On July 1, 2006, I was nine years old and bored out of my mind as Brazil fought to defend its 2002 World Cup title. We were playing France in the quarter-finals. School was out for winter break, and my parents had rented a house on the coast of São Paulo with some friends. Everyone sat around the television, glued to the screen. By half-time, the game was stalled at 0-0. My mother had lit votive candles everywhere. Clutching the collar of her blue away jersey, her whole body tense, she kicked me out of the house. My indifference to the outcome of the game was evidently jinxing the team. I was what Brazilians call a pé frio: a cold foot, a harbinger of bad luck. But Brazil lost even in my absence. When I came back inside, the atmosphere in the house was funereal. My mom, who grew up playing volleyball, was in the habit of reminding us that the single most important strength you could have as a player is sportsmanship. Losing was an inevitable part of playing the game. Against my better judgment, I reminded her of her own motto. “It’s just a game,” I said, then beelined back to the yard when I saw the look on her face.
In Brazil, of course, the World Cup, to say nothing of football, is never just a game. Ahead of the 2006 tournament, Brazilians were confident we could win it all. Our status as favorites had been cemented with a cathartic 4-1 win over Argentina at the Confederations Cup in 2005, and the national team, coached by Carlos Alberto Parreira, was counting on what the press and public nicknamed the quadrado mágico: Kaká, Adriano, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho Gaúcho. We had earned the fifth star above the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) crest with many of the same players four years earlier, when Ronaldo inspired millions of football-obsessed boys across the country to shave their hair down to a triangle on top of their head in imitation of his hairstyle. It was a visible demonstration of the power of Ronaldo Fenômeno.
Now, two decades later, sports journalists tend to agree on what happened between 2002 and 2006: Ronaldo got ultra-famous, ultra-rich, and ultra-out-of-shape. Cafu and Roberto Carlos, the mercurial fullbacks, fell into a similar pattern and, along with Ronaldo, were put on a leave of sorts for lacking intensity in the lead-up to the World Cup.
Still, by the time Parreira announced the seleção, the certainty that we could win the sixth star had possessed even the hard-partying players, who were heartily welcomed back into the fold. That the magical quartet had never actually played together was insignificant: They were the world’s brightest talents at the very top of their game; it seemed impossible that it wouldn’t work out. Ronaldo’s comeback would be a triumph, and combined with talented younger players, we would prove, yet again, that through football Brazil could harness enough soft-power to present itself as a strong and capable nation.. The World Cup, after all, is where Brazil goes to be taken seriously.
About two weeks before Brazil won the Confederations Cup in 2005, a special congressional committee was formed to investigate accusations of rampant corruption in Congress. A video had surfaced that depicted a director of the federal postal service negotiating bribes on behalf of the television-host-turned-congressman Roberto Jefferson. Indignant that he was the only one catching heat, Jefferson took to the press and named several other congressmen involved in the scheme, detailing the minutiae of what came to be known as the mensalão: a multi-party arrangement in which some officials belonging to President Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party (PT) paid a monthly sum to elected officials in exchange for political support. At the time, the PT was struggling to cement a solid base in Congress. To avoid having to dole out cabinet positions, the government’s solution, evidently, was to offer some congressmen an allowance that would guarantee their alignment with the government’s goals.
A political soap opera ensued. The first time Jefferson testified in front of the special committee, he showed up with a black eye, claiming that he had simply fallen at home. In mid-June, about a week after the first accusations went public, José Dirceu, Lula’s Chief of Staff, resigned from his cabinet post and resumed his seat in the lower house of Congress, to which he’d been elected in 2003. A month later, the most indelible image of the mensalão reverberated on every newspaper, magazine and news broadcast: José Adalberto Vieira da Silva, a PT official, was arrested at São Paulo’s Congonhas airport with one hundred thousand dollars hidden in his underwear. In addition to that sum, he carried nearly ninety thousand dollars in a more traditional vehicle –– a suitcase –– which he maintained were the profits of sales he had made at the Ceagesp, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler in São Paulo; he alleged he was a farmer.
The whole mensalão process, from Jefferson’s first public accusations to the final judgment by the Supreme Court, which sentenced 24 government officials and private contractors, dragged on for nine years. José Dirceu went home with an ankle monitor in April 2014, a few months before our next great World Cup disappointment and in the early stages of yet another corruption scandal that would embroil much of Brasília.
When Brazil’s national team won its third star in 1970, the team’s success was repackaged as “proof” that things were fine, prosperous even, as an increasingly violent military dictatorship tightened its grip on the country. Two years prior, the military instituted the AI-5 decree, which legalized the regime’s use of torture and the practice of disappearing “subversives” — anyone ranging from an active political opponent to a student with a beard deemed to be too long.
In 1970, General Emílio Garrastazu Médici, the country’s dictator, loved football and made sure the national team knew it. He had an obstacle in João Saldanha, the team’s coach, who had come up in the world of professional football through journalism. Saldanha was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, and his refusal to drop, conceal or reform his ideas when he came to represent a country under siege by right-wing authority was so striking that it earned him an epithet in the press: João Sem Medo, Fearless João. It was surprising, to put it mildly, that he had been hired at all –– the CBF, back then the Brazilian Sports Confederation (CBD), worked in conjunction with the Military Sports Commission –– but Saldanha was good. He guided the star-studded team through their undefeated run in the qualifying rounds.
A year earlier, Saldanha had hit a breaking point when his longtime friend, the Marxist revolutionary Carlos Marighella, was assassinated in São Paulo. In Mexico for the draw of the World Cup groups in early 1970, Saldanha distributed a dossier to international authorities that detailed the regime’s torture and assassination tactics –– fearless João indeed. General Médici tried to meddle in his team, campaigning to have a player known as Dadá Maravilha included in the squad, but Saldanha refused. He was fired in March, two weeks before he was to arrive in Mexico for the tournament. Saldanha was replaced with former-all-star Zagallo, and the team’s staff was reformed to include military officials. Major Roberto Câmara Lima Ypiranga de Guaranys, one of Médici’s trusted crooks and a torturer according to the National Truth Commission, was put in charge of security.
Brazil, we like to say at home, is the country of the ready-made joke, a place where irony and absurdity are the organizing principles of life. In the same way the law of gravity determines that anything that goes up must come down, in Brazil anything that looks bad is actually worse. According to the sports journalist Breiller Pires, Dadá Maravilha later revealed that the then-president of the CBD, João Havelange, told him he had fired Saldanha on Médici’s instruction. Havelange would go on to have a long and storied career as FIFA’s president, in which capacity he “built soccer into a multibillion-dollar international enterprise,” per his New York Times obituary, and accepted, along with his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira, millions of dollars in bribes from advertising firms. Havelange resigned from both an honorary FIFA presidency and the International Olympic Committee, of which he was the longest-serving member, before any corruption charges could be substantiated. He lived to be 100 years old. Teixeira stepped down from his post as the head of the organizing committee for the 2014 World Cup, hosted in Brazil.
By the time the 2014 World Cup came around, I was about to graduate high school. I was as indifferent to football as ever. My only interest in the event was that school was either canceled or let out early on the days Brazil was playing. For a whole month, school entered that suspended state usually reserved for the last week of classes before summer break. We were allowed to ditch our uniforms for jerseys, and even the teachers seemed distracted.
I’d been at the same school since the fifth grade. It was founded by German expats and kept a strict curriculum geared toward discipline, workmanship, and polyglotism. That’s how I found myself in a house full of German kids on July 8, 2014. As Providence would have it, Brazil was playing Germany in the semifinals that afternoon. I wasn’t paying attention to the game, preferring to study the air that my boyfriend breathed. We were at his house, and his family was hosting a German exchange student, a wide-eyed, easily impressed kid named Jan who thought everything about Brazil was interesting. Still, there was no ambiguity on who everyone else was supporting: save for Jan, kids with last names like Müller and Schmidt were in their yellow and green jerseys.
I noticed something bad was happening because Galvão Bueno’s legendarily long gooooaals became shorter, recurrent, and incredulous. Eleven minutes into the first half, Germany scored their first goal. They scored again in as many minutes. In six more minutes, they scored three more goals. At half-time, the score was shocking: Germany five, Brazil zero. No one knew what to do with themselves, least of all Jan, who sat quietly in a corner, as if it was all his fault. During the half-time break, I called my parents, who were at the stadium, worried about my mother’s cardiovascular health. The connection was unstable. My parents’ disbelieving faces glitched on the screen, but the sound in the stadium came in loud and clear: it was silent. The ref blew the whistle and the game restarted. Germany scored two more goals, ten minutes apart. It became clear that the German players were holding back from scoring to spare the Brazilians their last reserves of dignity. Brazil scored a single goal at the ninety minute mark. No one said a word. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw tears rolling noiselessly down my boyfriend’s cheek. I was moved myself when, after the game was over, the defender David Luiz gave a post-match interview. He could hardly speak. He said, “I just wanted to give my people something to be happy about. My people suffer so much.”
We were suffering then, again at the hands of a greedy government. Operation Carwash, the biggest corruption investigation in the history of a country that has been corrupt from the day a scorned Portuguese royal declared our independence, was in full swing. The president was Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s protégé and a former anti-regime militant. It was another bad blow for PT, the worst they ever had. Some of the images of the mensalão repeated themselves, as if the ninth circle of corruption hell was sponsored by Calvin Klein: Nelma Kodana, a money changer targeted by the investigation, was arrested trying to leave the country with 200,000 euros in her underwear.
The federal police discovered an arrangement through which executives of the state-owned gas company Petrobrás teamed up with construction firms to embezzle public funds. The most infamous of the investigated firms was the behemoth Odebrecht, which offered Petrobrás executives money in exchange for contracts. The numbers in these contracts were inflated to account for the share each party would take home: the executives in both the public and private sectors and the money changers responsible for laundering the whole mess. The infrastructure demands of hosting the World Cup, which Brazil hadn’t hosted since 1950 –– that year, we lost to Uruguay in the finals at the brand-new Maracanã, another historic disappointment –– offered the firms a perfect opportunity to apply the same scheme to the building or renovations of stadiums nation-wide.
Where Brazilians saw an opportunity to finally conquer our sixth star and prove on a global stage that we were a country of some validity and seriousness, the Dick Dastardlys of Brazil only saw dollar signs. Odebrecht executives testifying in court named politicians and city officials in nearly every state touched by the World Cup. In Rio alone, the former governor Sérgio Cabral –– who was convicted in the Operation Carwash sweep for several crimes –– pocketed over six million reais in dirty money from Maracanã renovations, which were contracted to the private sector in a move that resulted in protests. An Odebrecht executive later testified that the president of Rio’s Court of Audit, Jonas Lopes, accepted one million reais in February, 2014, to approve the contract. He was supposed to get three more installments for a total of four million, but Operation Carwash got in the way.
Every four years since I developed a conscience, Brazilians rally at the hope for the hexa. Every four years, my mom reminds us: The game doesn’t end until it’s over. It’s been a little more than a decade of turbulence since the 7-1 loss to Germany, whose effects on the culture are impossible to overstate. The defeat felt collective, as if the whole country had been on the field. It left a scar so profound, “7-1” has entered the lexicon as a shorthand for a general feeling of humiliation or defeat; “Another 7-1,” a person might groan on getting home after a tough day at work.
In 2018, the yellow-and-green colorway was co-opted by Bolsonarism, which sucked all the joy and pride out of wearing the jersey. Our usual World Cup euphoria deflated like a balloon, with many of us feeling disinclined to cheer for a country that was making a mockery of itself. In the next tournament year, 2022, Lula was reelected by the skin of his teeth in the tightest election since the country’s redemocratization in 1985. I voted for him at the Brazilian Consulate in New York, an inconspicuous building on 41st Street, a few long avenue blocks from a concentration of Brazilian markets and stores some wishful thinkers like to call Little Brazil. In front of the consulate, people lined up on either side of the street. A wall of yellow and green jerseys was offset by a wave of PT red.
People at home have taken to asserting that Brazil is “in,” which is to say, it has lately become a fashionable destination for traveling Americans. At least as far back as Pelé, only music rivaled football in terms of significant Brazilian cultural exports. Over the last couple of years, the green and yellow jersey, which had come to signify downright fascistic sentiment at home, became a recurrent sight in downtown New York, worn tight and cropped by American girls. In summertime, I marveled at the amount of Havaianas flip-flops I saw on the subway, elegantly paired with expensive jeans and manicured toes. Instructors at my gym routinely play bass-heavy Brazilian funk to pump up their students, who squat and press and jump to the most sordid lyrics imaginable. In Brazil, it’s become common to remark on the new presence of gringos everywhere, the proliferation of English menus in restaurants. Gringos like football now, I heard. They call our game joga bonito. My sister explained that it’s how they describe our blend of irreverence and talent.
Many Americans are sick of America. The culture is trickling up. For the past two cycles, Brazilian films entered the awards race in the United States with some force. Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here took home Best International Feature at the Oscars in 2025; Fernanda Torres won a Golden Globe for her starring turn. It made sense that I’m Still Here would be the film to briefly lift Brazil onto the global film stage; Walter Salles has been making sleek Hollywood pictures for years. It’s much harder to explain the success Kléber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent found among international audiences. It’s a dense film steeped in hyper-local Brazilian references; I missed some because I grew up in the southeast. When Mendonça Filho was asked whether he feared his localisms would alienate international or even domestic audiences, he shrugged his shoulders. It was not his problem.
The unexpected success of our cinema abroad gave Brazilian people another tournament to cheer in, another reason to wear the jersey. We didn’t win, but we showed up with characteristic enthusiasm. Much has been made out of the Brazilian passion for rooting, the fervor with which we claim this or that artifact –– a football team, a movie, a tennis player, a half-Brazilian model –– as a treasure, a source of pride. It’s a national pastime to be a fan. “Come to Brazil” is what the Internet hears us say, but what we mean is here we are, hoping desperately someone will notice. In a country so used to neglect, every last drop of attention feels vital. Look here, come close, pay attention, we plead. We are a people disappointed, battered, robbed blind. The beauty of the landscape is a slap in the face, an affront daring us to give up on these mountains and beaches, the dense, ancient rainforests, and deep long rivers, the freaky animals and insects, and colors that defy explanation. The funny, warm people. We come home like abused lovers, our tails in between our legs, swearing this time things will be different, this time we have learned. In another year, it’ll be Carnaval again. Brazilian cinema will continue to thrive. Democracy will work; Bolsonaro will stay in jail. Brazil will win the hexa, Brazil will win the hexa, Brazil will win the hexa.