Neymar scored a penalty against Norway on July 5, becoming only the second Brazilian player in history, after Pelé, to find the net in four different FIFA World Cup tournaments. Then he walked off the international stage for good.

The 34-year-old announced his retirement from international football following Brazil’s 2-1 round-of-16 loss, closing out a career that spanned four World Cups and produced nine tournament goals. It was the kind of moment that, just a few years ago, would have launched a thousand token presales. This time? Crickets from the official crypto world.

A career bookend worthy of its own highlight reel

Neymar’s World Cup journey started on home soil in 2014, continued through Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022, and now the 2026 edition. Scoring in all four puts him in genuinely elite company, sharing a distinction with Pelé that no other Brazilian can claim.

Where are the tokens?

Rewind to early 2022 and the vibes were very different. Neymar dropped roughly $1.12 million on two Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, instantly becoming one of the highest-profile athletes in the Web3 space.

Fast forward to his historic World Cup moment, and the crypto tie-ins are conspicuously absent. No official Neymar-branded token. No commemorative NFT drop. No blockchain-powered fan engagement platform riding the wave of his retirement announcement.

The contrast is striking. During the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the intersection of football and crypto was everywhere. Crypto.com had stadium naming rights. Fan token platforms like Socios were running at full tilt. Binance was a FIFA sponsor.

What does exist in the Neymar crypto universe is a scattering of unofficial meme tokens on Solana and other chains, the kind of low-value, unverified projects that pop up whenever a celebrity trends on social media. None of them have any connection to Neymar himself.

The sports-crypto cooldown is real

In 2021 and early 2022, athlete-backed crypto ventures were practically a weekly occurrence. Tom Brady launched FTX partnerships. Steph Curry bought a Bored Ape. Entire leagues experimented with fan tokens that promised governance rights and exclusive access.

Then FTX collapsed. NFT floor prices cratered. Those Bored Apes Neymar bought for $1.12 million lost the vast majority of their value, a fate shared by most PFP collections from that era.

The meme token parasites that inevitably spawn around trending names remain a persistent feature of on-chain culture, particularly on Solana where deployment costs are negligible. But the gap between an unofficial token riding a hashtag and a legitimate, athlete-endorsed digital asset has never been wider.