Neymar Gets a Fourth and Final World Cup With Brazil Unsure He Can Last

Carlo Ancelotti is not a sentimental man. The Italian has won everything there is to win in club football by making cold, clear-eyed decisions about who can help him and who cannot. So when he confirmed that Neymar would be part of Brazil’s squad for the 2026 World Cup, despite a body that has betrayed the forward again and again over the past three years, it counted as one of the most revealing calls of his managerial life. This was not nostalgia. “We chose Neymar,” Ancelotti said, “because we believe he can help the team, whether it’s for one minute, five minutes, 90 minutes or even taking a penalty.”

That single sentence captures the strange, suspended state Neymar finds himself in at 34 years old. He is Brazil’s all-time leading scorer with 79 goals, a player who for a decade was spoken of in the same breath as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and he arrives at what is almost certainly his final World Cup not as the centrepiece but as a gamble. A man who once carried a nation’s hopes on his back is now being asked, gently, whether he can still carry anything at all.

The Body That Keeps Letting Him Down

The hardest part of Neymar’s recent story is that the talent was never the issue. The injuries were. In October 2023 he suffered a serious knee injury playing for Brazil, tearing knee ligaments in a way that wipes out the better part of a year and changes how a player moves forever. He has not appeared for the national team since. His attempt to rebuild his career took him home to Santos, the club where he became famous as a teenager, but even there the comeback has been stop-start, interrupted by fresh setbacks including a calf problem that has lingered into this tournament window.

For a footballer whose entire game was built on acceleration, balance and the ability to change direction faster than a defender could react, those injuries strike at the very thing that made him special. The Neymar of 2014, who arrived at a home World Cup as the great hope of Brazilian football before a broken vertebra ended his tournament in tears, was an electric, unstoppable force. The Neymar of 2026 is asking the same body to do those things after three years of it breaking down. Nobody, including Ancelotti, seems entirely sure it can.

An Act of Faith From a Pragmatist

What makes Ancelotti’s decision so interesting is that it cuts against his reputation. This is a coach who has never been afraid to leave out a big name if the numbers did not add up. Yet on Neymar he chose belief over caution. “To be clear, Neymar will be with us,” Ancelotti said, framing the forward not as a passenger but as someone who could still tilt a match in Brazil’s favour. He spoke of Neymar being “motivated” and “working very well” to get back to fitness, and made clear that the player’s value was not as a luxury but as a potential difference-maker, even in small doses.

It is the kind of call that can define a manager’s tournament. If Neymar recovers and produces even a handful of decisive moments, Ancelotti looks like the wise old hand who saw what others missed. If the forward’s body fails again and the squad spot proves wasted, the same decision will be picked apart as the one indulgence of an otherwise ruthless selector. Ancelotti has staked a little of his own credibility on the belief that there is still magic left in those feet.

A Different Brazil Around Him

The Brazil that Neymar returns to is not built around him the way it once was. For years the team’s tactical identity and emotional weight rested almost entirely on his shoulders, and the burden visibly wore at him. This squad is younger and less dependent on a single star, with a generation of forwards and attackers who have grown up while Neymar was injured. Brazil opened their World Cup campaign with a 1-1 draw against Morocco, a result that underlined both the talent in the squad and the fact that this team can function without leaning on one man for everything.

That shift may actually suit Neymar. Freed from the responsibility of being the entire plan, he could be deployed as a specialist, a player brought on to unlock a stubborn defence or to take the penalty in a shootout that Ancelotti pointedly mentioned. The pressure that once defined his international career, the sense that Brazil rose or fell on whether he delivered, has eased simply because the team no longer needs it to be true. For a player who has spoken in the past about the toll that expectation took on his mental health, there is a quiet kindness in arriving at a final World Cup as a contributor rather than a saviour.

The Homecoming That Was Supposed to Heal Him

When Neymar left European football to rejoin Santos, the club where he first became a star as a teenager, the move was framed as a return to happiness. After difficult, injury-ravaged spells that took him from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain to Saudi Arabia, the idea was that going home would restore both his fitness and his joy in the game. Santos is where Brazilians first fell in love with him, the same club that produced Pele, and the romance of the homecoming was obvious. He would play in front of fans who adored him, in a less punishing league, and rebuild himself for one last run at the national team.

The reality has been more complicated. The fitness has not held the way he hoped, and the stop-start nature of his Santos return has meant he arrives at this World Cup without the consistent run of matches that any returning player needs. The romance has not been enough to outrun the physical problems. Yet the move did achieve one thing. It kept him visible, kept him playing, and kept the door to a final World Cup open just wide enough for a coach willing to gamble to push through it. Without the Santos chapter, Neymar would almost certainly have drifted out of the international picture entirely.

It also reconnected him with the version of himself that existed before the weight of being Brazil’s saviour wore him down. There were flashes at Santos, moments of the old invention, that reminded everyone the ability has not vanished even if the body cannot always summon it. Ancelotti has clearly seen enough of those flashes to believe the gamble is worth taking.

What a Last World Cup Would Mean

For all the caveats, the stakes for Neymar personally could hardly be higher. This is, by any realistic measure, his fourth and final World Cup. He has reached a semi-final, suffered the trauma of that 2014 injury, endured a quarter-final exit on penalties in 2022, and never quite got his hands on the trophy that Brazilians consider their birthright. The country has won the World Cup five times, more than any other nation, but not since 2002. An entire generation of Brazilian fans has grown up without seeing it, and Neymar’s career has spanned almost the whole of that drought.

Lifting the trophy on 19 July would, as one assessment put it, place a completely different frame around his entire career. It would transform a story that has often been told as one of unfulfilled potential, of brilliance undercut by injury and controversy and bad timing, into one of redemption. It would let him stand alongside the Brazilian greats not as the most gifted player of his era who never won the biggest prize, but as the man who finally ended his country’s long wait. Few players have ever had so much riding on so uncertain a body.

The Final Dance of a Fading Star

There is something universally affecting about watching a great athlete chase one last moment of glory while their body argues against them. Neymar has been one of the most scrutinised footballers of his generation, adored and criticised in equal measure, and the easy thing would have been to let him drift quietly out of the international game after the injuries piled up. Instead, a pragmatic coach decided he was worth one more gamble, and Neymar decided he was not ready to stop.

Whether he plays one minute or ninety, whether he scores the goal that defines a tournament or watches most of it from the bench, this is the closing act of one of the defining careers of modern football. The kid from Santos who once looked certain to win everything has been handed a final chance to write the ending he always wanted. The question that will hang over Brazil’s summer is a simple and human one. After everything his body has taken from him, does Neymar have one last great World Cup moment left in him? Ancelotti, against his own cautious instincts, has decided it is worth finding out.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.

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