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The headband had returned. Neymar sunk to his knees, overcome by the emotion of it all. The title was his. The UEFA Champions League had a new Goal King.
Moments earlier, he’d led a breakaway seven minutes into stoppage time, exchanged passes with Luis Suarez, and coolly dispatched an unerring finish past a UCL legend, Gianluigi Buffon. It was the final kick of the final game. The one that sealed it. Barcelona’s third goal in a 3-1 victory over Juventus. Neymar’s tenth of the competition, the strike that brought him level with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo as the UCL’s top scorer with ten goals in the 2014-15 season.
He was now in the UCL’s most esteemed company, standing tall alongside the top two scorers in the competition’s history. And he’d have to get used to them, months later he’d join the duo on stage at the FIFA Ballon d’Or gala, officially recognised as the third greatest player on the planet.
After just a single season of acclimatisation following his overdue 2013 switch to European football, the Brazil captain had emphatically written himself into the UCL history books. While Messi and Cristiano have led an all-out assault on every goalscoring record in the game, Neymar had taken one for himself by becoming the first player to score in both quarter-finals, both semi-finals and the final of the competition.
For anyone who’d said the globalisation of the game had diminished Neymar’s 2011 achievement of leading Santos to their first Copa Libertadores in almost half a century since Pele had led the club to back-to-back titles, now there was no doubt. He wasn’t all hype. He was no “YouTube player”. Neymar Jr had come of age.
Not only had he joined the prestigious list of players to have won the biggest continental crowns in both South America and Europe, he’d become the first player to do so while scoring in finals of both.
His goals are making the difference. Half of his 16 strikes have arrived at the UCL’s all-important knockout stage. He’s now hitting more than one in two in a tournament that is widely regarded as the highest standard of play the game has ever seen.
Any early suggestions he’d struggle to meet that standard, to negotiate marking much tighter than he’d grown accustomed to in Brazil, were instantly dismissed on the night he scored his first UCL goal. Not content with a tap-in for his opener, he spent the next 12 minutes hitting two more to seal his first and, to date, only UCL hat-trick.
It was a sign that Neymar had added a ruthless streak to his game. If 138 goals in four-and-half seasons with Santos weren’t enough, Neymar was now proving that he was every bit as adept in the tight confines of the penalty area as he is at executing lambreta’s on the touchine – 15 of his 16 UCL goals have been hit from inside the box.
And now starring alongside Suarez and Messi as one third of perhaps the greatest attacking trio the game has seen, there will no doubt be many more. The headband is destined to return.
Neymar Jr. 100% Jesus. 100% genius. 100% UEFA Champions League Goal King.
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