Neymar’s online ‘disappearance’ coincides with his all-or-nothing bet to play with Leo Messi once more at the Camp Nou, leaving PSG behind.
The information blackout from Ney is a real anomaly caused by the internal earthquake in Paris and that could end in the coming weeks, when the Brazilian departs after two years in Ligue 1.
Neymar urged, in May, the PSG board to let him move to Barcelona. Without their agreement he eventually had to join the club’s pre-season trail.
He did it last Monday, a week later than Leonardo programmed. It has already been seven days in Paris, but in none of PSG’s official accounts – Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, where they have 114.5 million followers – have dedicated him a single post, nor a single photograph alone.
Without a doubt, one of the pluses Ney offers is the strength of his figure in the advertising market and on social networks, where he has become a global icon.
This added value was one of the reasons PSG, alimented by petrodollars of the Emirate of Qatar, decided to sign Ney, two years ago, and pay a record salary that amounts to 38 million net euro per season.
Now that Neymar has joined the group means for PSG that the star appears in the videos that the club publish in an almost fortuitous way, for a few seconds, sometimes in the background, with his teammates, either in the gym or on the training pitches.
The player himself, however, has been responsible for filling in some of the PSG information gaps, through his official Twitter account, where he posted photographs of his first day of training in the gym, or a sequence of snapshots in which he hugged Mbappe, showing good vibes, in a preparatory session on one of the training camps in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
The curious thing about both cases is that the author of the images is the PSG, as Neymar’s communication team stated, but that the club declined to publish them.
The obsession with the non-presence of Neymar on their social networks has reached such a surreal point that, as SPORT explained, Leonardo, the club’s sports director, asked the squad not to post any messages welcoming back the Brazilian crack, when he joined training a week later than expected.
PSG’s social media tantrum is a unique case within the big European clubs, who have always adopted the same tactic of highlighting their stars, to try to put pressure on the buying clubs.
Leonardo reiterated on Saturday night that they have not received any offers for Ney, and that, for all intents and purposes, he is still a PSG player, while the club tries to hide it, in a surreal attempt to dwarf him. The only thing that does is to expose the bad feeling that there is between the star and the club’s leaders.