A little over six years ago, the soccer world seemed like it had just changed forever. Roughly two months after masterminding maybe the greatest comeback in the history of the Champions League for Barcelona against Paris Saint-Germain, Neymar was leaving Barcelona to go play for PSG.
The fee, of course, stood out -- how could it not? PSG paid €222 million to meet his buyout clause, which Barca seemingly had set at a random impossible-to-meet number during contract negotiations. After all, the previous transfer record was just -- "just" -- €105 million, paid by Manchester United for Paul Pogba the summer before.
After years of gradually edging upward by €5 million or €10 million or €15 million, the world-transfer record suddenly doubled overnight. The largest previous jump was from €60 million to €77.5 million -- Real Madrid's moved first for Luis Figo and then for Zinedine Zidane. That's about a €17 million increase; PSG's move for Neymar increased the record by ... €117 million. The fact that there now existed a soccer club both capable and willing to do this meant that the fundamentals of the game had, well, fundamentally changed.
It wasn't quite clear exactly how they had changed in the moment, but the way things had worked in the past was that the best players in the world would all eventually make their way to Barcelona or Real Madrid. Sometimes there wasn't enough room for all of them, and obviously not every superstar wanted to live in Spain, but this was broadly the way of the soccer world.
In Neymar, Barcelona had acquired the next-best player in the world to go along with the current best player in the world, Lionel Messi. He arrived in Catalonia at 21, won the Champions League at 23 and figured to be there for the rest of his prime. And then, at 25, he was gone. Superstars just didn't do that to Barcelona or Real Madrid. We had entered a new world.
Or had we? Six years on from maybe the most shocking individual player transaction of all time, with Neymar leaving Ligue 1 for the Saudi Pro League, it doesn't really seem like it's worked out for anyone involved.