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TThe first thing to know about the six-day clandestine Christmas disco that Neymar supposedly hosts for 500 people in the soundproofed annex of a mansion on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro is that Neymar denies his own existence.
However, CNN Brazil has reported that an unusually high number of cars have been seen stopping in front of Neymar’s home in the small coastal town of Mangaratiba in recent days. Local hotels have seen an increase in bookings, despite the increase in coronavirus cases in the region. A source from the municipal government has described the alleged meeting as “a lack of sanitary respect.” And a representative of a Brazilian folk band called Vou Pro Sereno has confirmed that they have been hired to play a clandestine Christmas record in which Neymar, and we really cannot stress this part enough, insists that it is not taking place. .
Look: who knows if any of this is true? The guests certainly, although given that Neymar has allegedly banned attendees of his supposedly six-day clandestine Christmas disco from bringing their cell phones, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure. For our purposes, in any case, the existence or not of Neymar’s six-day underground Christmas disco is largely irrelevant. The aim is to offer a brief glimpse of the confusion – the noise, the confusion, the real scandal, the fake scandal, the chaos – that awaits Mauricio Pochettino as Paris Saint-Germain’s new manager.
The last PSG coach was Thomas Tuchel, an excellent coach who nonetheless struggled with the club’s internal currents. Just before Christmas he gave an interview on German television in which he said he felt “more like a sports politician or a sports minister” than a football coach. “At a club like PSG, there are a lot of influences,” he said, a point that the Qatari owners of the club clearly demonstrated a few days later by firing him.
Despite leading them to a first Champions League final, Tuchel never quite fit into the PSG universe: a world of conflicting agendas and truths, where everything is football and everything is something else. It is a benevolent luxury brand. It is a facade for an autocratic government. It is a decaying star vehicle. It is a factory of magical dreams. It is based on hard work and Parisian enthusiasm. It is built on CO2 emissions and modern slavery. Everything is real. Nothing is real.
To prosper as a PSG coach is to be able to have all these ideas at once, perhaps even believe in all equally. Ultimately, it was all too much for Tuchel, a man who ultimately just wanted to coach a little soccer and win some great trophies. You might decline to comment on the six-day Christmas underground disco. You might ridicule it as a distraction or a media obsession. He could pretend not to notice. What he couldn’t do, fatally, was not see him.
And so into the gap comes Pochettino, a man who in his last job led a Tim Sherwood team to a Champions League final in the space of five years with a net transfer expense of around £ 30 million. Naturally, his imminent arrival has catalyzed all kinds of feverish speculation about who else might join the revolution: Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen, perhaps even Lionel Messi. The more interesting question, in the short and long term, is how do you handle what you already have.
This, after all, is Pochettino’s gift: change your horizons, increase your expectations, redefine the limits of what is possible. He is her bridge between Sherwood and José Mourinho, between Nigel Adkins and Ronald Koeman. It forces you to dream a little bigger.
The problem is that none of this really applies to PSG. They don’t need to raise your expectations. They don’t want to go on a holistic journey of growth, renewal, and self-realization. This is the most intriguing aspect of the appointment: Pochettino made a name for himself as a team builder, a coach who demands humility, honesty and suffering, and who unites his teams as a family. What happens when you take over a club that demands the exact opposite? Where is the guy king? Where do all the forces turn outward?
Thomas Meunier left PSG in the summer and remembers his four years there as “nothing more than birthday parties”. The club’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, is said to have a direct line to the dressing room. Sporting director Leonardo wields the kind of influence that goes far beyond what Pochettino will have experienced with, say, Les Reed in Southampton.
Bottom line: In almost every facet of the job, Pochettino will face reminders of his basic helplessness. The five-to-zero wins over Dijon will be scrutinized for signs of possible deterioration. Each replacement will feel like the end of the world. Then there will be the questions about Messi, the questions about birthday parties, about imagined fights and real fights, questions that will demand bravado, obfuscation and lies. On the pitch, all he has to do is persuade Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, two of the most individualistic attackers in the world, to sacrifice themselves for a high intensity collective pressure game and win the Champions League. Good luck with that.
This is how it falls apart. But that’s also how it all comes together. Because this is the possibility that we must also face: that somehow PSG’s right and Pochettino’s zeal and PSG’s thirst for pleasure and Pochettino’s thirst for pain are completed. That at some level, each has what the other needs. And right now, it feels possible to believe in both results equally.
