Is Neymar Jr. the new Figo?
In the year 2000, Figo changed club and signed for Real Madrid, hand in hand with the winner of the presidential elections Florentino Pérez, who had made the Portuguese one of his big electoral claims. According to recent rumors of the press, Florentino plans to bring Neymar to Madrid, which if true, could bring interesting consequences for the football world.
Neymar is willing to finalize his departure from Paris Saint-Germain this summer and according to an information published by the French newspaper Liberation his father initiated the proceedings in a secret meeting with the famous intermediary Pini Zahavi to request his help in the operation. The French newspaper points to Real Madrid as the most likely destination. Ney is not seduced by the idea of playing in the Premier League, knows a return to Barcelona is impossible and discards both Bayern Munich and the Italian Serie A, which cannot deal with signings of such depth, which is why, adding the known interest of Florentino Pérez, he places the merengue club in the first place of his preferences.
The meeting between the father of the Brazilian crack and the Israeli agent occurred, as published by the French media, on April 24 in Paris and would have been the second between them, a month after Zahavi met with Neymar Jr. and several executives who work under his orders in Sao Paulo. It was there, in March, where the possible signing for Madrid began, whose plans would happen to present Neymar as the great ally and future successor of Cristiano Ronaldo in the Merengue squad.
Although Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, president of PSG, traveled to Brazil also in March to meet Neymar personally, after learning that the player was already planning an exit from the club, the intentions of the president collided with the coldness of Ney, who did not assure him his continuity.
Although Neymar returned to Paris to finish his rehabilitation and was very close to his teammates in the celebration of the conquest of the Cup of France, his relationship with the top of the club is known very deteriorated, hence the strategy to continue to force his exit this same summer, advancing in a year the speculations that pointed to his landing at the Bernabéu in July 2019.
Despite various reports pointed out in recent days that the transfer of Neymar would be valued at 260 million euros, a person close to PSG rejected such a possibility, assuming that the French club, if necessary, would not let him go "for less than 350" due to the mammoth operation it had to do to get him out of Barça in the summer of 2017. Rumors or not, the truth is that Neymar might well play the role of Figo while becoming Barcelona’s enemy.