What Brazil’s early success at the Club World Cup says of its status as a football power

This is a public service announcement.

You may think that this Club World Cup is an American affair. You probably looked at the host cities, saw FIFA president Gianni Infantino glad-handing with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, noted the distinctive bombast of those grating individual player walk-ons, heard the U.S. anthem being played before each of the 32 matches so far.

Advertisement

All very American, fair enough. Hence your confusion.

But sorry, no. Appearances have deceived you. This is actually a Brazilian tournament. The rest of the world just hasn’t realised it yet.

First there are the demographics. 508 players took to the field in the first round of group matches. 70 of them — 14 per cent — were from Brazil. Argentina had 57 players on that list. Next was Spain with 26.

There are, granted, four Brazilian clubs in the U.S. this summer. But the reach of the diaspora is remarkable. There are Brazilians at Manchester City, Real Madrid and Los Angeles FC, but also at Esperance de Tunis and Urawa Red Diamonds, Pachuca and Al-Hilal, Ulsan and Mamelodi Sundowns. Some countries sell oil, grain or circuit boards to the wider world; Brazil exports footballers.

Igor Jesus celebrates Botafogo’s first goal against PSG (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

This, though, is only a footnote to the bigger story. The Brazilian teams have played eight matches between them. They have won six of them, drawn two, lost zero. Each tops their group after two rounds of games.

It’s not because they’ve only had easy fixtures, either. Flamengo duffed up Chelsea. Fluminense went toe-to-toe with Borussia Dortmund. Botafogo defrocked Paris Saint-Germain, the European champions and any rational person’s idea of the best team in the world right now. “No one has defended better against us this season,” an admiring Luis Enrique said after that match.

The results have been greeted with a mixture of humour and excitement in Brazil. “The Europeans are sending a petition to FIFA,” went one typically catty gag doing the rounds on Brazilian WhatsApp. “They want Vasco da Gama (the fourth of the big Rio de Janeiro sides) in the competition so they have a chance of winning.”

Writing in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, former Brazil international Tostao — usually a fairly sober observer of the game — allowed himself to dream, just for a sentence: “Can you imagine the euphoria and pride if a Brazilian team ends up becoming champion?”

Take a long view of history and this may appear quite normal. In the early 1960s, Pele’s all-conquering Santos side enjoyed back-to-back victories in the Intercontinental Cup, a competition established in 1960 to pit the European champions against their South American counterparts. Flamengo thrashed Liverpool in the same competition in 1981; Gremio and Sao Paulo (twice) also tasted glory.

Advertisement

When FIFA first dreamt up the Club World Cup in 2000, Brazil’s clubs thrived. Corinthians won the inaugural edition, beating Vasco in an all-Brazilian final,. The next two editions went to Sao Paulo and Internacional.

The years since, though, have been cruel. In 2010, Internacional were knocked out by Congolese side TP Mazembe. Santos were hammered by Barcelona a year later. Gremio, Flamengo, Palmeiras and Fluminense have all lost to European teams in the final. Before this current tournament began, no Brazilian club had beaten a European side in a competitive match since 2012, when Corinthians famously overturned Chelsea.

You could write a book on the factors underpinning that drift. The short version is that European football — the top leagues at least — left Brazilian domestic football behind in a number of areas, from commercialisation and investment to infrastructure and tactical innovation. It is no coincidence that Brazil’s last World Cup win came in 2002. Nor did the decline go unnoticed: lamentations about the growing quality gap were a staple of the Brazilian media for decades.

Ronaldo Nazario holds up the 2002 World Cup, Brazil’s last (Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)

Where, then, have the results of the past nine days come from?

In the first instance, a little context is probably due before we get too excited. Dortmund and Porto — held to goalless draws by Fluminense and Palmeiras respectively — are not great teams. Fluminense also made extremely heavy work of Ulsan. Flamengo fans were thrilled with the win over Chelsea but dedicated watchers of the Premier League may not have viewed it as quite such a coup. Even Botafogo’s result against PSG came with a minor caveat: Luis Enrique rested a number of key players.

None of which to say it isn’t an eye-catching pattern, or not worth zooming in on. Indeed, even those involved have been struck by the novelty of it all. “I’m surprised by these results,” Flamengo manager Filipe Luis said after the Chelsea match. “I know the quality of European clubs, especially the elite.”

Advertisement

There are three circumstantial factors at play. One is the climate: the Brazilian clubs are more accustomed to playing under a roasting sun. “We’re used to it,” Botafogo right-back Vitinho said last week. “I hope that it works in our favour.”

Another is that the Brazilian teams are midway through their season, which runs from January until December. The national league only kicked off at the end of March. Compared to the European sides, many of whom look exhausted at the end of a long campaign, there is a level of freshness there.

Motivation is also relevant. There has been scant evidence to suggest that the European sides are phoning it in, but are they committing to the competition with every last drop of energy? That’s up for debate. Rightly or wrongly, the Club World Cup is not currently seen as being on the same level as the Champions League or even domestic competitions.

For the Brazilian clubs, like many others from outside Europe, this is a priority. Even if they are just half a percentage point more motivated, it can make a big difference. “You can see the teams are playing every game like it’s a final,” Filipe Luis said on Friday. “That makes a lot of difference.”

There are wider trends at work here, too. Brazilian football has evolved a lot in the last 10 years, particularly behind the scenes.

A number of the country’s big clubs — Flamengo and Palmeiras in particular — have gone to great lengths to become more professional and stable. Their training facilities are every bit as good as those found at the best European clubs; their marketing departments have finally found a way to leverage the colossal fanbases that exist in a country as big as Brazil.

In 2021, Brazil’s government passed a law that introduced a new ownership model for the country’s football clubs, promising to make them more corporate, more sustainable and even — whisper it quietly — profitable. In has come foreign investment: John Textor, the co-owner of Crystal Palace, acquired Botafogo; Red Bull has put significant resources into Bragantino; the City Football Group added Bahia to its roster of clubs.

Advertisement

As recently as 15 years ago, most Brazilian squads were filled with players at the bookends of their career: youngsters destined for Europe and veterans in the twilights of their careers. The very best youngsters still leave but clubs can afford to sign and pay players in their prime. The 28-year-old midfielder Gerson, bought by Flamengo from Marseille for €15 million in December 2022, is the most obvious example of this trend but far from the only one

Nor is it just a question of quality. “You look at the Palmeiras squad and they have two or even three high-level players in every position,” Inter Miami coach Javier Mascherano said on Sunday, before his side’s game against the São Paulo side. “It’s the same with Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo. They have invested a lot of money.”

Alongside the spending has come greater openness to new ideas. A wave of foreigners has freshened up the local managerial scene, challenged old notions. Four of the past six Brazilian championships have been won by Portuguese coaches. Little wonder that public opinion over the possibility of a non-Brazilian manager of the national team softened considerably over that time frame.

Jhon Arias, age 27, has impressed for Fluminense (Hector Vivas/Getty Images)

The result of all this? Brazil has begun to dominate the Copa Libertadores, South America’s Champions League equivalent, like never before. The past six editions have been won by clubs from the Campeonato Brasileiro. Four of those finals were all-Brazilian affairs.

That might not be good for the overall health of the South American game. For Brazil, though, it’s a signal that they are doing something right. So too is the growing ease with which they are able to scout and sign youngsters from other South American nations. “They clearly have an economic strength that the rest of the countries do not,” Mascherano said.

The next step is unclear. There are some who see huge potential, just waiting to be harnessed by good governance, the right global TV deal. “Brazilian football looks like the next Premier League,” ran a headline in The Economist in December. Textor, the Botafogo owner, has been bullish in his championing of the Brazilian game.

Hurdles remain, however. The calendar remains bloated: the most successful teams play 70 or 80 matches a season, many of them in the outmoded, low-wattage state championships. This affects the quality of the football, as do poor pitches. Working conditions for coaches have improved but there is still a culture of short-termism and churn.

Advertisement

The Club World Cup, though, is providing hope that the chasm is bridgeable. Not even the most one-eyed Botafogo fan thinks her team is better than PSG’s. But maybe they’re not as far off as some would have assumed before the tournament began.

“I think there’s an elite in football, formed of eight or ten teams,” Filipe Luis, the Flamengo coach, said last week. “They’re far superior. Beyond that elite group, I think the Brazilian clubs are on the second rung.”

Renato Gaucho, his Fluminense counterpart, echoed that view. “There’s no way we can compete with the European teams financially,” he said on Saturday. “They can buy the best players and build incredibly strong teams. But football matches are decided on the pitch. The Brazilian people should be really proud of what our clubs are doing at this Club World Cup.”

(Top Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images)

Click here to read article