What’s in the number? If Brazil’s No. 10 carries any magic at all, Neymar needs it now more than ever | Football News

The debate should not even exist, and yet here we are, days before Brazil name their squad numbers for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with social media ablaze over reports that Vinicius Jr., the Real Madrid forward who has become the most explosive attacking player on the planet, should inherit the most iconic shirt number in the history of the sport, and that Neymar, the man who has carried it for more than a decade, should be moved aside to No. 13 to make room for him. The reports were denied, and Brazil’s official squad numbers have not yet been assigned, but the fact that the speculation spread as quickly and as widely as it did tells you something real about where Neymar finds himself right now at this particular moment, back in the squad after nearly three years away, carrying the weight of a torn ACL and the memory of what he once was, arriving at what is in all likelihood the final chapter of one of the most complicated and magnificent careers Brazilian football has produced. Before anyone decides whether the shirt should stay with him or move on without him, it is worth remembering what that number actually does to the people who wear it, and there is no better place to start than a tunnel in Tokyo in the summer of 2021.

The shirt and what it asks of you

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, delayed by a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and held in 2021, gave the world one of the more instructive demonstrations of what Brazil’s No. 10 jersey is capable of demanding from its wearer. Richarlison, the Tottenham Hotspur striker who had been handed the shirt by the squad for the tournament, was standing in the tunnel before Brazil’s opening Group D match against Germany when veteran captain Dani Alves, the decorated full-back whose career spanned two decades and encompassed virtually every honour the sport offers, turned to him with a challenge as direct as it was pointed: “Ah, so you’re wearing the number 10 eh? I want to see some goals from you.” The response was a first-half hat-trick inside thirty minutes, a 4-2 victory over Germany in a match that served as a symbolic rematch of the catastrophic 7-1 semi-final defeat Brazil had suffered on home soil at the 2014 World Cup, and the beginning of a run that ended with Richarlison lifting Olympic gold and finishing as the competition’s top scorer with five goals.Reflecting on what the experience had meant to him, he told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview for their ‘World At Their Feet’ series: “I was really happy, I discovered in the final that I was top scorer, my first time as top scorer. And like I said, the number 10 shirt of Pele, Neymar, Ronaldinho, I felt like a king because they gave me the number 10 and I finished up as top scorer, just as people expect to seeing from the Brazil No.10.” Three months later, at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, Richarlison opened Brazil’s account against Serbia with a scissor-kick goal so extraordinary that it was voted the Hyundai Goal of the Tournament and nominated for the FIFA Puskás Award, with Brazil winning the match 2-0 and Richarlison scoring both goals, this time without the No. 10 on his back, Neymar having reclaimed the shirt as expected, but with the confidence and self-belief that the Olympic experience had planted in him carrying forward visibly into everything he did. The shirt, as Richarlison’s experience made abundantly clear, has a way of locating the best version of whoever is brave enough to wear it, and the residue of that belief does not simply disappear when the number changes, and the question of who that person should be heading into the summer of 2026 is one that Brazilian football cannot seem to stop arguing about.

How the number became what it is

Brazil’s governing body was founded on June 8, 1914, and the national team played its first international a month later, beginning a journey that would produce the most decorated footballing nation in history and the most mythologised shirt number the sport has ever seen. The connection between Brazil and the No. 10 was, in one of football’s great ironies, born from an administrative oversight; Brazil failed to submit their official squad number list to FIFA ahead of the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, and the organisation assigned numbers at random, handing No. 10 to a seventeen-year-old from Três Corações named Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known to the world as Pelé.He responded by scoring six goals in four matches, including a hat-trick in the semi-final against France and two goals in the final against the host nation (Sweden), winning the first of what would become three World Cup titles and transforming an administrative accident into the sport’s most enduring symbol of attacking excellence.After Pelé came Zico, the technically brilliant Flamengo playmaker who embodied Brazilian football in the late 1970s and 1980s, then Rivaldo, whose performances at the 1998 and 2002 World Cups reminded the world what the shirt was supposed to look like, then Ronaldinho Gaúcho, the Ballon d’Or winner whose displays at the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea are still cited as the definitive modern expression of Brazilian No. 10 football, and then Kaká, the AC Milan and Real Madrid playmaker who won the Ballon d’Or in 2007 and carried the number with a quiet elegance that felt entirely in keeping with its lineage.

Neymar’s decade and the years that tested it

On June 21, 2013, Neymar Jr., Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, the forward from Mogi das Cruzes in São Paulo state who had made his name at Santos FC before signing for Barcelona, wore the No. 10 for Brazil for the first time, stepping into a lineage that had been built across six decades of some of the sport’s greatest players. A month after that debut in the shirt, he led Brazil to the Confederations Cup title, defeating reigning World Cup champions Spain 3-0 in the final, and two months later he made his European debut at Barcelona, beginning a club career that would take him to Paris Saint-Germain and eventually back to Santos. Over the decade that followed, he wore the No. 10 across three FIFA World Cups: 2014, 2018 and 2022, scored 79 goals in 128 international appearances to become Brazil’s all-time leading scorer, surpassing Pelé’s previous national record of 77 goals during a World Cup qualifier against Bolivia in September 2023, and became the second most capped player in the country’s history, contributing 59 assists alongside his goals. By any measure, his ownership of the shirt was not inherited passively, it was earned across years of carrying the enormous and often unreasonable expectations of the most football-obsessed nation on earth. Then, on October 18, 2023, during a World Cup qualifier against Uruguay, Neymar tore his anterior cruciate ligament and disappeared from the international stage entirely, leaving a vacancy that exposed just how much of Brazil’s identity had been built around one player. Rodrygo Goes, the Real Madrid forward, sought and received Neymar’s personal blessing before wearing the No. 10 at the 2024 Copa América, becoming a temporary custodian of a shirt whose owner watched from the sidelines as Brazil failed to meet expectations at the tournament and Rodrygo struggled to fill the role.

During the November 2024 qualifying window, it was Raphinha, the Barcelona winger who has constructed a case for the Ballon d’Or this season on the back of one of the finest individual campaigns European club football has seen in years, who wore the No. 10 in Brazil’s draws against Venezuela and Uruguay, scoring the equaliser against Venezuela while wearing it and paying tribute to Neymar with his celebration afterwards. Raphinha has since made clear that he has no issue returning the shirt, understanding the hierarchy that governs such things inside the Seleção dressing room.

The contention, the history and the argument for one more time

The reports that Vinicius Jr. would inherit the No. 10 while Neymar shifted to No. 13 were denied, and the numbers remain officially unassigned as of the time of writing, but the conversation they provoked has not quietened, and it reflects something genuine about the tension between Brazil’s present and its future. Vinicius first wore the No. 10 on June 17, 2023, during Neymar’s injury absence, and a younger generation of supporters embraced the transition with an enthusiasm that suggested they were ready to move on entirely, that the shirt’s next chapter was already being written by the player who had just helped Real Madrid to another Champions League title and had established himself as arguably the most dangerous forward in world football. The argument is not without force, and in any ordinary circumstance it would be difficult to resist. But this is not an ordinary circumstance, and the No. 10 of Brazil has never operated according to ordinary logic. On May 18, 2026, coach Carlo Ancelotti, the Italian manager who took charge of the national team after a distinguished career that included multiple Champions League titles at Real Madrid, officially named Neymar in Brazil’s 26-man squad for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, confirming his return after nearly three years of absence.Brazil’s pre-tournament camp begins on May 27 at Granja Comary, with a farewell friendly against Panama at the Maracanã on May 31 that Neymar is targeting for his return to action, subject to his recovery holding up, before a further friendly against Egypt in Cleveland on June 6 and the tournament opener against Morocco in New Jersey on June 13. Ancelotti has spoken about the significance Neymar carries within the squad, and Raphinha has reinforced the same point publicly, the veteran’s authority inside the dressing room remains intact regardless of what the injury years took from him physically.

There is also a historical dimension to his case that sharpens the argument beyond sentiment alone. If Neymar wears the No. 10 at this World Cup, he will join Pelé as the only Brazilian players ever to carry that number across four separate FIFA World Cup tournaments, equalling a record set by the man whose accidental assignment of the number in 1958 started everything, and cementing his place alongside the greatest to have worn it. That is not a small thing, and it is not unrelated to the question of whether he deserves to wear it, because the history of the No. 10 has always been about the accumulation of meaning, about each player adding their chapter to a story that began before them and will continue after them, and Neymar has been writing his chapter longer and with more consequence than anyone alive. If the shirt carries any magic, and Richarlison’s hat-trick in thirty minutes against Germany suggests that it does, then Neymar, standing at the edge of what is almost certainly his final act in yellow, deserves to “feel like a king” one more time.