Pele does Neymar no favours
Outstanding prospect he may be, but for Pele to describe him as being “more complete” than Lionel Messi smacks of almost wilful blindness.
Of course, Pele has for a long time eschewed reality for what his audience wants to hear — any credibility he had left surely disappeared when he named El Hadji Diouf but not Tostao in his list of the 100 greatest living footballers.
And of course when he says “Neymar is better than Messi” what he is really saying is that “I was better than Maradona”.
But still, the Brazilian hyping of an admittedly extravagantly gifted 19-year-old feels like a nation feeling left out by the on-going Messi-Cristiano Ronaldo debates and desperate to get involved.
Yesterday’s Club World Cup final, in which Barcelona beat Santos 4-0, exposed the gulf that still exists between Brazilian football and the very best in the world.
Whether there’s a gulf between Neymar and Messi was rather harder to tell; the Brazilian forward simply never had the ball until the game was lost.
Neymar, it should be said, was superb in the second leg of the Copa Libertadores final, producing a match-winning display as Santos beat Penarol. He was named as the best player in the competition, and he scored a stunning goal against Kashiwa Reysol in the Club World Cup semi-final.
When he receives the ball in space on the left and prods it forward, Mohawk twitching as he surveys his options, anybody watching can’t help but feel the mounting anticipation, be impressed by his command.
But there are major reservations. His Santos side finished just 10th in the Brazilian championship, their season unsettled by the injury problems suffered by Ganso, the 22-year-old playmaker, something that would seem to strengthen the claims of those who would suggest that not merely is Neymar not the best player in the world, he’s not even the best player at his club.
Neither Neymar nor Ganso impressed at the Copa America, both rattled by the sort of hard pressing game that, while common enough globally, is rare in Brazil.
The comparison with the unflappable, casually brilliant Messi is impossible to avoid. Messi is football’s great minimalist. However great his technical gifts, even greater is his application of them.
He is never showy, something that’s not just down to personality — has a great footballer ever had such an understated haircut? — but also to a brain that apparently processes all the apparent options almost instantly and then selects the most efficient.
Sometimes that is something with a high technical tariff — the overhead kick he flashed across the face of goal in Thursday’s semi-final against Al-Sadd, for instance — but more often than not, it’s something very simple, done incredibly quickly and incredibly well, such as the dink with which he put Barcelona ahead in Tokyo or the backheel with which he laid on the third.
In that regard, Neymar’s decision to stay on at Santos for another two years is intriguing.
It speaks of the strength of the Brazilian economy and the self-confidence of the league (although his £120,000 a month deal is funded by seven sponsors, and a similar deal for Ronaldinho at Flamengo has gone horribly wrong with the forward owed millions after one investor decided he wasn’t providing value for money), and you’d usually say that young players are best staying in their homeland until their early 20s, when they should be mature enough to make the move to an alien culture.
But with Neymar, given how advanced his technical gifts already are, it’s hard not to wonder whether he might not have been better off moving to Europe where he could learn about different styles of defending, rather than stay in Brazil where he is likely to be indulged for another two years.
Neymar has the talent, but that’s only half the battle — and, frankly, getting the temperament and the decision-making right isn’t going to be helped by the hype machine.
Pele is probably making it harder for his favourite.
