As he rode his horse around his enormous country estate in the bright sunshine of the plains of central Spain, Miguel Ángel Gil mulled over the next step for Atlético Madrid. He had borrowed from investment funds and wealthy individuals to keep creditors at bay, and assembled a squad to win the club's first La Liga title in 17 years, but he was tired of the financial balancing act he had to perform. He wanted a longer-term plan. He looked enviously at Real Madrid and Barcelona, who could command huge television deals and sponsorships. They had annual revenue topping €500 million, more than three times what Atlético earned.

Barcelona, wowing football fans with attacking displays led by Lionel Messi and supported by Xavi Hernández and Andres Iniesta, had recently snagged a €30 million per year deal with Qatar to brand its burgundy and blue shirts with the Gulf state's name. Real Madrid was in talks with Abu Dhabi about the naming rights of its Santiago Bernabéu Stadium that would help finance a €400 million refurbishment, including a money-spinning hotel and shopping centre.

Even as the newly minted Spanish league champion, Atlético Madrid could not attract the backing of such rich allies because it did not have the big names that its bigger rivals had: players like Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The Atlético players were a bunch of outsiders, even if as a group they were formidable. Defender Filipe Luís described the team under the black-suited coach Diego Simeone as like the fictional motorcycle club in the Sons of Anarchy, a television series loosely based on the Hell's Angels. In the American crime series, the group of bikers have an unbreakable bond.

In Atlético's cast was assistant coach Germán Burgos, a former goalkeeper from Argentina who had once played in a heavy metal band. He even had his own nickname – “Mono” or “Monkey” – like the characters in Sons of Anarchy. His weight had ballooned since he quit playing for Atlético Madrid in 2004, after helping the team win promotion back to the first division. Lounging around in Madrid, he spent his days playing five-a-side football, with the occasional gig as a football pundit on Spanish TV. Simeone gave his friend a new lease of life, hiring him as an assistant first at Racing Club de Avellaneda in Argentina and then at Atlético.

So, how could Miguel Ángel Gil try to find another way to bring his loveable but motley crew into the money and wean the club off its reliance on short-term loans? He turned to two of the emerging countries that investment bank Goldman Sachs had coined BRIC nations: India and China. Seeing untapped potential in their combined 2.6 billion population, Gil began exploring ways to plant seeds that might one day bring Atlético Madrid the standing that Real Madrid and Barcelona enjoyed around the world. He opened talks on co-owning a football team in India and had started to make regular trips to China for discussions about how Atlético could help the government's plan to make the world's 97th-ranked national team a power in the sport. It was a project that would need months of careful diplomacy.

Like Real Madrid, Barcelona did not have to try so hard to get attention on the global stage. Barça was already an established brand, and by hiring star players could bring themselves tens of millions of euros in extra marketing revenue. For several years now the two superpowers had their eyes fixed on a young player from Brazil, who they realized could be a gold mine for them. The next Messi, or the next Ronaldo. Or even the next Pelé.

On a July evening in 2011, the football world's focus was on the Vila Belmiro Stadium in Santos, which appears little changed from the days in 1965 when a teenage Pelé lived in a dormitory under one of the stands. National-team coaches had arrived in Brazil ahead of the World Cup qualifying draw, as a 19-year-old footballer called Neymar went toe-to-toe with Ronaldinho, a two-time world player of the year famous for his hip-swivelling trickery with the ball and toothy grin.

Sporting a blond mohawk hairstyle that teenagers all over Brazil were copying, Neymar was a blur of energy and movement. He danced past six players before slipping the ball into the net. One of the moves was so rapid that it required slow-motion replays to understand just how he had done it. “Sensational” British football writer, Henry Winter, told his 1 million Twitter followers.

News of the boy playing for Pelé's former team had spread beyond Santos six years before. Like the goods loaded onto ships that set sail from the port city, Neymar had become a commodity that the biggest clubs in the world wanted. His agent Wagner Ribeiro had moved Santos's previous star, Robinho, to Real Madrid at age 21 for $30 million. The next year, Ribeiro took the 14-year-old Neymar to see the world's richest club.

When Santos found out, it became worried that Neymar, who it didn't yet have tied to professional terms, would sign as a free agent with the Spanish club. Santos executives contacted football lawyer Marcos Motta and asked him to warn off Real Madrid and alert the football authorities. “We said: listen he's a minor,” Motta said. “We called FIFA, we called the Brazilian football federation – we called everybody.” Real Madrid said Neymar was just visiting. Soon after, Neymar signed his first contract with Santos.

Like most clubs in Brazil, Santos could not match the wages top European teams were offering. So, when Neymar renewed his contract soon after signing an initial deal, his agent managed, as an alternative, to convince Santos to give Neymar 40% of his future transfer fee. It was not unheard of for South American footballers to receive the promise of a cut of their next transfer fee. It was a way for clubs to retain talent a season or two longer. FIFA allowed club executives to award players up to 15% of their own fees (in 2015, in an internal directive, FIFA effectively capped the amount at €1 million) – what was more unusual was for a player to bank a cut of his transfer rights before he was even traded.

But Neymar was not an ordinary player, and his agent Wagner Ribeiro knew it. “Wagner said I want 40% for the boy”, Motta, the Santos lawyer, said. “So Neymar got 40%.” Santos sweetened the deal by telling Neymar's father it had arranged an immediate buyer for the stake: supermarket chain owner Delcir Sonda.

Sonda's chain of 24 supermarkets in São Paulo was pulling in 2 billion reais a year and he had already paid a little more than €1 million to buy portions in the rights of a group of five other Santos players. As usual there was a tussle over the price he would pay. Neymar's father valued the stake in his son's transfer rights at 5 million reais, the equivalent of about €1.8 million. For some of Sonda's advisors that was too much for a 17-year-old, according to Eduardo Carlezzo, a lawyer who was working for Sonda. “Thousands of players that are great hopes when they are 16 or 17 end up not making it.” But in meetings at Sonda's offices in São Paulo, one thing became plain: Neymar's father, who led negotiations on behalf of his son, held all the aces in this poker game. Sonda agreed to pay the 5 million reais demanded and even came up with an extra $500,000 for Ribeiro, the agent. Neymar therefore become a millionaire while many of his peers were still at school.

A few years earlier, Neymar's father, who had the same given name as his son, had been juggling careers as a semi-professional football player and car mechanic. He shared a room with his wife, daughter and son in São Vicente, a satellite town close to Santos. Like many Brazilians, the family went to the local Christian Evangelical church. Although, at 12, Neymar lacked the strength and size of boys even his own age, he would outclass those who were several years older. One match at a church camp stuck out for the pastor's son, Newton Lobatto Netto. “There was a guy, he was a really good goalkeeper and Neymar just humiliated him,” he said. By then Neymar was already playing for the local boys' team at Santos. Antonio Lima dos Santos, a trainer at the club and once a teammate of Pelé, says he first saw the 13-year-old kid playing “futebol de salão” – literally meaning living-room football – an indoor game with a heavy ball where poise and quick thinking are more important than power.

Neymar was running rings around his rivals and making the game look so easy that Dos Santos felt the boy should be tested against older opposition. He suggested this to Zito, a one-time mentor of Pelé who had played with him in two World Cup-winning teams and was now a club director. “Zito told me I was mad,” Dos Santos recalls. “You can't do this. He's very skinny, very weak,” Lima recalls. Neymar readily accepted the challenge and flourished. Sometimes his confidence would spill over into arrogance and his coaches had to step in. “He could go over the limit,” Lima said. “But we asked him to correct it and he did.”

With Neymar reaching manhood, his father controlled one of the most appreciating assets in football. As soon as his son had agreed to sign professional terms, Santos offered him a five-year contract. Santos arranged a signing ceremony but, with journalists crammed into a room at the club's headquarters, the deal almost unravelled in a sign of the tumultuous nature of Brazilian football. “We arrived believing everything was set and that all that was left to do was sign the agreement,” Carlezzo, Sonda's lawyer, said. “Then the vice president of Santos started to claim ‘no we cannot sign this!’ He was red, red! I think he almost had a heart attack.”

“I turned to the president of Santos and said, if you agree to changes your guy is proposing we are not authorized to sign the deal. Then we are no longer buying this 40% and Neymar would not sign this five-year deal. The president turned to me and said we have to sign.”

The next day, Neymar made his professional debut for Santos, coming on for the last 30 minutes of a state championship game. He wore a jersey several sizes too big that hung loosely off his child's frame. Fans were already chanting his name before he came onto the pitch. His earliest touches had the crowd on its feet. “The boy set fire to the game,” said one report. Santos won 2-1. Neymar went on to score 10 goals in his first league season and 17 in the next, and there were more wealthy investors lining up for a piece of his future transfer rights. A group of wealthy Santos fans bought 5% of those rights from the club through Terceira Estrela Investimentos (“Third Star Investments”). Their 3.5 million reais outlay meant Neymar's perceived transfer value had soared more than fivefold in a year.

For supermarket owner Sonda and his investment advisors, the focus now was on continuing to cultivate a relationship with Neymar's father and trying, with his consent, to secure a big profit by promoting the idea of transferring Neymar to a top European team. Trips to Europe became commonplace.

Carlezzo says a Sonda executive told him of a meeting between Neymar Sr. and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich in London. Though Neymar was just beginning his career, his performances were such that Brazil coach Dunga started to come under pressure from sections of the media to include him in his squad for the 2010 World Cup. After all, wasn't Pelé just 17 when he helped Brazil win its first World Cup in 1958? In the end, Dunga left Neymar at home. Brazil exited the tournament with a quarter-final defeat to the Netherlands and Dunga lost his job.

Six months later, Neymar made his debut for Brazil in a friendly game against the USA to mark the opening of the Red Bull Arena in New Jersey. On the same day, Chelsea made an offer to sign him. “We had a meeting in the Hilton Hotel on Lexington Avenue” in New York, Motta, the football lawyer said. Seated in the lobby were a large group of interested parties: Neymar's father, his agent Wagner Ribeiro, Pini Zahavi, the Israeli dealmaker who knew Abramovich, a delegation from Chelsea and Luis Álvaro de Oliveira Ribeiro, the newly elected Santos president. “Neymar's father started to play his game, saying he might go or not. It will depend, let's see,” Motta said. “He started to realize he could get a very interesting contractual situation for the boy with Santos. He had control.”

Luis Álvaro ended the conversation quickly. He rejected the €35 million being offered by the Premier League team. While he tried to appear calm, he was spooked by Chelsea's push to sign Neymar immediately. He phoned officials back in Brazil to prepare a special career-plan programme designed to keep Neymar at the club for as long as possible. The plan included giving him English and Spanish lessons, specialist physical preparation and hiring him a wealth-management team.

Luis Álvaro also spent time trying to persuade Neymar to develop fully as a player before leaving for European football. Over a four-course lunch with the authors at his penthouse apartment in São Paulo that finished with lemon meringue pie, the club president used Brazil's ubiquitous “churrasco” (barbecue) as a metaphor to describe his point of view. “It's the same thing as putting a steak on the grill. If the meat is uncooked you have to leave it 10 minutes and then you'll have the best beef. Neymar was uncooked meat at 19 years old.”

Luis Álvaro managed to hold on to the teenager. Neymar led Santos to South America's top club competition, the Copa Libertadores, for the first time since 1963 when Pelé was in the team. Neymar had scored throughout the run to a two-legged final against Peñarol. He opened the scoring in the decisive second game, where a 2-1 victory clinched the championship, and was named man of the match. His bargaining position now stronger than ever, Neymar's father persuaded the Santos president to sign what some saw as a naïve agreement by the club allowing its star player to negotiate a future transfer with four years left on his contract and leave one year earlier than planned.

The licence to negotiate with other teams, set out in a brief one-page letter, meant the father could go to the market early to drum up interest and he subsequently listened to offers from Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. The end goal for the Neymar entourage was for Neymar to remain at Santos until the 2014 World Cup, when he and his sponsors – such as Nike, Red Bull and Panasonic – would capitalize on his profile before he moved to Europe.

Real Madrid was well aware of the array of sponsors that Neymar was attracting. The Spanish club had a policy of taking 50% of endorsement deals players signed, and for years had pursued high-profile players such as David Beckham to increase its income. José Ángel Sanchez, the club's general director who had signed Beckham in 2003, had a meeting with Sonda lawyer Eduardo Carlezzo in Madrid in late 2011. At about the same time, Real Madrid made a €45 million bid for Neymar but it was rejected, and the lawyer representing the supermarket chain owner was powerless to help push the move through. “I told Real Madrid we would be interested for the player to come to Real Madrid as well, but the influence Sonda has over Santos is near to zero,” Carlezzo said. Sonda's relationship with Santos had deteriorated because the club no longer liked the idea of outsiders sharing in Neymar's transfer fees, and had “started a war” with Sonda, Carlezzo said.

Real Madrid tried another front. President Florentino Pérez called his Santos counterpart while the Brazilian was taking the two youngest of his six children on a trip to France. Pérez offered to fly Luis Álvaro to Madrid for lunch. “I imagine you want to have lunch with me to talk about Neymar's rights?” Luis Álvaro said, recalling the conversation. “I said ‘don't waste your time and fuel on the plane because we have no interest in selling.’ What did he do? He got on his jet, flew to Paris and had lunch with me.” Over rack of lamb and potato gratin at Guy Savoy, one of the most exclusive restaurants in Paris, Álvaro told Pérez what he had told Chelsea: no sale.

Still, Real Madrid felt like it was making progress with Neymar's father. Motta even drew up a contract between the club and Neymar. The deal was to be done in top secret, though with time running out before a crucial meeting, Motta had to complete his work on the one-hour TAM airline flight between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. “I said to my assistant Stefano, let's go over the contract on the plane,” said Motta, an extrovert who sports dress shirts bearing his initials. “But we won't take the first page of the contract because you never know who's sitting next to you.”

The next morning at 5 a.m. he received a call on his mobile phone from a friend asking him if he'd seen that morning's O Globo newspaper. In the pages of the Rio de Janeiro-based daily, columnist Anselmo Gois noted: “Marcos Motta the lawyer of Neymar was on the TAM flight in the morning revising a contract between Real Madrid and the boy.” Motta thought back to who might have been looking over his shoulder on the flight. “There was a guy pretending to sleep, a kind of famous guy from TV and maybe he saw,” Motta said. “I was concerned about people behind us, not about this guy that looked like he was sleeping.” In the end, the draft contract wasn't needed.

Roman Abramovich had not given up wooing Neymar either. Michael Emenalo, a former Nigerian player who was Chelsea's director of football, flew to Santos to try again. He met Neymar in the port city and proceeded to deliver one of the best sales pitches Motta had ever heard. “It was the very first time that I saw Neymar's father listen to someone for more than 30 minutes without looking at his mobile,” Motta said. Emenalo told the story of the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan. How Chicago was not a big team, but together they evolved into international icons. Neymar could become Chelsea's Michael Jordan, Emenalo said. José Mourinho was about to return to the club as manager and he wants to sign you, the Nigerian added. “You are going to lead Chelsea to the top.”

Zahavi, the Israeli agent, was not far away from the action. He had called Motta to say that he was on his way to Brazil to sort out the transfer of a player he refused to name by phone. After arriving in São Paulo, Zahavi confided to the lawyer that the footballer was Neymar. There was a problem, Motta told him: Zahavi would be encroaching on the territory of Wagner Ribeiro, the player's agent. Motta arranged a meeting to try and reach a solution where Zahavi could be shoehorned into the negotiations. The meeting place was the Emiliano Hotel in Rua Oscar Freire, São Paulo's swankiest shopping street where boutiques pump perfume out into the street to lure wealthy Brazilians in to buy designer brands.

In the hotel's small lobby, the Israeli met with Wagner Ribeiro and representatives from Sonda and even Neymar's church to make a game plan. It was a noisy discussion, a real bagunça – “a mess” – Motta said. But eventually they agreed on an unusual compromise. Ribeiro and Zahavi would divide up representation of Neymar in Europe depending on their sphere of influence.

Also seeking a cut of any future transfer fees was the Milan-based agent Giovanni Branchini, who made an initial approach to Neymar on behalf of Bayern Munich. The more he met with his son's powerful suitors, the more money Neymar's father realized he could extract from them. He decided that whichever team wanted to sign his son would have to pay an upfront fee of €10 million, an arrangement that was unheard of in world football. And then, upon completion of the deal, his son would be due a further €30 million. Under the plan, if either side reneged, it would be liable to pay a €40 million penalty. Motta told Neymar Sr. it was a masterstroke. “I said: congratulations you are there. It's not a matter of money now. You can get the money you want from Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona or Bayern. It's time for you to look in your son's eyes and say where do you want to play, what makes you happy?”

Neymar's father, acting on the advice of his wealth advisors, took out an insurance policy to protect his son against paying €40 million in case he was seriously injured before his transfer to Europe. Barring a hitch, the former car mechanic had played the transfer market as effectively as any hedge fund.