Neymar Slashes the Tires on Teammate's SUV in Retaliation for Shoe-Tying Prank

You remember when you were younger and you'd get to pranking your friends or colleagues with stupid, funny stuff like putting toothpaste on their face or, in later years, messing with their keyboard at work? Retaliation was always swift and unexpected from them, which only made the gag funnier.

Regardless of whether you're still into pranks or not, you will probably agree that Neymar's response to one was – at the very least! – exaggerated. There's funny, and then there's deliberate destruction of property, which is never funny.

Renan Lodi and Neymar Jr. are both in Saudi Arabia right now, the former basking in the glory of having been named the Saudi Professional League champion and the latter still in recovery from an injury.

Neymar has been sidelined for almost eight months, so Lodi's prank involved tying the shoelaces on his trainers. In a ranking of the world's most surprising or offensive pranks, the tying of shoelaces is at the absolute bottom. In fact, it's a staple prank that anyone from kids to adults must've done at least once in their life. It's the prank you pull when you don't feel like racking your brain at all to come up with something better, and virtually anything else you'd come up with would be better.

Neymar's response was to slash Lodi's tires – all of them, based on Lodi's post.

The whole thing played out on social media as banter between mates, with Lodi even joking that he'd be keeping an eye out for Neymar's Rolls-Royce. There's also video (below) of Neymar popping the front tire on Lodi's white Genesis GV80 and a later photo showing the mid-size SUV propped up on jacks, completely wheel-less.

As far as his public reaction goes, Lodi didn't seem specifically bummed out by the way Neymar blew the prank out of proportion, escalating a harmless joke this way. This might feed speculation that Neymar didn't really pop the tires, which could be backed up by the fact that you don't really see him do it.

That said, even if you're inclined to give Neymar the benefit of the doubt unless there's a whole other story we don't know behind this (like, the tires were already busted and in need of being replaced), it looks like Neymar really did it. It's true that you can't see the knife going in, but you can hear air hissing out, and you see the effort it takes for him to puncture the tire once more.

No wonder then that the football legend is now being trolled online for overreacting, much like a 3-year-old would when pranked in a way that he thinks is not funny. Tit for tat is fair game in pranking, but slashing tires over tied shoelaces is not it.

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