Joao Neves: How Portugal’s little prince stole Parisian hearts

Watch the video without sound, without context, and you will be forgiven for wondering what exactly is going on.

It is a television news report from 2019. It shows Portugal’s under-15 squad in training. The session is dynamic and intense. Players shove each other off the ball, crunch into challenges. These are only kids but they exhibit a physicality far beyond their years. All, that is, except one.

Darting about in the forest of limbs is a little cotton-tailed rabbit. He looks like he hasn’t even heard of puberty. He’s not wearing the No 10 jersey; it’s wearing him. Look closer, though. He’s running rings around those other boys.

The footage cuts away to an interview. It’s him, the mini maestro, Joao Neves, 14 going on eight, hair bobbing up and down, eyes lit up like candles. He looks like a porcelain doll come to life. Then he starts to speak.

“People sometimes underestimate me due to my size and my lack of physicality,” he says. “But football is also about intelligence. When you don’t have the body (to compete), you have to be smart. Football is not all about strength. It’s about what you have in your head.”

We know now that Neves was onto something. He was a regular in the Benfica side at 18, a full international at 19. He joined Paris Saint-Germain last summer for a fee that could reach €70million (£58.7m; $75.8m). His performances since have been so consistently good that it already looks like a bargain.

At the time, though? Neves’ sure-footedness in that interview was remarkable. A year earlier, he had been left out of the Lisbon squad for a prominent inter-region youth tournament due to his size. Even at Benfica, whose youth system he first joined aged eight, there was no great consensus over him.

“He was always seen as someone with huge potential but his height and physique did make some question his ability to reach the very highest level,” says Nuno Gomes, the club’s former academy director.

Neves may no longer have an underdog aura — he is, aged 20, very much the golden boy of Portuguese football, not to mention the embodiment of this new-look PSG project — but it is telling that he sees those early doubts as formative.

“I had to find a way of escaping that characterisation of me as a frail player,” he said in a recent interview with French magazine Onze Mondial. “It made me better prepared. Opponents often looked down on me because of my size. They’d think, ‘He’s weak, I can relax’. I took advantage because I always went all-out.

“Contempt always gave me the upper hand.”

Neves grew up in Tavira, a small city on the Algarve coast. His mum was a P.E. teacher, his dad a policeman who also coached youngsters as Casa Benfica, a local football school loosely affiliated with the Lisbon club.

Neves started there, later being invited to train at Benfica’s regional development centre. Aged 11, he left home to live at the Benfica Campus on the outskirts of the capital.

There is a funny picture of him from those early years. He is wearing a long-sleeved Benfica shirt, Coca-Cola logo on the front. He has red socks pulled over his shin pads. In between, there is the biggest pair of shorts you can imagine, their size accentuated by the fact that they are tucked in. I have measured the photo with a ruler; he is literally 35 per cent shorts.

Neves may wear correctly sized kit these days but the habit of tucking his shirt in remains. It has become his trademark, a look that he says is an expression of his values rather than any aesthetic preference.

“My dad always said I should keep doing it because it is a mark of respect for ourselves and our opponents,” Neves told Onze Mondial. “It’s your jersey and it represents you. When the shirt comes out, I try to put it back as soon as possible. I don’t feel at ease when it’s untucked.”

In the youth teams, Neves stood out mostly for his intelligence and his attitude. He was, says Luis Castro, who coached the midfielder at under-19 and B-team level, a joy to work with.

“He was a very rounded player but it was the mental side that made the difference,” Castro tells The Athletic. “He always worked right up to his limit, always at maximum. I don’t think Joao ever had a single coach who didn’t regard him as a spectacular kid. He had a one-in-a-million mentality.”

Only once did Neves let himself down. One evening, he and a group of fellow lodgers at the Benfica Campus jumped a security gate in order to get their hands on a hidden cache of… Powerade. They filled a couple of backpacks with bottles of the sports drink and managed to escape a security guard, only to be rumbled when academy staff went through the CCTV footage the following morning.

Gomes summoned the boys to his office. Neves feared the worst.

“He was clearly really scared,” Gomes tells The Athletic. “He and his team-mates understood that they had done something wrong and that there had to be consequences. He thought I was going to do something drastic, maybe even send him back home.”

Gomes told Neves and his friends that they would have to make extra beds in the dormitory and they would not be allowed to attend the first-team game against Porto at the Estadio da Luz. But that, to Neves’s great relief, was the extent of the punishment.

“I was not too hard on them,” says Gomes. “I was their age once and I was no saint. We can smile about the episode now.”

Neves rides a challenge during PSG’s Champions League win over Manchester City in January (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

Neves’ big break came during the 2022 World Cup. Half of the Benfica squad went away to represent their countries. Needing extra bodies so he could still train the remaining players properly, first-team coach Roger Schmidt asked Castro to recommend some players from the B team.

Neves, who had just signed a new contract, complete with a €120m buyout clause, was first on the list.

“I remember telling my staff that we weren’t going to see him again,” Castro says. “I knew that he wouldn’t be there just to make up the numbers.”

Schmidt loved Neves and kept him around even when the World Cup was over. After a few appearances off the bench, the midfielder made his first start in a 1-0 win against Estoril in April 2023. “It wasn’t a risk,” Schmidt said in his post-match press conference. “He plays with a mixture of joy, confidence and quality. He’s ready.”

Neves rarely left the starting XI thereafter, filling the gap left by the departed Enzo Fernandez. “He has given us something special, something fresh,” Schmidt said after Benfica’s win over Braga in May 2023. “He’s good with the ball, good without the ball, understands what to do tactically. He’s physically intense. He’s only 18 but he is so complete.”

Neves ended that season with a Portuguese champion’s medal. He started the following campaign like a house on fire. Case in point: his virtuoso display in the dramatic derby win against Sporting CP in November that year, which made the local press swoon and in which Neves scored a 94th-minute equaliser before Casper Tengstedt grabbed the winner. “The youngest and smallest player on the pitch can see solutions where many can’t,” wrote Bruno Roseiro on the Observador website.

“It looked like he had been playing at that level for 10 years,” says Castro. “It was an affirmation. Everyone could see Joao’s level.”

Neves scored a late equaliser against Benfica’s Lisbon rivals Sporting CP in November 2023 (Carlos Rodrigues/Getty Images)

Growing up, Neves idolised Andres Iniesta. You can see a few echoes of the latter’s game: the subtle accelerations, the head-up posture.

Neves, though, is a slightly more blue-collar footballer. He presses and chases hard, never gives a ball up for lost. These attributes, more than any others, made him an instant fan favourite at Benfica.

“The fans took to his style of play,” says Gomes. “His commitment and dedication was obvious. He has this contagious energy, which spreads to his team-mates and brings a stadium to life.”

Neves is also unafraid of letting his emotions show. His mother died last February, aged 50. A day after her funeral, he played against Toulouse in the Europa League, breaking down on the pitch after the final whistle. It was a scene that touched fans around Portugal.

“It’s easy to see that he’s a pure person with a huge heart,” says Castro. “He’s the kind of player who will create deep connections with people wherever he goes. Everyone falls in love with him — fans and team-mates. No Benfica supporter wanted him to leave. Nor did the staff.”

Neves has admitted that he did not particularly want to move away from his boyhood club in 2024, either. He cried when Benfica president Rui Costa told him that PSG had made an offer that he could not turn down. “It’s scary, leaving my comfort zone,” he told Benfica TV after the deal was confirmed. “I’m not sure what I can achieve (in Paris).”

An emotional Neves after Benfica’s Europa League clash with Toulouse last year (Sylvain Dionisio ATPImages/Getty Images)

He need not have worried. Neves has barely put a foot wrong since he arrived in the French capital. He is, perhaps more than any other player, the poster boy for Luis Enrique’s youth revolution — hungry, tenacious, unflinching.

“He has the same ideas about football as I do,” Neves said on PSG TV after joining and the symbiosis has only come into greater focus in the months since.

“I describe him as pure energy at the service of the team,” Luis Enrique said in August. A month later, speaking before the Ligue 1 game against Rennes, he was even more emphatic: “He is a perfect fit for my way of playing. He has adapted really quickly.”

Team-mates, too, have been bowled over. “He’s a monster,” PSG captain Marquinhos said before the Champions League game against Girona in September. “We don’t have the most simple philosophy but he was prepared from the very first game. He might be young but he’s mature. He arrived ready.”

“He can play in any position in midfield,” says Castro. At Benfica, Neves was most commonly used just in front of the defence; it was common to see him dropping between the centre-backs to receive passes from the goalkeeper and start moves.

Former Benfica boss Schmidt made the most of his versatility, picking him at wing-back on a couple of occasions. Mainly, though, he challenged Neves to take more risks in possession. “He wanted me to play fewer short passes,” Neves told Benfica TV in August. “He wanted me to look up more, try to play forward, break the lines.”

At PSG, Neves registered four assists in his first two Ligue 1 matches; he has added four more since, plus another in the Champions League. This is a factor of a slightly higher position — Vitinha is usually the deepest midfielder, with Neves and Fabian Ruiz either side — and, frankly, a bit of a bonus.

His coach, certainly, seems to care more about his ability to retain possession than he does about chance creation.

“He has one vital characteristic: he doesn’t lose the ball,” Luis Enrique said in September.

Off the ball, Neves is a terror, a presser and counter-presser of the highest order. Witness the graphic below, which shows the locations of his tackles and interceptions across PSG’s Champions League campaign. There is no hiding from him.

Neves has been a transformative signing. It is no coincidence that the PSG midfield looks more functional this season than it has for years. He and countryman Vitinha, in particular, have an understanding that verges on the telepathic.

It is no coincidence, either, that the French side’s best win of the season — the 4-2 win over Manchester City in January — coincided with Neves’s best performance. The midfielder’s error led to Erling Haaland’s 53rd-minute goal but he bounced back, dragging PSG forward and eventually putting them ahead with a fine, plunging header.

“A miniature masterpiece,” Hugo Delom called his display in L’Equipe. “Players from previous PSG teams would have sunk. But not him.” Then there was the verdict of So Foot, the irreverent French Football magazine. Neves, they posted on X, was “Marco Verratti without the cigarettes and nights out”.

PSG could do with something similar as they plot a second-leg revival against Liverpool at Anfield on Tuesday (kick-off 8pm GMT; 4pm ET).

Neves impressed during the home leg against Liverpool (Geoffroy Van der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images)

If Neves is looking for personal motivation, he could do worse than watch a couple of replays of that gilt-edged chance he had in the first half at the Parc des Princes, scuffed into the floor and over the bar when it looked easier to score.

It was a reminder that Neves could still do with adding a few more goals to his game. He is, for all the justifiable excitement, not quite perfect. Not yet, anyway.

Time is very much on his side. Neves is still only 20. He has so much runway ahead of him, so much sky to climb into.

“Joao has always been able to overcome his limitations with his intelligence,” says Gomes. “I’m really happy for him; happy that he is achieving his dreams.”

Castro, too, is enjoying the show. “I’m certain he will be one of the best midfielders in the world,” he says. “Actually, no. I think he already is.”

Other contributor: Liam Tharme

(Top photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)