Bittersweet memories. That is all I’m taking with me. So goodbye. Please don’t cry. We both know, I’m not … Ah. Sorry. It’s fine. Just a little dusty in here.
When it comes to Neymar and I, me and Ney, the feelings, the farewells, the deeply personal – I’m going to say it – love story of the last 13 years (legal clarification: Neymar has no idea who I am) I feel a lot closer to the Dolly Parton original version right now – rueful, sad, fondly heartbroken – as opposed to the Whitney Houston super-cover: sad but also defiant, hopeful, liberated and ultimately the banshee nemesis of the final chorus, where I Will Always Love You has become I am going to hunt you down and murder you with a scythe.
Either way the last few years have been hard, emotional and at times deeply dull. But it is at least over now. The pretence that the wonderfully pure sporting genius of Neymar might once again be applied to the pursuit of genuine sporting ultimacy is finally dead in the water.
News of Neymar’s move to Al-Hilal, of the Saudi Pro League, has been the chief bizarro-world transfer story of the week, if only for the details. Neymar has announced that he is, like AJP Taylor before him, “excited to write history”. And no doubt excited to some lesser degree by his £138m salary, the three dedicated supercars (Bentley, Aston Martin, Lamborghini) plus four Mercedes G-Wagons and a luxury chauffeured van to be kept “available at all times”.
Other non-negotiable demands include a house with three saunas, a pool “at least 40 metres long”, seven full-time workers, including a sous chef to work – keep up – with Neymar’s own head chef, plus, in a moment of semi-caricature, a guaranteed supply of açaí juice and Guaraná drinks in his fridge. Oh, and he needs a private plane. Plus all expenses for his 30-strong entourage to be covered by the Saudi state, also known, under what we must call Newcastle Rules, as Al-Hilal FC.
At the end of which it seems likely Neymar has played his last game of genuine elite football, outside of a possible international tournament. It is a profound full stop for one of four unrestrained everything-all-at-once football geniuses to have appeared in my lifetime, the other three being Lionel Messi, Diego Maradona and Ronaldinho (and yes, you-know-who scored loads of goals but we’re talking fully rounded creative expression).
Players will always come and go. It is rational human behaviour to take the money and run. But this feels different. Loathe him, hate him, or simply feel deeply annoyed by him, Neymar’s retirement from serious sport represents something more profound.
It is at least a transfer that suits everyone. The Saudi league gets some more genuine global visibility. PSG are glad to be shot of him. Every few years there is talk in Paris of getting real, getting hardcore, bringing in players who will die for the cause, before they go out and sign Donald Duck. This is part of the cycle.
It has also been a surprisingly fond farewell in Paris, given the mob protests outside Neymar’s house a while back, the talk of ducking training, the galling excesses of the last six years. For all that there is still a wistfulness about the Neymar era. “Obrigado, despite everything” was the headline of a touching and subdued retrospective in Le Parisien.
And for all his maddening habits they still love Neymar in Paris, or at least many younger fans do, those who will always see the age of Neymar (118 goals, 77 assists, 183 games, so many moments of pure balletic imagination) as something bathed in light.
This is really the point about Neymar. For all his demerits, his appalling behaviour, his massive underachievement both as footballer and human being, the only really interesting thing about him is his essentially limitless beauty as a footballer.
I admit it. I love Neymar. I adore him, and have done from first sight at Wembley in 2010, when he looked cold and sad and frail, to making a point of watching every available Neymar game in the flesh, from the 2014 World Cup opener when we sat giggling and goggling at this outrageous little hyper-skilled sprite, to the overwrought Olympic triumph of Rio, the tantrum-ball of Russia 2018, the doomed endgame in Qatar, the Champions League highs in between (actually quite a few of them).
Through all this I’ve cooed fondly and found stupidly florid ways of describing this miracle of motion and skill. Because this is kind of a goodbye, and something that is most likely never going to happen again, here are some of them, from ‘made from kitten fur and gold thread’, through ‘made of dandelion dust and sherbet’, ‘made of candyfloss and millefeuille pastry’ to ‘a Disney prince made out of blossom and icing sugar’, to ‘a grain of cosmic dandruff’, ‘God’s mosquito’, an ‘elite processed human talent-unit’, a ‘sexy-determined-mechanic’ (from an article about his advert for car batteries), to the ‘walking commodity chip’, the ‘spoilt nine-year-old berating the local oompa loompas’, to a man who is ‘essentially two-parts baseball cap and a sporting-commercial absurdity’.
You see? This is love. And again, this is the thing about him ultimately. You can’t dislike Neymar. Well, scratch that, you can actually. But he is our own shared abomination. Neymar didn’t create this world. But no other footballer represents the modern paradox of beauty inside the machine so profoundly, the way Big Sport takes these things we cherish and yearn to see in motion, and weaponises that love against us, processing it through the money-raking corporate machine, the nation-state propaganda operation, making fond useful idiots of us all.
Neymar has lived this life since he was 12. He is the ultimate butterfly on a wheel, albeit a butterfly who really loves being on the wheel, who wants to help make the whole world a bit more like the wheel. Watching him float through this landscape is like stumbling across Sidney Bechet tootling his horn on the 27th floor of a nine-star luxury hotel made entirely from coral, human tears and carbonised ladybirds. Here is the beauty that made you love this thing in the first place, repurposed now as an avatar of greed and cynicism. But you’re still going to listen.
This is in the end why you have to keep loving Neymar, why I will always write stupid fawning things about Neymar and cherish whatever still emerges. When we give up on this stuff it starts to belong solely to the other people, the ownership class, that political-sporting theatre for whom Neymar appears to be the ultimate spirit animal.
So obrigado, malgré tout. I hope life treats you kind. I hope, as a wise woman once said, you have all you’ve dreamed of. Even if that appears, in the final reckoning, to be supercars, 40-metre swimming pools, enough money to drown the world and a fridge with on-tap Guaraná.
