Neymar is a sad example of talent but not precisely directed. More tragically, the Brazilian striker’s brilliantly expected career was bent by his father’s greed.
Before Kylian Mbappe, Neymar was the most outstanding talent in world football, after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Therefore, after Neymar came Mbappe is expected to inherit the position of football king left by the other two great legends.
There is no need to rush to talk about achievements or careers, imprinted in the minds of football fans, surely the other two are never comparable to the two superstars who have dominated world football for nearly two decades. past year.
Many generations of football lovers have grown up with great handling, glorious feats or touching stories of Messi and Ronaldo. So the deep affection for these two superstars is natural.
However, the eyes of the majority of fans about Neymar and Mbappe are not sympathetic. Both as symbols of the villain on the pitch, opposite the two superheroes Messi and Ronaldo.
If Neymar makes fans imagine a football star filtering the core and playing debauchery, Mbappe shows ambition, selfishness and treason. Very little content of love is expressed in the story of the two most expensive and second most expensive players in the world. Therefore, the general psychology of the fans is derision and gloating when Neymar or Mbappe stumble.
A living example is the 2022 World Cup final between France and Argentina. Mbappe’s hat-trick makes everyone fear because of the excellent talent of the striker born in 1998.
However, happiness only vibrated in every molecule when fans watched Messi score and win the world championship. It’s the perfect ending like every movie is aiming for.
But Mbappe, before Neymar, why was he attached to the villain? The answer is not because of the love the fans have for Messi and Ronaldo, so they turn to hate the stars born late.
One corner of the answer is the way Neymar or Mbappe matured and reached the position of the top player in the world. That way both are not chosen. That way is manipulated by the parents. And that way reflects their greed: Neymar’s father, Neymar Sr and Mbappe’s mother, Fayza Lamari.
Neymar decided to part ways with Paris Saint Germain (PSG) and will follow Cristiano Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia to play football, which means ending his peak career at the age of 31. That’s the end no one wants to see in a player who is likened to “” little Pele” and was once planned to succeed Messi in Barcelona. Unfortunately, the path lined with dollars was chosen by Neymar Sr.
If you look back at the Brazilian striker’s career, the biggest mark is money, not trophies or goals. Neymar stepped into Europe with the announced €57.1 million contract between Santos and Barca in the summer of 2013.
However, just a year later, this deal was discovered to have signs of fraud and actually cost the Catalan team 86.2 million euros, half (40 million euros) fell into the hands of the striker’s family. Brazil.
In 2017, Barca was stunned by Neymar when it was announced that the striker’s legal representative had completed a financial obligation of 222 million euros to release the contract.
This impossibly huge amount of money comes from the emerging rich man PSG. Even more confusing, just a year ago, Neymar just signed a new contract with Barca and received what is called a “loyalty bonus”.
And in the latest development, Neymar joined Al Hilal of Saudi Arabia for a fee of 90 million euros and received a salary of 320 million euros for a two-year contract.
After 6 years of going down with PSG, no top team will be willing to spend a lot to recruit the Brazilian striker, let alone spend such a huge amount. Of course, this is another slick shot of Neymar Sr.
It was not until he became a top star that Neymar’s father found a way to sell his son for the best price. Many years ago, when Neymar was a teenager with a salary of $500,000 a year at Santos, Neymar Sr made $11 million through advertising contracts. Neymar himself also had to confess in a sad voice: “Business is growing very fast!”.
Understanding Neymar’s family background, none more so than Luis Alvaro de Oliveira Ribeiro, the exuberant former President of Santos Club. He was a young, cheerful man, enthusiastic and a little careless. During his time leading the leading football team in Samba, Luis Alvaro always chatted and laughed with the press.
He is a charismatic man and has always prided himself on his close relationship with Neymar and those close to him.
“He went from a traffic policeman to the most powerful man in the world of football,” the former Santos president giggled about Neymar Sr. However, when the transfer scandal between Neymar’s family and Barca was revealed, with Santos receiving only 17.1 million euros, Luis Alvaroa’s respect for the Neymar family was gone.
In August 2016, after a persistent depression from a transfer scandal and cancer, he breathed his last. In his dying breath, Luis Alvaro still managed to write a letter in both Portuguese and Spanish to condemn Neymar’s father’s deceitful behavior in negotiations with Barca.
The two-page letter, published after his death, shows the 73-year-old man still suffering from a trick from Neymar’s family.
Luis Alvaro is not the only one to be overtaken by Neymar Sr. A long list of respectable and football-loving figures has been exploited by this former traffic policeman.
Delcir Sonda, one of the most powerful businessmen in Brazil is also on that list. Sonda spent 5 million reais, equivalent to 2 million USD to buy 40% of Neymar’s value when the striker was a young talent at Santos.
This rate is equivalent to $ 35 million (30 million euros) when Barca recruited Neymar, but DIS (his company) received only $ 6.8 million. “They arbitrarily sold 40% of my shares to Barcelona. They deceived me,” Sonda said angrily.
30 million euros is not too much money for the owner of a supermarket chain with 15,000 employees. But, Sonda decided to pursue the Neymar family case to the end to reclaim justice.
Once dreamed of becoming a soccer star, Neymar Sr soon had to accept the fact that talent was not enough. His career is a journey of suffering at the bottom of the Brazilian football pyramid. He ended the game when he had just turned 30 because of injuries from a car accident.
“Football has treated me so badly. I’m not a happy person. I left my career at the age of 32 without a penny,” Neymar Sr himself admitted.
The entire fortune of this unknown former player is a small dilapidated house in Mogi das Cruzes, a shabby suburb of Sao Paulo. He was so broke that he couldn’t afford to take his wife for an ultrasound when Nadine was pregnant with Neymar.
The biggest talent of Brazilian football in the 2010s had to live in frequent power shortages and rely on the light from candles in the night. At one point, the whole family, now with a younger sister Rafaella, had to move into the old house of Neymar’s grandparents and sleep together on a broken mattress.
When Neymar’s talent was revealed and noticed, Neymar Sr gave his son the dream of changing his life thanks to football. Every step in the career of the Brazilian football prodigy is calculated by his father to earn the most money.
Before signing a contract full of scandal, Neymar Sr represented his son, then a teenager, signed an agreement to join Barca to receive $ 10 million.
After that, this scandalous deal helped Neymar’s family earn another 40 million USD. By 2021, Barca will have to spend another $ 25 million in fee to convince Neymar, at the peak of 25 years old, to agree to sign a new contract. And when the Brazilian striker turned to join PSG, Neymar Sr earned at least $ 22 million.
In addition to the huge kickback fees are many other millions of dollars in revenue from advertising contracts. Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil) newspaper revealed that 85% of Neymar’s advertising revenue goes to the company NR Sport in the name of his parents.
To make it easy to imagine, in the 2017-18 season alone, Neymar earned his family about 100 million reais, equivalent to 24 million USD.
NR Sport company is not simply a name for Neymar Sr to do business based on his son’s name. NR Sport is a media business with more than 200 employees to extract every last dollar from Neymar’s name.
“You can say: ‘Damn it! He’s turning his son into a money-making tool.’ But at some point, everyone realizes, Neymar is not just my son. It’s my job,” Neymar said. Sr bluntly admitted in an interview with Gazeta Press.
In order for everything to run properly, Neymar Sr became an annoyingly strict boss with all employees, including Neymar. “I ask for a job offer from everyone, including my son,” Neymar Sr declared.
If anyone has ever watched the documentary about Neymar, although it has been “colored” a lot, it is not difficult to realize the harshness of Neymar Sr with his son.
“We used to be as close as any child to his father, but now we are growing apart,” Neymar said of his relationship with his father. “Now things are… more professional.
My father taught me everything. He takes care of me and protects me, but at some point, there are times in your life when you just don’t want to anymore. As a result, you lose your father.”
Then, Neymar Sr coldly replied: “Ten years ago, it was just a father guiding his son into a career. But now, we have a global plan.” The plan revolved around money and brands, with almost no paternity left.
So, Neymar once said: “Many times in my life, I thought that I would rather be an anonymous person than a celebrity. Being famous of course brings many benefits, but its harm is also on a terrible scale. much worse…”.
