Neymar: the outstanding sub-genius footballer of his generation

Welcome to the Premier League then, Nathan. Or rather, welcome to wherever you’re off to next, which will, let’s face it, almost certainly be somewhere else.

The most obvious reaction to the news that Chelsea have signed the 19-year-old attacking midfielder Nathan from Atlético Paranaense was: why exactly have Chelsea signed the 19-year-old attacking midfielder Nathan from Atlético Paranaense?

This is not to denigrate Nathan himself, who will join the club’s 26 loan players in a European league more hospitable to temp-to-perm teenage filler. Nathan may go on to have an excellent career, building on his time at the 2013 Under-17 World Cup, where he starred alongside his club-mate Mosquito. Nathan and Mosquito might even grow into one of football’s celebrated front lines, rather than simply sounding a bit like a much-loved hifalutin 1990s Scottish indie band.

Really, though, as Nathan prepares to join the 550 or so Brazilians playing overseas, it is tempting to reflect again on how football’s continental superpower is remarkable for its sheer weight of numbers these days, that high grade clone army staffing the world’s top tier leagues. And to consider how far out on his own the best of them is, Barcelona’s own gossamer goal-sprite who by the time he was Nathan’s age had been voted South American footballer of the year.

Neymar didn’t have his best game at the Allianz Arena on Tuesday, but he still scored twice against Bayern Munich to take his run of goals at the sharp end of the season to 11 in 10 games. Looking at the fallout from both legs, it was apparent once again that in the shadow cast by Lionel Messi’s obvious genius it is easy to forget what a fine and also unusual footballer Neymar is. And to conclude that this slight cloak of invisibility may be a significant advantage for a Brazilian superstar who has always had to carry with him two horribly unhelpful questions.

First, is Neymar going to be as good as Pelé (answer: no of course not)? And second, is Neymar going to be as good as Messi (answer: see previous answer)? Both of which represent a masterclass in missing the point.

Not only is Neymar a delightful footballer in his own right but he has other qualities that are more interesting. Perhaps the best part of him is that he provides a model of how to exist, happily, as a relentlessly consumed modern superstar sports person. He is the state of the art in this regard, the only 23-year-old global superstar footballer we have, and a player for whom there was almost no before, no life outside the glare of an impossibly overheated sport.

Perhaps this modern, pop star-ish quality, a refusal also to conform to a previous ideal of slightly guileless Brazilian genius, has something to do with a relative lack of warmth towards Neymar in Britain. Certainly among the pundit class there seems to be a feeling that here is a player who is a bit flash, a bit lightweight, a little entitled.

This is probably not helped by his gold-plated douchebag-playboy public image, the $16m in annual endorsements (smell like Neymar: with Drakkar Noir by Neymar), the Twitter feed spooling out endless pictures of Neymar and other young men who resemble him looking moody in baseball caps. Plus he has a history of falling over easily, although in his defence he is made of dandelion dust and sherbet, an animated chalk drawing of a footballer who looks to glide past rather than around a defender and is frustratingly vulnerable to the slightest touch.

Not that Neymar is likely to care about any of this. In fact his distinguishing superpower is that cool, clear, diamond-grade mental toughness. This is a sportsman who doesn’t feel pressure, who lives his inside out life entirely within the machine, but can still let it all wash over him. And who seems, for all the weirdness of his own life, a surprisingly non-weird superstar, a candidate for the role of happiest jewellery-draped millionaire celebrity.

Neymar's achievement this season has been to melt perfectly into that stellar three-man Barcelona attack, and here comparisons with Gareth Bale seem illuminating. This season, if not last, it has been a little painful watching Bale struggle to make himself heard in a team in which he is reduced to sitting in the wings battering out the occasional bongo fill during any brief pauses in Cristiano Ronaldo's endless one-man cock-rock guitar solo.

Neymar is also in his second season alongside an in-house megastar. He has, though, made it work in the last six months, revitalised not only by Messi’s switch to the right in November but by a huge amount of hard work. Often dismissed, incorrectly, as a lightweight presence, this season Neymar has run farther than any other Barcelona player in the Champions League. As he was in Munich, he has been relentlessly aggressive, always taking the ball on the turn, always running straight at the nearest defender, in the process allowing Messi to save himself for his own dazzling bursts and to unfurl the full sublime range of his passing.

Which is how it should be. Playing alongside great talent should be fun. It should be effortless – and this has been Neymar’s key quality. He is a player who barely leaves an imprint on the grass when he runs, who may not be an extraterrestrial talent such as Messi, or Ronaldinho, Brazil’s last really great off-the-cuff creative genius, but who is still a wonderfully complete footballer, able to pass, dribble, finish and graft with a seductive physical grace.

For Brazil, the pressure remains to provide some vision of world’s-best ultimacy. But perhaps this is also why in club football Neymar looks liberated rather than cowed in the glow of talents even greater than his own. If Barcelona do pull off their late-breaking treble the world’s greatest sub-genius footballer will have played a full part, a catalyst as well as a razor edge, and a refined lubricating part in that attack-for-the-ages.

(Guardian service)