It was in November 2010 that Argentina played what appeared to be a rather meaningless friendly against Brazil at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar. The football was largely pedestrian, though the local crowd still seemed ecstatic when a 23-year-old Argentinian, Lionel Messi, scored the only goal of the game.
In retrospect, it was the beginning of a tangled tale of money and geopolitics that will culminate when Qatar hosts next year’s World Cup. At the time, Messi was playing for Pep Guardiola’s all-conquering Barcelona. Opposite him on that night was an 18-year-old Brazilian named Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, a centre-forward for the club Santos. They didn’t know it yet, but their futures would become intertwined.
It would be four years until Neymar joined Barcelona to play alongside Messi, famously becoming part of the fearsome ‘MSN’ trinity (of which Uruguay’s Luis Suarez is the third member). In 2017, Neymar joined the Qatari-owned French club, Paris Saint Germain, in a deal worth almost £200m, which smashed the world-record transfer fee paid for a football player.
