The boys from Brazil: Teen sensations Vitor Roque and Endrick tipped for the top

It was not long into January 2014 that judicial questions started to be asked about the details of the transfer of Neymar from Santos to Barcelona. In time, the buying club would yield a huge fortune on the back of his talent and fame, but it had been costlier than Barca initially admitted to export Neymar from Brazil.

A decade on from the first investigations into exactly how, and for how much Neymar moved to European football, the legacy of that seismic transfer is still being felt.

Neymar, now 31 and enduring a long recuperation from the injury that has hampered the third big move of his storied club career – to Al Hilal in Saudi Arabia – has fetched combined fees in excess of €400 million. That’s a total that endorses predictions, made through his teenage years, that he would be the game’s leading standard-setter for his generation.

There will be various judgements, from Catalonia, and from Paris, where PSG set a lasting record when they triggered Neymar’s vast €222 million buyout clause to lure him from Barca, about how close Neymar has ever truly come to being among the very best individuals in his sport.

But at 21, as a wonderfully inventive, brave dribbler, he was close to the perfect epitome of what so many European superclubs desire in a new signing. He was young, he was heir to the great Brazilian tradition of flair and courage on the ball. And he was more intriguing for being a little unknown to European audiences.

There are hundreds of past stories of potential wunderkinds from Brazil failing to live up to expectations once across the Atlantic, but the seductive idea of such stars-in-the-making never wears out. The 2024 winter transfer window is only a few days old, and already its major headliners are boys