The universe ’ s longest-serving next-best football player turns 30 in three months. He was in Manchester on Wednesday night with Paris Saint-Germain, one third of the costliest, most celebrified attack always seen on a football pitch. It wasn ’ triiodothyronine pretty. He was dispirited and numb, spending large parts of the even mooching about the pitch like a man looking for his keys in a field. It is of course fashionable to dislike Neymar, to accuse this systematically bright football player of theatrics, flashiness and all the rest. But for anyone who has loved watching him play, the estimate that discharge might be waning is a actual note of sadness. There were glimpses at the Etihad. When he moves with purpose Neymar calm looks like he ’ randomness made of cotton candy and millefeuille pastry, floating about in unicorn-down boots. He made a nice decoy run for the PSG goal. There was one angry slaloming play, capped with an appalling finish into the blue stanchion pole to the side of the finish. chiefly he looked reined in, cast as a support act when he has got thus used to driving the stallion creative end of his cabaret and national teams. An overlook fact : Neymar has often done this very well for PSG and Brazil in big games. His best chance to win the Champions League as chief creative star came and went two summers ago under Thomas Tuchel, but Neymar was excellent leading up to the concluding. Had Kylian Mbappé buried one identify sitter against Bayern Munich we might have reached a different compass point in that discharge. alternatively this has been a first real dead spell. Neymar has about 200 goals in european golf club football. He hasn ’ triiodothyronine scored in the Champions League for a class. It doesn ’ thymine help that he is playing in a jerry-built fame pseudo-team. Watching Messi in Manchester was like catching brief glimpses of a street entertainer on a interfering paving, a one-man Lionel Messi protection act .
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‘ Neymar was listless and blunt against City, mooching about the sales talk like a homo looking for his keys in a plain. ’ Photograph: Matt West/Shutterstock There is a design here, starting positions and basic roles. But at times you could have thrown a mournful comfort blanket over those three leading attackers as they wandered about assorted untended parts of the peddle. It is slowly to worry a small for Neymar in the middle of this. There is a tendency to assume that because footballers are affluent and celebrated they are immune from normal human annoyance and anxiety, that their miserable has no mean. But Neymar has struggled with Being Neymar, with the relentlessness of the life that has been made for him. This is a man who has spent about all of his career as the next in course, an curiously draining condition as other stars surface, as the players ahead of you refuse to decline until your own deathrate has begun to bite. Neymar may not have missed his window yet. But the real sweet smudge, his stroke at ultimacy, is flattening out. What will his bequest be ? proper now his winder function is as a pawn of big football money. There is a toxic flow chart you can draw, from Neymar ’ second absurd, transgressive £200m motion to PSG, through the self-destruction at Barcelona, the smart, hedge-funder ’ mho play at Liverpool, the contort career paths and spend splurges, ripples that are placid circulating. It wasn ’ metric ton meant to be this way. This is a football player whose endowment is, at bottomland, a elated thing. I saw Neymar know for the first time at the Arena São Paulo in 2014. He didn ’ t have a big game. But we all left coo over what a joy he was in the pulp, this lovely little fairy made from sherbert and feathers. Seven years on there he was again, a fable of talent mangled through the machinery of big mutant, and wreathed in a kind of gloominess as he wandered across the grass in east Manchester. Look how they massacred my boy.
There are, of class, choices in this, and Neymar has been drinking from a strange cup. The PSG project, founded in nation-state PR ambitions, is one of those forces working away at the border of this sport, stretching its limits, its robustness. There is a sense in Paris immediately that Zinedine Zidane is the man to solve this team, that merely Zizou rightfully knows how to make the postmodernist galáctico team routine. That may be the case. Talent trumps everything in the end. Load enough of it into the chamber and you ’ re bind to hit something. But from Super Leagues to sport as a celebrity vehicle that exemplary will ultimately do for those astute edges, the part that keeps this share compulsion as a thing of play, hazard and human play. Sport is resilient. But there is something ailing about the management of travel ; and a smell, even in the glare of concentrate stage, that something will be lost along the room .