All eyes on Samba star

[1]

It has been a reccurent theme of the transfer rumours for the past few years. ‘Brazilian starlet Neymar set to join club X’ or ‘Neymar prefers X over Y, agrees to a deal in principle’. Now you can replace X and Y with any of the top European clubs and the story will still be considered relevant to an extent.

Be that Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester City, Chelsea or any of the German or Italian giants.
The 21-year-old Santos star — full name: Neymar da Silva Santos Junior — has been in the spotlight ever since he made the senior debut for Pele’s old club at the age of 17 in 2009. The slender, athletic playmaker/forward sure has a bag load of tricks in his arsenal. The quintessential stepover? Tick. The Elastico (made famous by Ronaldinho)? Tick. The Roulette (think of Zinadine Zidane)? Tick.
Neymar is the classic Brazilian playmaker. One who can take on a bunch of defenders with his quick footwork and with a sudden drop of a shoulder flick the ball to an awaiting teammate or chip it audaciously over a hapless goalkeeper. It is hard not to be in awe of this prodigious talent. Sporting one of the fanciest hairstlyles in world football helps too.
It’s for no reason that Neymar finished 13th in 2012 FIFA Ballon d’Or voting results. Now 13 is not a dampener. He is the youngest in the Top 23 published list and the only player who plies his trade outside Europe. He also has won two South American Footballer of the Year (2011 and 2012) awards and boasts of a club scoring rate of a goal every 1.6 games (as per Bleacher Report).
But some perspective has to be called for. Neymar has not played against the best defensive units of the world yet. Though he already has 28 national team caps, none of those were major matches against the best in the business.
Brazil domestic circuit definitely has quality but the defending, especially the marking, is way behind in comparison to the European leagues. Neymar sure has made Brazilian defenders look like frozen zombies but he is yet to come up against a Nemanja Vidic, a Pepe, a Carles Puyol or a solid Italian set up.
For that reason alone, Neymar should move to Europe. For in players like Neymar, Oscar, Hernanes and Lucas Moura lie Brazil’s hopes at next year’s World Cup.
These are players who can take Brazil back to their stylish Samba way of football. And Neymar carries a large part of that burden. So for his sake and that of Brazil’s he should make the switch to Europe.
One just wonders, how about a move to Bayern Munich? Remember the role Bayern’s incoming manager Pep Guardiola played in Messi’s development at Barca?