Neymar is now a member of Barcelona, but one of the teams that was rumored to have interest in the Brazilian was rival Real Madrid. Barcelona club president Sandro Rosell recently confirmed that Madrid was involved in transfer talks with the player and fought to the end to obtain Neymar's services.
"When we reached an initial agreement with Neymar's father, the player had already passed a medical with Madrid, so we joked we would not bother with our own check-up," Rosell said according to Goal.com. "When we were signing the contract, Madrid were sending emails to Santos."
In the end the Brazilian opted to play alongside Lionel Messi at Barcelona; however, the start to Neymar's career in Barcelona has not been all that it was initially cracked up to be.
Despite being seen as the Robin to Messi's Batman, Neymar has found himself on the bench for most of the early going this season. He did not touch the pitch during the first half of any of Barcelona's first three matches this season and was unable to get a chance to play alongside Messi in that span. He eventually got his chance to start alongside Messi in the second leg of the Spanish Super Cup against Atletico Madrid but was unable to conjure any magic alongside Messi. The two created a ton of magic in Barcelona's 3-2 win over Malaga in the third week of La Liga and Messi wound up with three goals in the game.
While Barcelona was able to land a superstar forward, Madrid ultimately landed winger Gareth Bale but is relying on the likes of Karim Benzema and youngsters Jese and Alvaro Morata to provide offense up top. So far, the experiment has yielded mixed results with Benzema scoring twice in one of three matches thus far.
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