Neymar can become the best player in the world

Neymar can be the best player in the world

Neymar lit up the Confederations Cup and showed why Barcelona have spent £60m to sign him. Having decimated last summer’s European Championship finalists Spain and Italy, he showed that he can bring his intoxicating combination of sublime technique, savage pace, perfect balance, trickery, imagination and lethal finishing to games against the very best.

The tournament was critical for him in silencing certain doubters and showing the world his immense talent. Not many players in the world are able to do what Neymar can do. Right now, he is in the top ten players in the world, maybe the top five in sheer ability.

That’s great, excellent even. But can he become the best in the world? Barcelona and Brazil are the best teams to show that he can.

At the moment, Lionel Messi is the number one player in the world with the more destructive Cristiano Ronaldo not far behind. Then come the likes of Iniesta, Xavi, Schweinsteiger, Bale and Lewandowski to name a few. At present, Neymar is on this secondary list. He hasn’t shown on the big stage consistently enough to be considered above them. However, in terms of pure skill, pure ability to do things with the ball that other players couldn’t dream of, only Messi and Iniesta are on his level.

What Neymar has to do, and what these world class players have done time and again, is prove that he can apply these stupendous talents game after game on the very biggest stages. This means the Champions League and the World Cup. If he lights those competitions up as he has the Confederations Cup, then he will rapidly move up the pecking order of the world’s elite talents. If it’s Messi and Iniesta he needs to learn from on how to do that, he couldn’t have picked a better place to land.

There was some conjecture that Messi and Neymar won’t be able to operate together, but that is nonsense. At Santos Neymar was by a long, long way the best player in the team, the best on the continent even and this meant he often tried to do things on his own. But at Barcelona he will be another star. He’ll be behind Messi, Iniesta and Xavi initially, but certainly has the talent to push to the front of the queue.

What he will have to prove, and this summer has gone some way towards helping that, is that he can play as part of a team. That he can demonstrate his game changing capability without losing tactical discipline was a key thing for him to show.