As life in football goes, it was just a workaday situation.

No more, no less. Two players wanted to take the same penalty, one of them did but failed to score and then the duo, probably back in the locker room, clashed verbally. It’s as old as football.

Some of these conflicts blow over faster than breath off a razor blade; some others, poorly handled, drag on.

Sometimes the press gets to know of them and, lacking bigger stuff, decides to pile it on. Just as commonly, the flare-ups are raked up years, even decades, later when autobiographies are ghost-written, especially if any of the combatants is an A-list celebrity.

Clever television interviewers too coax what are fashionably described as revelations, and they come usually marked by a stormy-teacup- long-ago note, ensuring buyers on both sides of the age divide.

But Neymar, in 2017, happens to be the world’s priciest footballer, quite evidently aware of the enormous power he wields by being a commercial totem in the new age of the game with an elite club’s commercial well-being and global ascent predicated on him.

Their jersey sales shot up the day the Brazilian stepped in. Their officials have to get on his good side, they have to keep him sweet. That, apparently, is what he was assured of when they called him over.

If Neymar made jaws the world over hit the floor when leaving Barcelona, he might now be dealing Paris Saint Germain’s morale a big blow by bullying Edinson Cavani into abject submission before, perhaps, pulling strings to have the bum’s rush given to him.

Damage-control apologies days after a bust-up imply little that should set the club’s fans dancing in the street. Here’s a player bigger than the club, if there ever was one. Cavani is a good frontliner whose profile, though, doesn’t equal his more illustrious peer’s.

With Neymar coming in, he is dwarfed. The poor man knew he didn’t stand a chance, and when the confrontation hit the headlines, he sounded so conciliatory you felt bad for him.

Neymar didn’t relent, though, and word was he wanted Cavani out of the club who, like a Hollywood mogul acutely alive to the need for his heroine to be allowed a little humour, were contemplating a winter sale. “Not true,” said PSG, adding: “Inside our dress-ing-room, the Dove of Peace is flapping its wings.”

Few people heard the sound of it, but the media abounds in spin specialists. The “mischievous” Spanish Press was accused of spreading anti-Neymar rumours.

If you read between the lines, however, you knew there was a fire behind the smoke, amid suggestions of a reconciliation being attempted. The smokescreen hardly sufficed to hide anything.

When the new wave recedes, football will be picking up the pieces.