The Beautiful Game’s Beautiful Problem
Twenty-four years. That’s how long Brazil will have gone without lifting a World Cup by the time 2026 arrives. For context, that’s longer than Pelé’s entire career, longer than the gap between their first title in 1958 and their third in 1970.
But here’s the question worth asking: Did Brazil forget how to be Brazil? Or did football evolve past what Brazil represents?
Consider the 1970 squad. Every single player contracted to a Brazilian club. Not just playing there, but formed there, thinking in Portuguese, dreaming in samba rhythms. When Pelé, Tostão, Jairzinho, and Rivelino rotated positions like a jazz quartet trading solos, they were speaking a language learned on the same streets, refined on the same training grounds, understood in the same cultural frequency.
Even the pragmatic victories—1994 under Parreira, 2002 under Scolari—maintained this essential Brazilianness. Yes, they had European-based stars. Cafu and Roberto Carlos brought Italian tactical discipline, Ronaldo carried Spanish finishing instincts. But the core remained domestic. In 2002, goalkeeper Marcos played for Palmeiras, Kleberson for Atlético Paranaense. The team’s tactical compromises were Brazilian compromises, authored by Brazilian coaches who understood which rules to break and when.
Fast-forward to the 2024 Copa América: Of 26 players, exactly four played in Brazil. Four. The rest scattered across Europe’s leagues like a diaspora without a homeland.
Modern Football’s Perfect Storm
The numbers tell a story of economic inevitability. FIFA’s 2024 Global Transfer Report logged 78,742 international player movements. Brazil leads the world in exports. Between 2003 and 2023, Brazilian clubs generated £4.9 billion from player sales.1 You don’t refuse that money. You can’t.
But here’s where it gets interesting: The age of extraction keeps dropping. FIFA’s Article 19 prohibits international transfers for players under 18, with narrow exceptions. So Europe does what capital always does: it finds the loophole. Sign them at 16, complete the transfer at 18.
The roll call reads like a generational heist:
- Vinícius Júnior: Deal at 16, Madrid at 18
- Rodrygo: Same blueprint, one year later
- Endrick: Agreement at 16, departure on his 18th birthday
- Estêvão: Chelsea deal at 17, another wonderkid pre-ordered like a video game
Compare this to Neymar, who stayed at Santos until 21, winning the 2011 Copa Libertadores, learning not just how to play football but how to be Brazilian while playing football. Five seasons of domestic seasoning before Barcelona.
Modern football has become dense with theory. The 2022 World Cup’s defining characteristic, according to FIFA’s own technical analysis, was the mid-block. UEFA’s Champions League reports obsess over pressing triggers, defensive compactness, rehearsed patterns.
This isn’t wrong; it’s just narrow. For Brazil, a footballing culture that once treated the wrong decision at the right moment as high art, this systematization is existential. When your forwards are raised from adolescence on European automatisms, when they’re taught to see space through German or Spanish eyes, what happens to the Brazilian gaze?
The beautiful game’s most beautiful practitioners are being reformatted before they’ve learned their native operating system.
Moving continents at 18 is a life earthquake. The casualty list grows:
Vitor Roque landed at Barcelona with fanfare, found himself loaned within months, later calling the experience “complicated.” Ângelo went from Santos to Chelsea to Strasbourg to Saudi Arabia in the time it takes most teenagers to finish high school. Deivid Washington, Luis Guilherme—young men with million-dollar price tags and nowhere to call home, professionally speaking.
This isn’t failure of talent. It’s the predictable outcome of asking teenagers to simultaneously navigate new languages, new cultures, new tactical systems, and the weight of being “the next Brazilian sensation.” When your entire national pool is experiencing this displacement, the aggregate trauma lands on the Seleção.
The Ancelotti Gambit
Which brings us to the unthinkable: Brazil hiring a foreign coach. Not just any foreign coach—Carlo Ancelotti, the Italian who manages like a Brazilian. After Dorival Júnior’s 4-1 cremation by Argentina in May, the CBF didn’t just change coaches; they changed philosophy.
Ancelotti represents something deeper than tactical innovation. He’s the anti-systematizer, the coach who famously adapts his system to his players rather than the reverse. His Real Madrid didn’t play one way; it played the way that made Vinícius and Rodrygo most dangerous. His Milan didn’t impose a philosophy; it liberated Kaká.
This is the wager: Can the most human of European coaches help Brazilian players remember they’re Brazilian? Can he create a space where European tactical discipline and Brazilian creative instinct coexist rather than compete?
His June debut (a 0-0 with Ecuador) offered no instant miracles. But miracles aren’t the point. The point is permission. Permission to take the extra touch, to attempt the impossible, to play football like it’s still a game rather than an algorithm.
Brazil’s crisis isn’t really about trophies. It’s about what happens when globalization’s efficiency meets football’s poetry. The market demands Brazilian teenagers leave before they’ve learned to be Brazilian. European academies teach them to play football as problem-solving rather than self-expression. The international game rewards the predictable over the inspired.
But here’s what the efficiency experts miss: Brazil’s gift to football was never just winning. It was showing the world that football could be more than sport. It could be art, could be joy, could be a form of cultural expression as distinctive as bossa nova or capoeira.
The 1970 team changed how humanity thought about the game. The 1982 team lost but left millions believing that beautiful failure meant more than ugly success. Even the pragmatic 1994 and 2002 victories carried traces of this DNA. Moments where discipline gave way to inspiration, where the system paused to let genius breathe.
Twenty-four years without a World Cup feels like crisis because Brazil measures itself against its own mythology. But mythology was never the point. The point was the thing that created the mythology: a way of seeing football that treated the ball as a dance partner rather than a problem to solve.
That vision hasn’t disappeared. It’s been displaced, scattered across European training grounds, diluted by tactical orthodoxy, priced out by market forces. But watch Vinícius run at a defender, watch Rodrygo find space where none exists, watch Endrick strike a ball with the certainty of someone who learned football is supposed to be joyful. It’s still there, waiting.
Ancelotti can’t resurrect 1970. Nobody can, nobody should. But if he can give these European Brazilians permission to occasionally be Brazilian Europeans. To treat their yellow shirts not as burden but as license, something interesting might happen.
The beautiful game needs its beautiful team back. Not for Brazil’s sake, for football’s.
- Equivalent to approximately €5.6b / $6.6b in transfer fees. ↩︎