Olympic games are not generally remembered for their football, and when they are, it is usually for the performance of a player rather than a team.
Way back in 1924, Uruguay’s Gold medal in the Paris Olympics –before FIFA’s World Cup competition had been created- marked the beginning of a new era of South America dominance. La Celeste as the Uruguayan team led by Jose Leandro Andrade –the first black player to earn respect at an international level- became a legend in its time, going on to winning the Olympic gold again in 1928 and the World Cup in 1930.
In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics , the Spanish football clinched a gold medal. Among the players in the winning team was a twenty year old called Pep Guardiola, whose contribution to the subsequent success of Spanish club and national team football has been huge. Fast forward to the Beijing Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and it was the individual brilliance of one Lionel Messi –a player groomed by Guardiola at Barca- that dominated sports headlines for the first time when Argentina clinched the gold.
The 2012 Olympics football games have drawn increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds to the selected stadiums around the country . The excitement in the first week was prompted by the somewhat absurd expectation that the football players of TeamGB would show the same excellence and team ethos as the British participants in other categories and grab a gold, or at least a medal. But the enduring interest even after Team GB has been knocked out, has underlined the global popularity of a sport that is now stirring genuine interest in the US after conquering Asia.
Within the games so far, no other footballer has generated as much interest as the young Brazilian Neymar. The football world- and by that I include sponsors, advertisers, agents, clubs, and fans- are watching not just to see if Brazil can clinch its first ever gold medal, but the extent to which such a victory might be personified in its best known star. A positive outcome will delight not just Brazilians, but all those who plan to make as much as money as possible from the World Cup of 2014. It might also enthuse a lot of fans for whom the prospect of Brazil, with a majority of its players in these Olympics, emerging as the main challenger in two years time to Spain’s La Roja is mouth watering
The jury remains out on whether Neymar deserves such interest. While Neymar has made a significant contribution to his team’s Olympian success so far, scoring three goals in four matches and creating most of the team’s scoring chances, he has met with a hostile reaction from British fans, who dislike the ease with which he dives and see little Olympian spirit in his egocentric exhibitionism.
Prior to these Olympics, Neymar has fallen short of matching Messi’s international status, or Ronaldo’s for that matter. Last year he was eclipsed when Barca thrashed Santos 4-0 in the World Cup of Clubs, and less than impressive in June this year during Brazil’s friendly against Argentina which they lost 3-4, with Messi scoring a hatrick.
Nonetheless the 20 year old Neymar da Silva Santo Junior has an extrovert character and flashes of genius when it comes to ball control and goal scoring (“I want to show happiness with the ball”, he says) that has made him a hugely marketable commodity, with top European clubs seriously holding him in their sights, and Brazilian clubs seeing their own revenues boosted thanks to a growing renewed global interest in the country that lays claims to ‘beautiful football’.
While such interest has seen Neymar’s transfer value soar, the question is whether he is capable of maturity as a player into the Pele of the 2014 World Cup or whether his potential is overhyped. Ramon Besa of the Spanish newspaper El Pais, one of the most insightful football commentators I know, asks the question today : “Who can be sure that Neymar will not end up somewhere between Ronaldinho and Beckham?”.
