to discern, even with the scrutiny that accompanies Neymar’s every move in both his personal and professional life, whether there is any truth in the idea of Neymar the Grown-Up. His coach, Thomas Tuchel, is adamant — at least in public — that there is not, because there was no truth in the idea of Neymar as Lost Boy.
“He has always been a leader,” Tuchel said this past week. “Even when I first arrived.”
That is not the way it has always seemed. When Neymar left Barcelona for Paris in the summer of 2017, he was warned by his former teammates — including his close friend, Gerard Piqué — that he would find in the French capital a “golden prison,” a place where he would be subdued by luxury and restrained by indulgence.
In those first couple of years, the warning seemed apposite. Neymar was not just one of the most gifted players on the planet, and not just a marketing tour de force. He was, instead, the crown jewel of a project that was as much political as it was sporting, the world-record breaking centerpiece of Qatar’s co-option of soccer in general, and P.S.G. in particular, to transform the country’s global image.
And so he was protected, coddled, infantilized. “Of course Neymar has privileges,” the former P.S.G. midfielder Adrien Rabiot once said. He could throw a birthday party a couple of days before a game, whether his coach knew or consented or not. He could train, at times, very much on his own schedule. He could disappear to watch the Davis Cup in Madrid with Piqué, much to Tuchel’s chagrin, and yet not be punished, because his coach is “not his father, not the police.”
At times, it was tempting to wonder if Neymar warranted such special treatment. He shone in Ligue 1, of course — together with Kylian Mbappé, by some distance the most gifted player in the league — as P.S.G. cruised to three successive championships, but the Champions League brought nothing but misery.
He missed both second legs as P.S.G. was eliminated at the last 16 in 2018 and 2019, by Real Madrid and Manchester United. No wonder then, when he was asked last year to name his happiest memories, he reached back to the last time he gleaned pleasure from this competition: the night he helped Barcelona to beat P.S.G., 6-1, in 2017.
That comment, though honest, seemed to encapsulate Neymar’s attitude toward his current club. It is two summers since he appeared to be on the verge of joining Real Madrid, his eye wandering sufficiently that Nasser al-Khelaifi, the P.S.G. president who has often treated him more as a friend than an employee, felt moved to ask him to show he was “really committed” to P.S.G.
And it is just a year — though a year that has moved at the glacial pace of Covid-time — since Piqué and his former colleagues at Barcelona were so desperate for Neymar to return that they suggested taking a pay cut so that the club could make the finances work. Neymar reportedly wanted the move as much as they did.
A little more than 12 months later, Neymar is transformed. The explanation for that could, of course, be blissfully simple: For the first time in his P.S.G. career, he has been fit enough to play in the final rounds of the Champions League, scoring in both legs of the round of 16 tie against Borussia Dortmund and then orchestrating the victories against Atalanta and RB Leipzig that propelled his team to its first appearance in the final.
Or it may be that the virtual world and the real world are more similar than assumed, and that Adulto Ney is more than just a meme. There might have been a birthday party, and there might have been no Carnival trip to Brazil this year only because of the pandemic, but there is a renewed seriousness about Neymar. At the club’s hotel before the return game against Dortmund in March, it was the Brazilian who took charge of gathering the team, of helping to forge a united front after its first-leg defeat.
Or perhaps health and maturity have dovetailed with a third, crucial factor. P.S.G. has, in its current cash-fueled incarnation, long struggled to carve out a genuine esprit de corps. It has been a club vulnerable to schisms and to factionalism and to jealousy, a place more about the parties than the sport.
Thomas Meunier, the Belgian defender whose contract expired this summer, remembered his four years at the club as “nothing but birthday parties” in rented palaces. At one, the players were divided into two groups: those who were married given a space on one floor, and those who were single directed to a different area on a different level.
Before he arrived in Paris from Manchester United last summer, Ander Herrera had heard that P.S.G. was the sort of squad where the Brazilian players formed one group, the Spanish-speakers another, and where unity was a distant prospect. His experience, though, has been quite different.
A few days after the defeat at Borussia Dortmund, for example — with P.S.G. on the verge of yet another elimination in the Champions League’s last 16 — the squad and the staff got together at Trattoria Giusé, an upscale Italian restaurant owned by Marco Verratti. Team dinners have been frequent events this season, with several of them organized and hosted by Neymar.
Tuchel also has instituted a policy of gathering the team in a hotel before matches, something that has not always been the case at P.S.G. Those inside the club’s five-star hotel in Lisbon report a collegial atmosphere, rather than one in which the players break off into distinct groups.
A team that had been stratified by age or nationality or interest has become, as Tuchel put it, more of a “collective.”
“This is the key for Neymar to rise to the level, because this is a collective sport,” Tuchel said. “He cannot win on his own.”
It has been nine years since Qatar Sports Investments bought into P.S.G., with the aim of turning it into the best team in the world. Neymar was the manifestation of how it believed it could bring that about: a player of vast talent brought in at exorbitant expense, coddled and indulged in the hope that he alone would be the difference, that this was a game ultimately decided by individuals.
It is to Tuchel’s credit that he has been able to divert P.S.G.’s path, that he has fostered a team spirit and a sense of purpose from those precious raw materials, one that has carried the club to the verge of fulfilling the longstanding ambition of its owners.
And it is to Neymar’s credit that he has responded, that he has allowed himself to change as his environment has changed, that he has realized that a team being built around him is not a prison so much as a platform. Perhaps that is the difference, what has been lacking at P.S.G. Neymar, the boy, was told that he needed to do it all himself. Neymar, the adult, knows that he does not have to.
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