For months, the question lingered over Brazilian football with the persistence of humidity before a storm. Nobody really wanted to ask it out loud. Not about Neymar. Not about a player who, for years, carried the weight of Brazil’s expectations almost by himself. Not just results, either. A whole idea of Brazilian football. Joy, improvisation, excess.
Still, the question never fully disappeared.
Is Neymar still Neymar?
Not the celebrity. Not the brand. Not the carefully managed public figure with luxury watches, private jets and cryptic Instagram captions. The footballer himself. The player who once made matches feel unstable in the best possible way, as if something irrational might happen every time the ball reached his feet.
For a while, the answer in Brazil seemed painfully obvious.
No.
Or maybe worse than no. Not anymore.
Not enough for another World Cup. Not enough for the physical demands of elite football after years of injuries and interrupted recoveries. Little by little, it started to feel as if Brazil had been waiting for a version of Neymar that only existed in old highlights.
Then came Carlo Ancelotti’s squad announcement for the 2026 World Cup.
Neymar’s name was read out among the forwards almost casually, buried inside the alphabetical order like it was nothing unusual. The reaction across Brazil suggested otherwise.
Television studios erupted. Former players hugged each other on live broadcasts. Children in São Vicente celebrated at school as though somebody had declared a holiday. Marcelo posted videos shouting from his apartment. Santos supporters immediately returned to speaking about Pelé’s heir, about unfinished destiny, about redemption.
For a few minutes, logic disappeared completely.
That is still Neymar’s gift. Even now, he has something most elite footballers lose at some point: anticipation. People still lean forward when his name appears. Modern football still produces brilliant athletes and devastating tactical systems, but players capable of creating emotional attachment before the game even starts have become rare.
Neymar remains one of them.
The long collapse in Saudi Arabia
What happened in Saudi Arabia did not really resemble a normal decline. It felt stranger than that. Slower. Sadder.
In October, during a World Cup qualifier against Uruguay, Neymar tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. The images spread instantly: teammates around him, his face twisted in pain, the stadium suddenly silent.
At first, the injury was discussed the way football always discusses injuries at that level. Recovery schedules. Surgery. Rehab timelines. But the months kept passing, and the conversation around Neymar gradually changed. People stopped asking when he would return and started wondering whether the old version of him was gone for good.
By the time he recovered physically, Al Hilal had already moved on.
The club left him out of its Saudi Pro League squad. Across the entire contract, Neymar played seven matches. Four hundred twenty eight minutes in total. One of the most expensive transfers in football history had turned into almost nothing.
In January 2025, he terminated the contract and returned to Santos.
From the outside, the move looked romantic. Back to where it all started. Back home. In reality, Santos itself was in pieces.
In 2023, the club suffered the first relegation in its 111 year history. Promotion back to the first division changed little about the broader atmosphere around the club. Financial instability remained. The squad lacked depth and quality. Confidence had evaporated years earlier.
Neymar’s return was supposed to represent a rebirth for both sides.
Instead, at first, it exposed how fragile both had become.
The body remembers
The hardest thing was not that Neymar looked bad.
The hardest thing was that he looked careful.
The talent still appeared in flashes. The first touch remained absurdly soft. The imagination was there. But every sprint seemed negotiated beforehand. Every change of direction carried hesitation inside it, as though his body were quietly warning him against pushing too far.
Watching him became uncomfortable in a very human way. This was not just athletic decline. It looked like somebody trying to reconnect with an older version of himself and discovering the distance was larger than expected.
One online commentator summed it up brutally.
“He plays like someone who thinks he’s Neymar but isn’t.”
The sentence spread because it sounded cruelly true.
Between March and July, Neymar managed only four appearances. Then came August and what may have been the lowest moment of his career.
His 250th match for Santos ended in a humiliating 6-0 home defeat against Vasco da Gama. Television cameras caught him afterward near the touchline with swollen eyes, embracing the opposing manager while supporters booed around him.
A few weeks later, photos surfaced of Neymar at Rio Carnival. The criticism arrived immediately, as if every moment spent outside football had become evidence against him.
Around the same period, Neymar posted a photograph of Kobe Bryant on Instagram. No caption. Just the famous image of Bryant staring straight ahead while Matt Barnes fake-threw a basketball inches from his face.
The message was obvious enough. Ignore the noise. Stay focused. Keep going.
But it also felt lonely. Like somebody trying to convince himself as much as everybody else.
The comeback nobody expected anymore
Then something shifted.
Shortly after another procedure on his knee, Neymar appeared at training ahead of a match against Sport Recife. His knee brace carried a mandala design. Most people assumed he was there symbolically.
Instead, he started.
Fifteen minutes later, he scored.
The celebration looked almost reckless in its joy. Neymar sprinted toward the crowd and nearly crashed into the advertising boards as teammates chased after him.
Santos won 3-0.
The next match mattered even more. Away against Juventude, deep inside a relegation fight that had started consuming the club psychologically. Neymar scored a hat trick.
The third goal was his 150th for Santos.
After the match, reporters asked him when he had last scored three goals in a game. Neymar paused before answering.
“I honestly don’t remember,” he said.
The answer sounded less like modesty than genuine disorientation. His own career had started blending together in his memory.
Days later, Santos secured survival against Cruzeiro. Neymar dropped to his knees on the grass and raised both hands toward the sky.
“My mental energy was exhausted,” he admitted afterward. “It was the first time in my life I had to ask for help.”
That sentence probably revealed more about Neymar than years of documentaries and press conferences combined.
The burden of almost being perfect
Part of what makes Neymar such a complicated figure is that his entire career has unfolded in the space between greatness and incompleteness.
At Barcelona, during the club’s Champions League winning season, he scored 39 goals in 47 matches. In almost any other context, those numbers would have defined the era. The problem was that Lionel Messi scored 58 in the same season, which meant Neymar’s brilliance became secondary inside somebody else’s mythology.
At Paris Saint Germain, he dominated French football and carried the club to its first Champions League final. Yet the broader conversation around him barely changed.
Too distracted. Too fragile. Too theatrical.
With Brazil, the emotional stakes became even harsher.
At the 2014 World Cup, he carried the national team through the early rounds almost alone before the knee to his back against Colombia ended his tournament. Then came Germany’s 7-1 victory in the semifinal, a national trauma so enormous that it erased almost everything surrounding it.
In 2016, Neymar scored the decisive penalty against Germany to win Olympic gold in Rio. He collapsed crying at midfield afterward.
Even that eventually disappeared beneath newer frustrations.
The 2018 World Cup became remembered more for memes about his exaggeration of fouls than his football. In 2019, Brazil won the Copa América while Neymar watched injured from the sidelines once again.
The pattern repeated often enough that it eventually became part of how people understood him.
Always central. Never fully satisfied.
Ancelotti understood the real issue
According to Globo Esporte, the decisive conversation happened during a video call between Ancelotti, Neymar and Brazil coordinator Rodrigo Caetano.
Ancelotti approached the discussion carefully but directly. No guaranteed place in the starting lineup. No automatic captaincy. Strict respect for schedules. Reduced social media activity during the tournament.
Neymar accepted immediately.
The detail mattered because it clarified what Brazil’s coaching staff actually worried about. Nobody doubts Neymar’s talent anymore. That debate ended years ago. The concern was everything surrounding it.
Focus. Stability. Discipline.
Weeks earlier, Neymar himself had revealed that vulnerability accidentally. While receiving treatment on his hamstrings, he recorded a video of himself listening to a Brazil squad announcement. When his name failed to appear, he looked toward the screen and asked quietly:
“Ancelotti, what about me?”
No performance. No irony. Just insecurity.
It may have been the most honest public moment of his career.
Still searching for football
After receiving the call-up, Neymar kept repeating the same phrase.
“We made it.”
Not “I made it.”
His physiotherapist had become one of the closest people in his life over the previous year. His family carried him through periods where even training sessions felt emotionally impossible. Santos gave him shelter when European football no longer seemed interested in waiting for him.
And in return, he helped save the club from relegation.
Then came another injury scare. Forty eight hours after the celebrations, Neymar suffered a calf problem against Coritiba. Brazil’s medical staff quickly attempted to calm the panic, insisting the issue was manageable.
Still, uncertainty now follows him everywhere.
The World Cup begins on June 13. There is not much time left.
And yet the deeper question surrounding Neymar no longer feels entirely connected to trophies or legacy. Those debates were exhausted years ago. Statistically, culturally and commercially, he already belongs among the defining footballers of his generation.
What remains unresolved is something more personal.
Can football still make him happy?
Years ago, during a routine Ligue 1 match, a referee scolded Neymar for showboating while PSG comfortably controlled the game. Neymar looked genuinely offended by the criticism.
“I’m just playing football,” he replied.
At the time, the line sounded almost childish in its simplicity.
Now it sounds closer to a confession.