The Brazil striker can still win things but his major-chord career is over in the place that made him rich but stole his value
For Qatar 2022, Neymar has been a key building block of the past five years, one of the key public faces of this global. He will remain urgently present in avatar form. The Neymar actualisations will continue. Take a walk around Lusail and before long you feel yourself drowning in Neymar content, Neymar iconography, boulevards of scrolling Neymar, lighted walls of Neymar.
Except, it turns out we do have a problem. Neymar will not be in Lusail next Sunday. This feels like a kind of end point for all that. Neymar has already suggested he may not play another World Cup, has spoken of his own fragility in that glare, which is in itself quietly encouraging, a reasonable response to his entirely unreasonable existence.
It is five and a half years since Neymar was bought by the state of Qatar and installed at its Paris outpost. This was prime Neymar, the years still un-wasted in frolics and room-temperature domestic fluff. Lest we forget, this is a player who can, or could or might have done anything with a football on any stage, the closest of his generation to having that Lionel Messi everything-all-at-once kind of magic.
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