There is a Brazilian saying that the soccer prodigy Neymar and his family often laugh about. The phrase — calça de veludo ou bunda de fora — comes up frequently: when Neymar reminisces about his beginnings in street games in São Vicente, for example, or when someone asks, again, “Are you really better than Messi?” Always, the family returns to calça de veludo ou bunda de fora. And then they all giggle.

The phrase is difficult to translate directly into English. Generally, it has to do with gambling and a man’s soul. It has to do with being brash and bold and brave. It has to do with fortitude and, perhaps more than anything else, an abiding belief in a singular path.

Sitting in a hotel lounge 25 stories above Columbus Circle in Manhattan last month, the star’s father, Neymar Sr., looked out over Central Park and tried his best to explain it. Across the Hudson River, his son was with the Brazilian national team, preparing for a sold-out exhibition match against Argentina and, beyond that, for the Olympics, where he will be the most dynamic player in the competition. At the London Games, with the world’s spotlight squarely on him, Neymar Jr. will seek to earn his country a gold medal, the one major soccer trophy it has never won.
“He is living it right now,” Neymar Sr. said. “That saying we talk about — he is doing it.”
But that was not enough. So Neymar Sr. tried again, through a translator, to summarize the essence of the phrase. His son’s success, he continued, has always been based on risk. On finding the right mix of fast and slow, of possibility and caution.

At 20 years old, Neymar is already the highest-paid soccer player in Brazil. He is the face (and future) of soccer’s South American mecca. He is, in the words of no less than perhaps the greatest player in history, a technical marvel, a wizard with magical feet. But through it all, his father said, this one Brazilian saying has guided him, especially now as the latest question — when will Neymar go to Europe for good? — is asked over and over.
Finally, Neymar Sr. laughed as he settled on the best way to present the idiom. He sat up straight and explained that in life there are, really, only two choices: “A man can either go through life wearing velvet pants,” he said grinning, “or he can go through life with his bare rear end hanging out in the open air.”

Neymar has set hairstyle trends in Brazil and, with his flashy footwork, will help change the style of soccer around the world, his father says.

Neymar, playing for Santos F.C., shooting in the Copa Libertadores last month. He scored 42 goals in 60 games at age 18 and scored his 100th professional goal in February on his 20th birthday.

Neymar has often been compared as a player to Lionel Messi, right, the Argentine star who left for Europe to play with Barcelona.

A Magician With the Ball
For the better part of 100 years, Brazilian custom has allowed many, if not most, people to go by a single nickname. This convention knows no boundaries (a former president was known simply as Lula), and in some cities even the phone books list residents by a lone name.
In soccer, the nicknames are prevalent. Edson Arantes do Nascimento is Pelé. Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite is Kaká. Robinho, who was Neymar Jr.’s favorite player growing up, is Robson de Souza. And so, before Neymar — Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., actually — there was Neymar Sr.
But Neymar Sr.’s risks did not come on the soccer field. Yes, he was a professional player, he said, but by his own admission “not a player of high quality.” In 1992 he was playing in Mogi das Cruzes, a factory city about 25 miles east of São Paulo, when his son was born. Initially, Neymar Sr. remained in Mogi, but after several years, as it became clear his playing career was ending, he moved his family — his wife, Nadine, as well as an infant daughter and Neymar Jr. — back to his hometown, São Vicente.

Grabbing a tiny salt shaker from the table, he held it up against a water glass at least three times as large. “They were this size, I was that size,” he said, laughing at the memory. “They were very dismissive, the other boys. ‘Who is this little kid?’ But I managed to convince them to let me play that first time, and I scored a goal. That changed their attitude. That changed everything.”
Between street games and salon football, or futsal, as it is sometimes known, Neymar quickly developed a preternatural touch with the ball. Style is prized among South American players, and controlling the ball artistically is such a desired skill that there is a television show — known as “Street Style” — dedicated to identifying the best juggler.
Neymar was a celebrity judge on that show last year (he even gave a standing ovation to one contestant, who popped the ball up and hid it under his shirt as Neymar looked for it in confusion) and, as a boy, he honed his feel for the ball by rarely being without one, as if willing it to become an extension of his feet.

He can flick it, roll it, slide it and cradle it. He can make it disappear. In an exhibition against the United States this year, Neymar took the ball to the near side and danced with it toward the endline. As the crowd at FedEx Field in Landover, Md., exhaled a collective “oooh,” he slipped toward the goal and slid a perfect pass at the feet of a teammate, Pato.
That Pato’s shot rebounded off the post almost did not matter. For that moment, Neymar was a boy again, juggling in the streets with his friends shouting at him to keep the ball in the air longer and kick it over his head once more.
“I just like playing with the ball,” he said. “I always have. I play on the street even now. When we’re on vacation — it doesn’t matter where — I will go and look for a game.”
There were never enough games to satisfy Neymar, and by the time he was 11, teams throughout Brazil coveted him. His father took over full-time care of Neymar’s career at that point, handling the crush of scouts and club representatives who came to try and sign him. One of them was the Brazilian legend Zito, who scored 57 goals with Santos F.C. and won two World Cups with the national team. That Neymar rooted for Santos made the connection even sweeter.
Neymar ultimately joined Santos’s youth team, but at 14 he was offered the chance to play for Real Madrid, a Spanish power and one of Europe’s most famous clubs. Brazilian stars like Ronaldo and Robinho played for Madrid, and Neymar traveled there with his family.

The allure of Europe was powerful. “I have always dreamed of playing there,” Neymar said, and he could have stayed, could have made his life there. No one in Brazil would have begrudged him using that opening as the start to a long career playing in a more visible league like those in Spain or England or Italy. But Neymar Sr. said the family ignored the popular sentiment.
“We’re from a humble family, and in a humble family there is always the question of cultural values,” he said. “We thought he had to grow up in Brazil. That was the first serious choice we had to make.”
So Neymar did not rise up through the ranks at Madrid. And he did not receive the exposure guaranteed to South American prodigies who opt to play in Europe like, say, the Argentine Lionel Messi, to whom Neymar is so often compared. Instead, he returned home. He rejoined Santos and re-entered a life that quickly developed into something he never could have imagined.

A Life Closely Examined
One afternoon, before a Santos game in 2010, Neymar and his friend Andres decided to give themselves new hairstyles. Neymar had previously kept a simple, basic look, but after toying with a razor for a while the pair settled on something akin to a Mohawk.
“It was just messing around,” Neymar said recently, in the way mischievous children do.
At the game later, Neymar Sr. had just settled into his seat when he saw his son — and his son’s hair — on the field. While he managed to restrain himself from running out there and wringing Neymar’s neck (a thought, he acknowledged, that crossed his mind), there was a conversation — the father’s word — afterward about Neymar’s impulsiveness.

Still, little could be done. After all, Neymar had scored two goals with his new haircut, so it was not going anywhere, and the haircut quickly became a national phenomenon. Children got the Mohawk. Adults got the Mohawk. “In Brazil, only the president doesn’t have a Mohawk,” Neymar Sr. said, sighing. Even now — with Neymar back to a more standard appearance — fans still pay homage. A teenage fan with a spiky Mohawk approached Neymar at the New Jersey restaurant recently, and Neymar rubbed the bristles as they took a picture together.
Neymar’s fame, particularly at home, is difficult to quantify. He returned to Santos at 14 and made a first-team impact at 17, scoring 14 goals that season. At 18, he scored 42 goals in 60 games and led Santos to the championship of the Campeonato Paulista, the top league in the country.
It was not long before he could barely go out of the house. Neymar likes food — Italian, Japanese and, of course, rice and beans, he said — but going to restaurants became troublesome. “And I only know how to make scrambled eggs myself,” he said a bit sheepishly.

There are safety issues as well. While hooliganism is not as prevalent in Brazil as in some European countries, the public scrutiny of Neymar and his teammates seemingly knows no bounds. Once, after Santos lost a match, 6-2, the fans were so angry that they threw eggs at the players.
The public examination of Neymar may never have been higher than in 2011, when he became a father at 19. His father had cautioned him against the dangers of what he called the “chemical and the physical,” but while Neymar had avoided issues with alcohol or drugs, the uproar over his baby out of wedlock was brutal.
Journalists pried. Fans speculated. Television shows and news reports inspected all aspects of the situation. Eduardo Musa, one of the 14 members of Neymar’s team of advisers, said: “It was overwhelming, and what we did not want people to forget was that it was not a money issue or anything else. It was a baby. That was the important thing.”
The baby, a boy named Davi, was born last August, and Neymar said the ugliness surrounding the news of the pregnancy had been far overshadowed by the joys of fatherhood. Davi lives with his mother, but Neymar said he saw him often; in New York, he and his sister both shopped constantly for presents for Davi, Neymar Sr. said.