@tobaepebinuade5830

2 weeks ago

Neymar is one of the most talented players I’ve ever seen. In the 2010s he had the potential to be the best player in the world. A combination of technique skills dribbling control and lethal finishing meant that at his best, he was unstoppable and defenders were unable to cope with him. He was playing Joga Bonito football all over again and since Ronaldinho, we haven’t seen a player with that same sort of skillset. When he was playing for Santos, he finished top 10 in the Ballon Dor while playing in the Brazilian league outside of the top 5 leagues in Europe as a teenager because at the time he was 19 years old. That was a sign of how special of a player he could be in the future he was tipped as a potential Ballon Dor winner and some believed that he would be a better player than Pele and surpass his legacy. His time at Barcelona, he elevated his game to another level. Making that transition from Liga Do Brazil to La Liga helped him become a better player because playing in a much more competitive league gave him that exposure and we truly saw the very best version of Neymar. The linkup that he had with Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, nobody was able to stop them and they produced some of the best football I’ve ever seen and everything was going well for him there. We all thought that he would be the first player to take over the throne from Messi and Ronaldo and he was Messi’s heir. As good as he was at Barcelona, here’s the problem no matter how well you play there even if you score 40+ goals a season, it’s Lionel Messi’s team meaning that Neymar was overshadowed and he couldn’t be the best player in the world since he wasn’t the best player on the team. I personally think that his move to PSG was a downgrade in his career because whether he went for the money or not, I don’t care, the move was too soon and overall he wasn’t ready to be the main man on his own team. Just in general, his move to PSG never made sense for his career simply because Ligue 1 isn’t known to be as competitive as the premier league or La Liga it’s a “farmers league” and due to the fact that he played on a team that wins their league every year, people couldn’t care less about how well he plays domestically and I think we’re seeing the same thing with Mbappe. At PSG, nobody cares about winning Ligue 1, everyone knew that his time at PSG was only gonna be evaluated based off of how successful he was in the champions league. What hurts his legacy is that despite playing so well, he never won the champions league at PSG and since people only remember the winners, they’ll forget about his performances and the role he played when they got to the final in 2020. He had so many injuries there we shouldn’t forget that, when healthy Neymar was excellent and I think that if he won the champions league in 2020, we’d be having a much different conversation about his legacy as a footballer. He should’ve never left Barcelona, what he should’ve done is been a little more patient and then if that happened, Messi would pass the throne over to him he’d be the main man achieve what he should’ve achieved and maybe win the Ballon Dor. Instead of going to PSG, a move to the premier league would’ve been a better option for him. With Messi and Ronaldo approaching the end of their careers, in Europe we have guys like Kylian Mbappe Erling Haaland Jude Bellingham Vinicius Junior and others making a case for being the best player in the world and at the age of 32, Neymar is supposed to be that guy who’s supposed to dominate and he should still be playing in Europe, but instead he’s in Saudi Arabia where he’s not playing and is more interested in going to poker partying with David Beckham in Miami etc, doing everything apart from playing football. We live in an alternate world where things would be so different without his move to PSG because not only would staying at Barcelona have been beneficial for his career, from a footballing perspective clubs wouldn’t have to be overpaying for inexperienced players and also I don’t think that Barcelona would’ve been in a financial mess to the point where they were almost broke. He’s a superb player purely off of individual talent, but modern football has evolved, talent alone isn’t enough and he’s one of those what if players because he never truly reached his true potential and that tells you how good Neymar is because for club and country he has 600 G/A combined.

16 |