What Race Will Brazil Legend Neymar Be at This World Cup?

In Brazil, unlike the U.S., transracialism is cool: race is not just a social construct, but also something the rich cosmetically reconstruct.

Americans are wondering why the whole world isn’t yet talking about the upcoming World Cup in North America that kicks off in Mexico City on June 11 and ends in suburban New Jersey on July 19.

Is it Trump’s fault?

Commenter David Pinsen explains that even in the 75% of years without a World Cup, the soccer season now goes on for, roughly, ever. All over the world, soccer teams have yet to wrap up their own normal league or regional championships. So, not even foreigners are focused on the on-rushing World Cup yet.

I find the World Cup, like the Olympics, to be fun on a once-every-four-years basis. (Watching the great Lionel Messi finally win his World Cup for Argentina at age 35 in 2022 was a blast.) But, for me, life is way too short to follow soccer during the 47 months between World Cups.

The New York Times’ Athletic sports section reports that 34-year-old Brazilian celebrity Neymar has been controversially picked for his fourth World Cup:

Neymar is going to the World Cup – let the psychodrama begin

By Jack Lang

May 19, 2026

I have no opinion or interest in Neymar’s ups and downs, except for one aspect: his extremely Brazilian adventures in transracialism, which I’ve been following since the 2014 World Cup in Rio.

Here is Neymar as a youth prodigy around age 16 or 17 and then again at 22 at the 2014 World Cup

So, what race is Neymar lately?

In America, you can be stunning and brave by being transgender, but you must never ever be transracial.

Note all the hate directed at Rachel Dolezal, who came to identify as black due to growing up with adopted black siblings — an unusual circumstance that you might think would engender a little empathy, but noooooooo. The young black women op-edsters who were handed such a large influence upon American culture during the Great Awokening absolutely loathed a white woman pretending to be a black woman and stealing our men.

In Brazil, however, being transracial is cool. Brazilians admire people with money and enjoy seeing what they do with it. Race in Brazil is not just socially constructed, it can be cosmetically reconstructed if you have enough money.

So, when Neymar Jr. was young, he was a normal-looking black kid by U.S. standards, taking more in his looks after his blackish father, soccer player Neymar Sr., than his whitish mom:

But by his early 20s, Neymar had straight brown hair, a lighter skin tone, and maybe some work done on his facial features. He looked like the kind of skate punks you see in Venice Beach, CA of who knows what combinations of racial ancestries. You know, my Grandpa from Nebraska met a lady in the Philippines when he was in the Navy and my other Grandpa from Hawaii of complicated ancestry married a lady from northern Mexico … you know, that kind of complex 21st Century Southern California mixture, like Tiger Woods, or fellow SoCal golfer J.J. Spaun, or Dodger manager Dave Roberts, who is black and Okinawan.

Back in 2018, the NYT Op-Ed page unloaded on the Brazilian star for not obeying the dictates of the Anglo-Saxon One Drop of Blood Rule:

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