Father’s bond forged by rich talents of son
THE MASTERMIND BEHIND THE DEAL THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD
WHEN Neymar Jnr shuffled into one of the offices at the Nou Camp on Wednesday lunchtime with Barcelona directors Oscar Grau, Raul Sanllehi and Enrique Tombas, to tell them — what they already knew — that he was off, they were apparently stunned to hear him ask about the money the club owed his father in the next breath.
Neymar Snr has been a huge part of his son’s career from first noticing that his offspring was a football genius aged six — and the money that has followed his overwhelming success in Europe since he arrived from Santos in 2013 has only made the bond stronger.
Away from the pitch, everything Neymar does and says is in the name of the father, and everything Neymar Da Silva Santos says and does is in the name of the son.
One joke circulating on social media on Wednesday was that Neymar Snr was already negotiating a pay rise for his son with Paris Saint-Germain. Barcelona directors tired of the show, knowing that moment won’t be too far down the line.
At 25 and with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo now past 30, Neymar is not about to get any cheaper, more rich-list records will be broken — the father’s financial acumen and the son’s football will make sure of that.
Neymar Snr was a striker, too, back in the early 1990s in the professional Paulista Campeonato in Sao Paolo state. He was physical, hard to push off the ball, but not good enough to earn the sort of living that would feed his young family, so he quit aged 32.
He took a civil service job in the traffic department of the town hall in San Vicente and dedicated himself to one thing and one thing only — making sure his son had every opportunity imaginable to turn his talent into a successful career.
He never missed a game his son played and he made sure as many of them as possible were seen by the best-connected scouts in Brazil. He had the gift of the gab, too. He had them believing they were coming to see the new Pele even before they clapped eyes on the kid — and soon realised that Dad had not been exaggerating.
Brazilian journalist Agnese Marra’s profile of the kingmaker father in El Mundo this week quotes Adilson Durante Filho, who was youth football director at Santos when Neymar was emerging. He tells her: ‘He is a noble man, nothing like the unjust talk around him now.’
Marra paints the picture of a doting dad who takes his son to the barbers to have his head shaved, only for the boy to ask permission to have increasingly flamboyant cuts.
Beyond the fashion tips, the fatherly influence is solid. Neymar bulks out a little and becomes completely two-footed thanks to the advice of his mentor.
When Neymar becomes a young teenager, Neymar Snr recognises that he needs a little help getting the best out of his son and he allows top Brazilian football agent Wagner Ribeiro into the tight family circle.
The pair have had their business ups and downs over the years but on Wednesday when they boarded a flight to Porto with Neymar for his medical, it was Ribeiro who stopped to speak to reporters — it appears he remains an important cog in the Neymar machine.
Via Ribeiro, Neymar Snr took the player to Real Madrid’s youth academy aged 13 and was offered a job in the Spanish capital if he could move to Madrid with his son. Marra says he took the deal back to Santos and so improved the player’s terms with the Brazilian club — it’s a tactic that he has been using ever since and none more so than seven years ago when he came back from a trip to London with an offer from Chelsea.
Then Santos president Luis Alvaro de Oliveira Ribeiro had to get Pele involved to beg Neymar Snr to keep his son in Brazil.
The method worked right up to last October when Neymar Snr returned from meetings with PSG and told Barcelona just how much they needed to pay his son to keep him from the clutches of the French club.
They paid up with a shiny new contract up until 2021 and a 45million euros (£40.5m) signing-on fee due to his father. Around 25m euros (£22.5m) of that is still owed. Neymar Snr was supposed to cash his last cheque from Barcelona on Monday but they are withholding funds in the hope they can find legal grounds to not pay the amount in full.
Don’t bet against Neymar Snr winning that particular legal wrangle. He has come out on top more often than not over the years.
Some say the money and the power changed him. His final exchanges with Spanish journalists were bad-tempered and full of ill-feeling on both sides.
He confronted the media outside a party for his son’s birthday last year and after several requests from him for them to leave, went unheeded things turned ugly and one camera ended up thrown to the ground.
When Gerard Pique posted his famous ‘He stays’ Tweet accompanied by a photograph of himself with Neymar Jr last week, the memes replaced the player with the Brazilian’s father in the picture.
You can’t have one without the other. Now father and son are both off to Paris.