Former FC Barcelona midfielder Denis Suárez (31), now playing for Deportivo Alavés, spoke about Neymar’s (33) departure in L’After by Post United on YouTube. His testimony definitively cracks the myth of the famous “se queda” (“he stays”).
Suárez: “His departure took us by surprise”
“His departure took us by surprise, but there was still a moment when we knew he was going to leave. Even with the se queda photo, we already knew he wasn’t going to stay. We started telling Piqué that he didn’t have the guts to post the photo… and he posted it. But in reality, Neymar was practically already gone at that point.
Suárez: “He could have achieved something very big”
There were teammates close to him who tried to convince him that staying would be better for him. And I also think it would have been better for him to stay, because he could have achieved something very big. He would have quickly become the number one at Barça, winning everything he wanted to win.”
Denis Suárez’s testimony mainly helps rebalance a narrative that is often caricatured. Yes, staying at Barcelona would have offered Neymar a royal trajectory. But leaving for Paris Saint-Germain represented a challenge far more complex than a simple quest for ego. In Paris, Neymar didn’t just change clubs: he changed scale. He became the face of a project, the sporting engine of a European ambition still unfinished.
Unlike Barcelona, where Lionel Messi remained the immovable axis around which everything revolved, PSG offered him total—almost overwhelming—responsibility. To build, to carry, to assume. Far from being a personal whim, this choice reflected a desire to test his ability to lead a club to a summit it had never reached. With hindsight, the outcome can be debated, but reducing that move to a matter of pride would miss the point: Neymar chose maximum risk, not comfort.
