Neymar Made the Squad. Now He Has to Make the Pitch.

Neymar's calf tore on the 17th of May. Brazil's 26-man World Cup squad was announced the next day, read out position by position at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio, beneath a backdrop declaring it forbidden to dream small. When Carlo Ancelotti moved through the forwards in alphabetical order and jumped from Igor Thiago to Luiz Henrique without saying João Pedro's name, the room understood before the list was finished. Neymar was going to a fourth World Cup, and his body had already filed its objection, a grade two muscle tear that has kept him off the pitch ever since.

Neymar's last match for Brazil ended on a stretcher in Montevideo. He ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament and the meniscus in his left knee in a World Cup qualifier against Uruguay in October 2023, and the recovery swallowed what remained of his time at Al-Hilal, where the spell collapsed into a handful of appearances before coach Jorge Jesus removed him from the league squad altogether. “He can no longer play at the level we are used to,” Jesus said in January 2025, the same month the contract was terminated and Neymar went home to Santos.

Ancelotti arrived as Brazil coach four months later with a selection policy that left no room for sentiment. “He has to be 100%,” he said of Neymar in an interview published at the start of December. “If Vinícius is at 90%, I'll call up another player who is at 100%, because it's a team that has a very high level of competence, especially up front.” Five squads came and went without him, the last of them the final pre-tournament friendlies in March, and Neymar admitted to being upset and sad at the omission.

The case for picking Neymar was made in the final month of Santos's season, in the middle of a relegation fight. He scored against Mirassol and damaged the knee in the same match, a meniscus injury the doctors expected to end his year. He sat out the next game, then ignored the medical advice and played the last three.

Four goals and an assist followed, five and an assist across his final four appearances, including a hat-trick at Juventude and three consecutive 3-0 wins that carried Santos from 17th to 12th and safety on the final day. The surgery he had postponed happened on the 22nd of December, two weeks after he rated his own year a 7 out of 10.

That run is what Ancelotti pointed to when he named the squad. “We evaluated Neymar throughout the year and noticed that recently he has been playing consistently and has improved his physical condition,” he said. The dressing room had spent months making the other half of the argument. “As teammates, as Brazilians and as fans, we want him at the World Cup,” Marquinhos said in March, with Raphinha, Casemiro and Rodrygo all lobbying publicly behind him.

An injury has shaped every World Cup campaign Neymar has played. In 2014 he carried Brazil to the semi-finals with four goals and a Bronze Boot, then a knee in the back from Juan Camilo Zúñiga fractured a vertebra in the quarter-final against Colombia. He watched the 7-1 from outside the camp, and said afterwards that a blow a few inches lower would have risked paralysis.

In 2018 the damage came before the tournament, a broken metatarsal in February that cost him 16 matches for PSG and left him short of full sharpness in Russia, where Brazil's run ended against Belgium in the quarter-finals.

In 2022 his ankle went in the opening game against Serbia. He returned for the last 16, scored a penalty against South Korea, then put Brazil ahead against Croatia in extra time with the goal that drew him level with Pelé on 77. Tite saved him for the fifth penalty in the shootout, and Croatia won it before the fifth was ever needed. Neymar wrote afterwards that he was psychologically destroyed.

Neymar has not played a minute for Brazil since that night in Montevideo, a run now stretching close to a thousand days. The calf tear ruled him out of both warm-up friendlies, the 6-2 win over Panama and the 2-1 win over Egypt, and Brazil's staff have reportedly ruled him out of the Morocco opener at MetLife Stadium, with the second group game against Haiti on the 19th of June pencilled in as the realistic return.

What waits for him if he gets there is the one line missing from the career. He owns Brazil's goalscoring record with 79 goals, taken from Pelé in 2023, and his World Cup record reads 13 games, 8 goals and 4 assists without ever reaching a final, for a country whose wait for a sixth title is now 24 years long. In February he admitted retirement might come as soon as December, which makes the next five weeks the whole question of his career in miniature.

The squad list has his name on it. The team sheet is the document that matters now.

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