Neymar: if you want to go, go now

Neymar has managed to make Barça’s tour of the US, his own private tour. His slow motion departure from Barcelona, postponed in a very calculated fashion with similarly calculated silences is dynamiting Barça’s good work in the US. The vast amount of effort put in at Bryant Park with the impressive huge Barça shirt or the photo of Bartomeu with Obama have inevitably been overshadowed by Neymar’s global show. The problem is not that the Brazilian might leave, but that he’s doing it so slowly and in silence. The situation is so grotesque that we are at the previously unimaginable stage where a clásico, a Barça-Real Madrid, for which tickets are changing hand for $10,000 is being overshadowed by the show being put on by Neymar the son, Neymar the father and a whole host of hangers on that takes us back to the old days of Maradona or Ronaldo. With Neymar’s silence, the mask has slipped and all we can see is a textbook example of playing both sides, where the player is using Barça for leveraging and reaping the benefits from PSG. Neymar is perfectly entitled to activate his release clause, what’s is regrettable is that he is so publicly using the club that catapulted him into the big time, and that enabled him to become the best forward in the world after Messi. Barça, and the Barça fans who have shown him so much affection, deserve better, they deserve a bit of respect. The situation has reached the point that the only way out is for the player to talk publicly, to explain his motives and to stop beating about the bush. It’s still almost too late: as the survey this newspaper did yesterday shows, his relationship with the fans is deteriorating by the day. If you want to go, go. But at least do it soon.