Few countries enter every World Cup expecting to triumph. Brazil does. This doesn’t mean everyone in our nation, Latin America’s largest, thinks we will win every four years, but the general expectation is that we should. Since achieving independence from Portugal in 1822—and, in some ways, even before that—Brazilians have had lofty ambitions on the world stage. Despite its massive size and abundant natural resources, however, our country has consistently fallen short of reaching the global power status it has long hoped for. Except in soccer.
The sole country to have qualified for every World Cup since the tournament began in 1930, Brazil is also the only one to have won five times. Pride in these glorious feats is counterbalanced by enormous, often unreasonable levels of sustained pressure that casts defeat as civilizational failure. In 2014, for example, the traumatic 7-1 loss to Germany (at home, no less!) quickly became a national shorthand for everything from political crisis to daily misfortune, collapsing the boundary between a sporting loss and broader social breakdown. Each tournament carries not just the weight of past victory, but the burden of reaffirming a national identity so often expressed through the success of the seleção—the national team or, more literally, “the selection.”
Brazil enters this Cup in relatively dim spirits. It has not lifted the trophy since 2002, a drought that feels longer than it is in a country where the median age is roughly thirty-five. As ESPN’s Gabriele Marcotti wrote last year, “it’s the sort of run that breeds failure, toxicity and self-doubt.” For a time, it even seemed possible Brazil might fail to qualify for this year’s tournament altogether. (It ultimately won the fifth of six guaranteed slots reserved for South American nations, accumulating the same number of points during the qualifying round as Uruguay and Paraguay, nations whose populations are roughly sixty and thirty times smaller respectively than that of Brazil.) The current crop of talent inspires little enthusiasm and the usual self-confidence is conspicuously absent in conversations about the team’s prospects.
In response, the Brazilian Football Confederation made the controversial decision last year to appoint its first foreign manager in six decades: Carlo Ancelotti, a suave Italian with a sterling track record at the European club level. Ancelotti’s challenge is not merely technical. He must essentially perform a kind of exorcism, dispelling the many doubts looming over the seleção and, by extension, restoring belief in the nation itself.
Brazil could use a shot of optimism. The country’s democratic life in recent years has been struck by its own crisis of confidence, reflecting in large part the heated ideological polarization that has become the norm in large pluralistic societies the world over. Since the return of democracy in 1985 following two decades of military dictatorship, Brazil has enjoyed both economic stabilization and institutional consolidation. It elected governments of differing partisan hues who transferred power peacefully, delivering long-term policy gains that improved the lives of millions.
In 2013, things took a turn when millions of Brazilians took to the streets to express a generalized dissatisfaction with the status quo. Driven in part by popular anger at FIFA’s spending demands ahead of the 2014 World Cup, as well as a generalized sense that the country had stalled, what started as a localized protest over a fare hike in São Paulo morphed into a national outcry that reshaped the country’s politics. “New demonstrators brought new demands—better schools and healthcare, less corruption and police violence—into the mass movement, which could be read as fundamentally progressive,” journalist Vincent Bevins, who covered the mass convulsion on the ground, wrote in his 2023 book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. By targeting most of the leading figures of the country’s political establishment, the outburst instead set the stage for the far-right outsider candidacy of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.
As president, Bolsonaro did much to unsettle Brazil’s democratic order. He even set about trying to overturn the result of the 2022 presidential election, which he lost to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro failed, but his folksy authoritarian example looms over Brazilian politics, raising doubts about the solidity of the country’s institutions should Lula lose reelection this year.
For Brazil’s modern democracy, as for the seleção on the pitch, past success no longer seems to guarantee a positive outcome. Notions that were once taken for granted—that democratic institutions were solid and that the seleção was a world beater—are now stressful and contingent, subject to reversal and doubt. To be fair, it’s not as if Brazil has arrived at every World Cup in perfect harmony. There are always multiple stars on the team, with distinctive personalities and approaches to the game. Great squads are rarely without friction.
What is missing is a coherent collective identity. Without one, there is no compelling narrative for Brazilians to latch onto.
On paper, this year’s likely squad is hardly bereft of talent, but there is little sense of how the potential pieces fit together into something greater. Neymar’s status remains very much in the air, with questions about his work ethic and transcendent ability more pronounced than ever. Vinícius Júnior and Raphinha, undeniably gifted wingers, have yet to translate their club successes into a convincing partnership on the world stage. Players such as Bruno Guimarães and Gabriel Martinelli excel in their respective roles, but niether has emerged as a decisive force. What is missing is a coherent collective identity. Without one, there is no compelling narrative for Brazilians to latch onto.
Part of the issue lies in the evolution of the global game. European teams, in particular, have combined organization and technical refinement in ways that neutralize the famously expressive style historically associated with Brazilian soccer (the 7-1 drubbing at German hands made this brutally clear). The romantic image of the seleção as a free-flowing, improvisational force has given way to a more constrained reality in which structure and discipline often trump individual virtuosity.
So what to expect from Brazil in this tournament? The most honest answer is uncertainty. A deep run is entirely plausible. The individual quality in attack alone ensures that Brazil can overwhelm lesser opponents, and in knockout tournaments, moments of spectacular inspiration can make all the difference. At the same time, against well-organized teams, cohesion, the quality perhaps most lacking in this generation of Brazilian players, often proves decisive.
That same sense of uncertainty extends beyond the pitch. This is an election year in Brazil, and Ancelotti’s test is not so different from the one facing politicians selling their future plans for the nation. A recent poll showed only twenty-eight percent of Brazilians approve of the job he has done so far, the lowest standing for any seleção manager heading into a Cup in the twenty-first century. The aura of inevitability that once surrounded the seleção has faded. For a country accustomed to seeing its national team achieve its highest aspirations, learning to live with the prospect of sustained failure may be the most difficult adjustment of all. But if Ancelotti can temper expectations without extinguishing the country’s restless ambition, Brazil may rediscover something of its older, quieter self-assurance: the confidence that it still belongs among the global elite, that it might once again serve as an example to the world.