What’s Wrong With Brazil?

Football form is cyclical. The powerhouses—whether nations or clubs—have successful runs followed by periods of shrinkage and failure. Like the market where the bull and the bear are never far from each other. Sometimes great teams are built from scratch and they go on to win everything or almost everything, powered by a constellation of talented players, coaching strategy as well as a system working at near-perfection. The Spain that ruled world football for the six years of 2008 to 2014 was one such national side when they were practically unplayable for their opponents. It lasted as long as the players could deliver and their rivals could not break the system. And then, it all went away.

A near-equal example is Manchester City under Pep Guardiola which, after winning six of the last eight Premier League titles, a Champions League, and several other trophies are finally exhausted, the best players gone or too jaded, the ‘System’ well and truly broken. Like Spain in 2014, it’s the end of an era of brilliant and beautiful football. A new model will need to replace the machine that is grinding to a halt. Perhaps an even bigger example is the crisis of German football where Die Mannschaft crashed out of the last two World Cups in the first round. But German football is the victim of generational and societal factors and it’s not a precise example of a single period of greatness of a team with a more-or-less intact core coming to an end.

If City are not the same without Rodri in the middle, the same could be said for the current Spanish team that are back at the top of world football with their triumph in Euro 2024. But City without the injured Rodri are a lot worse and last month’s second-leg 3:1 defeat to Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu was the moment that definitively ended the eight-year run of this City team. In both these cases, the coach’s personality and role have been paramount. The glory of Vicente del Bosque’s Spain was as much the coach’s and Luis de la Fuente has resurrected La Roja after a decade. Guardiola’s teams are all about his system and he makes changes to it periodically when something doesn’t work anymore. Perhaps not this time at City without new players. On the other hand, a series of coaches hasn’t been able to restore the pride of the Mannschaft.

Which beings us to the case of Brazil. Brazilian football is perhaps in its deepest crisis ever and it’s got little to do with the absence of Neymar. Brazil have now gone 23 years without a World Cup and by the time of the 2026 tournament the gap will be as big as the one between their triumphs in 1970 and 1994. But they are unlikely to win next year in North America even if they qualify, which they will given that most of South America will be there at the expanded World Cup, with six teams qualifying automatically and the seventh having a chance in a play-off. That’s six/seven out of 10 teams on the continent. It’s hard to see Brazil not making it, sitting at No 4 on the qualifying table as of now.

And yet, something broke on Wednesday, March 26 when Brazil were humiliated 4:1 by Argentina in Buenos Aires. The Seleção haven’t beaten the current World Champions in six years. Coach Doravil Junior—a decent man who had done remarkably well in the domestic league but was out of his depth on the international stage—has been sacked. The question is who will replace him and how quickly can the new coach turn things around. Because Brazil’s malaise, like Germany’s, runs deep albeit for purely footballing reasons.

A little perspective. It’s easy to forget, given Brazil’s current state, how good they were just in the last World Cup in Qatar when they seemed well on their way to winning the trophy till a nasty deflection from Bruno Petković in the quarter-final against Croatia took the match to penalties and they lost. A few minutes earlier, the world was celebrating a moment of unadulterated Neymar magic of genuine Brazilian pedigree.

And here’s the irony: unlike City, the Seleção are not a team of ageing and tired players dependent on Erling Haaland to score. It’s still a very talented squad. But one which hasn’t been able to make things work, having forgotten what a midfield is. Doravil Jr will take the blame undoubtedly since he had made the team look disjointed on the pitch. Indeed, how often does one see a Brazil team that cannot move the ball down the pitch?

Brazil have been running on the autopilot of individual talent since Tite’s exit—the one homemade national coach in a long time who seemed to understand football as it is played today and had a semblance of strategy to boot. That brings us to the real crisis in Brazilian football—it’s not just the bureaucracy and the lack of ideas in the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF). The country simply isn’t producing coaches capable of making world beaters out of football’s instinctive magicians. The most successful coaches in the domestic league are foreign; in fact, Argentinian. The last coach to win Brazil a World Cup was Portuguese. Across the border in the south, they had had a similar problem not so long ago but then even a cerebral coach like Marcelo Bielsa, one of Guardiola’s gurus, had spectacularly failed in 2002 when Argentina came on as favourites but exited the World Cup in the first round. But Argentina have hit gold with Lionel Scaloni who, at 43, made them World Champions after 36 years and has since claimed his place as one of the best in the business. It’s hard to remember the shambolic state of affairs under Jorge Sampaoli as recently as the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

Brazilian football needs a lot of things to fix it. Player talent is not one of those. But a decent coach is top of the list. Carlo Ancelotti knows Brazil are desperate but he is more than comfortable at Real Madrid, especially now that Los Blancos have demolished the one team Ancelotti feared the most. A brilliant coach needn’t be a big name to start with as Scaloni’s success with Argentina shows. But Brazil have a temperamental problem too—Doravil Jr’s failure extended from strategic and tactical incoherence to psychological mismanagement. A defeatism has set in now and a big name, synonymous with rethinking football might be the answer. Perhaps Ancelotti’s opposite number at City whose English creation is passing from twilight into night? But one doesn’t see Guardiola taking the job, till the other day the most thankless in world football when Brazilian expectations were always high. They need someone to make a winning team out of Vinicius Jr, Raphinha, Paquetá, Rodrygo, et al again.

Brazil would simultaneously need to rethink football and institutionally rebuild. They have fallen behind in ideas. The biggest tragedy of world football was Telê Santana’s team of Sócrates, Zico and Falcão not winning the World Cup in 1982. They didn’t in 1986 either and are still reaping the consequences, perhaps never more so than right now. For, they did win in 1994 and again in 2002, with the 1990s making Brazilian football ‘European’ by breaking its natural flow. Brazilians still hate the change but as the detested Sebastião Lazaroni, the 1990 coach, would say: it’s better to play ugly and win than play delightful football and lose. The antithesis of Santana’s football philosophy. It didn’t work in 1990 but in a perverse vindication of Lazaroni, the one match in which Brazil broke his rules and played their natural game—thereby delighting fans at home and across the world—was the second-round defeat to an Argentina they had dominated till a Maradona pass was put in the net by Claudio Caniggia, the Albiceleste’s only real chance that day. The score should have been 7:0 in Brazil’s favour.

Lazaroni’s shadow over Brazilian football must disappear. They are now playing ugly and losing.

Brazil need to turn the clock back a little. A critical failure of Doravil Jr’s time at the helm was the midfield collapse and a near-complete disruption of Brazilian fluency, the process having begun in the 1990s but now producing no compensatory trophy. Brazil need to return to instinct and play a lot more of their old game even as they show more respect to the mathematics that is modern football.

They may have suffered their worst defeat in a qualifier but a neat qualifying record rarely ends with the World Cup trophy. In 2002, Argentina had pulverised opponents to be the first to qualify for the tournament only to fall in the first round. Brazil, in contrast, had almost failed to make it, with newspapers across the world headlining the likelihood of a World Cup without Brazil. They went on to win. In 2022, they were the first South American team to qualify. In 2018, they were the first team in the world to qualify. We know how far those campaigns went. Argentina didn’t have easy qualification campaigns for those same tournaments and made it to the 2018 edition thanks only to a Brazilian victory and a Chilean defeat at the last minute.

Brazil remain the only team to have played in every single World Cup. Their place in the 2026 edition is more or less guaranteed. But they have to find their way back to the top of world football. A generation has grown up without seeing them there.

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