Cancel the funeral march. Put the obituaries on ice. Tell the violinist he can knock off early for the evening.
Neymar is going to the World Cup.
On a warm, slow-motion, incredibly verbose night in Rio de Janeiro, Carlo Ancelotti pushed the Brazilian national team — and, yes, Brazilian public discourse — into a new chapter.
For six months, the country had been glued to Neymar: The Referendum, a rolling psychodrama with a giant question mark at its heart. With a brief pause and just the faintest hint of an ironic smile, Ancelotti put that to bed and gifted us something else. Welcome to Neymar: Last-Chance Saloon, a slightly different rolling psychodrama that will either make Brazil’s summer — or break it.
It will be Neymar’s fourth World Cup. His last, too, barring stunning advances in medical science between now and 2030. For him, it is a chance to right a few wrongs, to end his Selecao story with a flourish. For his country, it’s a big old bet, a heap of chips stacked on his talent — ethereal, self-evident — and a blind eye turned to the risk factor.
The prevailing winds had changed in the lead-up to the squad announcement. Ancelotti, having spent the best part of 12 months quietly fuming at being asked about Neymar in every press conference, seemed to soften on the topic.
It is not that Neymar, who turned 34 in February, has been playing especially well for Santos. He has been playing, which is something after so much injury heartache, but also falling out with young team-mates and kicking off after being substituted by accident. No, the shift in tone came from elsewhere.
The Neymar lobby, previously led by former players — Romario, Cafu, Zico — gained vocal new members, many of them key to Ancelotti’s plans. “As team-mates, as Brazilians and as fans, we want him at the World Cup,” Brazil captain Marquinhos told website UOL in March. Casemiro and Raphinha have both echoed those statements in prominent interviews. “He’s the guy to take us to our sixth World Cup title,” Raphinha told TV Globo earlier this month.
Neymar has fought back to fitness with Santos in recent months (Miguel Schincariol/Getty Images)
Ancelotti always insisted that he alone would make the final call on Neymar. He did, though, drop a big hint in an interview with Reuters last week. “I know full well that Neymar is much-loved, not only by the public but also by the players,” he said. “This is also a factor, because we have to consider the atmosphere that will surround Neymar’s call-up. It’s not as if I’m going to drop a bombshell in the dressing room.”
It was telling that the Italian returned to that theme on Monday after naming his squad. He cited Neymar’s improved fitness as the key criterion for his selection but did reference squad dynamics. “With the experience he has in this kind of tournament, and the affection the group has for him, we thought we could create a better atmosphere,” Ancelotti said.
There is nothing wrong with that theory on paper. Three questions will stress-test it, however. One is whether the widespread admiration for Neymar, which borders on deference even among the other senior players, will lead to a transference of responsibility to him, as it so often has in the past. The second is whether Neymar himself is willing to be just one of the troops rather than the big kahuna.
Then there is the whole Neymar Industrial Complex: the analysis and over-analysis of his every breath, the on-off moral panic, the garish sideshow with its own centre of gravity. Might Brazil not have been better without all of that?
“He has the same role, the same obligation as the other 25,” Ancelotti said on Monday. “He might play; he might not; he might be on the bench and come on.”
The World Cup has not always been kind to Neymar (Fabrizio Bensch / AFP via Getty Images)
Neymar, though, has always been on a pedestal. And with his days at this level obviously numbered, you best believe he will be taking this World Cup personally.
You could reasonably call it unfinished business. Neymar is Brazil’s all-time top goalscorer, indisputably one of the greats, but the World Cup has not always been kind to him. He should have been at the 2010 edition as an 18-year-old but wasn’t, a victim of Dunga’s joyless managerial approach. He was a sensation on home soil in 2014 until being kicked into a hospital bed by Colombia’s Juan Camilo Zuniga. In 2018, he was half-fit. Four years later, in Qatar, he produced a moment of heart-stopping brilliance in the quarter-final against Croatia, yet still ended up on the losing side.
It is by no means a bad body of work. Eight goals and four assists in 13 World Cup games is a solid return. Yet he will feel, with some justification, that it is not commensurate with the magnitude of his ability. Not yet, at any rate.
Neymar has only played four times for his country since that Croatia match. His last appearance was against Uruguay on October 17, 2023. Assuming he plays a part in the friendly against Panama on May 31, that will be a 956-day absence. Given the extent of his injury woes since then, a degree of a caution is necessary. Neymar will be motivated this summer but he, more than anyone, will also know what an achievement it is just to have made it this far.
“It’s my dream to be at the World Cup,” Neymar said on Sunday after playing for Santos against Coritiba. “I have always been clear about that. It’s what I’ve been working for. I want to be there.”
On Monday, Ancelotti granted Neymar his wish. The wisdom — or otherwise — of that call will be now be the central theme of Brazil’s World Cup, for better or worse. For now, there is only one certainty: it won’t be boring.
