Well, that’s enough time off. Tite and co. have returned to work after winning the Copa América, which means it’s time for me to speculate recklessly about what the next steps are for the Seleção.

I already recapped the highs and lows of the campaign in my last article, and the question now is, where do we go from here? Before the tournament, there rumors that Tite was unhappy that several of his key staff were leaving to pursue opportunities in Europe, and that this might lead to his resignation. But Tite approved of the new faces the CBF brought in to replace his departing staff, particularly Juninho Paulista as the new coordinator of national teams, and combined with Brazil’s victory in the Copa itself, it appears to have been enough to convince him to stay on.

Nonetheless, it feels like turning over a new leaf. The Copa was likely the last hurrah for the bloc of older players who formed the core of the 2018 World Cup team, and Tite will have to familiarize himself with new faces both on the roster and within his own staff in order to prepare Brazil for the 2022 World Cup.

So, what sort of questions are on Tite’s to-do list in the months and years ahead? Well…

Who stays and who goes?

Globo has long reported that, in part because the 2022 World Cup is held in November and everyone has a bit more planning time, Tite and his staff always intended to prioritize this summer’s Copa América as a must-win tournament and then begin integrating the next generation afterward. Eight of the twenty-three players in the squad (including Willian, a last-minute replacement), were over the age of thirty, and Globo suggests that this summer was the last hurrah for most of them. The regular starters are still likely to be carried over; this means Thiago Silva, Dani Alves, and perhaps Filipe Luís, though the queue of younger talent waiting for a crack at the left-back spot may mean he has lower odds of staying on. Personally, I think keeping any of the older players besides Silva and Alves would be really pushing it—and I would begin thinking about dropping Silva to the bench, not because he’s no longer good enough to start, but because it’s time to start seriously thinking about younger players more likely to be able to partner with Marquinhos in Qatar.

Dani Alves, though? He finally, finally, came good for Brazil with a Golden Ball-winning campaign. If he can do so well at 36, maybe he can hang on a few more years. But it is definitely time to start seriously testing replacements, simply because of the age factor, and that presents a new problem. Alves did so well partly because Brazil finally set up in a way that let him use his considerable playmaking skills without leaving him exposed. Not many other right-backs have his skill on the ball, so Tite will either have to find one who does or adjust his system to accommodate one with a different style.

How to handle the stars in trouble?

Brazil’s two biggest names right now, Neymar and Philippe Coutinho, are both stuck in very awkward situations with their clubs that may eat into their playing time this year. Barcelona do not want to keep the out-of-form Coutinho, but they also want to recoup some of the 120-plus-million Euros they spent on him originally, which means they haven’t found any buyers. They tried to offload him on loan to a Premier League club before the English deadline day, without success, and now it’s not clear where he might go, only that he won’t get to play very much if he stays.

Neymar, meanwhile, is in a much thornier situation. He and PSG seem to have tired of each other and he wants to leave, ideally back to Barcelona. Problem: PSG want to make back the €220 million they spent to buy him, and Barcelona had trouble finding half that much cash to sign Antoine Griezmann. Oh, and they just signed Antoine Griezmann, so bringing in Neymar would either force out one of Barça’s other attacking stars (almost certainly Luis Suárez) or make them sacrifice all their defensive stability in order to field the most potent attacking quartet on the planet. Plus, he’s under fresh tax evasion allegations in Spain, plus, there’s bad blood there over a €25 million bonus Barcelona allegedly refused to pay him, plus, didn’t he leave the club originally because he was tired of being in Messi’s shadow?

None of it makes much sense, and neither do the recent rumors of negotiations with Real Madrid, though in that case it’s mostly because Real have already spent €200 million on Eden Hazard, Vinícius Júnior, and Rodrygo, all players who can play in Neymar’s position. I’m personally holding out hope that the murmurings of interest from Juventus are true; he’d get to play under a very good coach in Maurizio Sarri and link up with Cristiano Ronaldo, which would be really fun.

The point is, it seems unlikely that Neymar will actually leave PSG this summer. And if he does end up staying, I’m worried. There’s bad blood there now, and PSG are absolutely petty enough to put their entire season at risk by freezing him out of the team in retaliation. I know this because they did it to Adrien Rabiot last year after he refused to sign a new contract.

So what happens to Brazil if Neymar and Coutinho stop playing for their clubs? Again, Coutinho’s situation is probably simpler. After a Copa América where he was given free rein in Neymar’s absence but struggled to consistently influence games, I’d have to think that it wouldn’t take much to see him relegated to the bench or dropped altogether. Neymar, though? He’s essentially undroppable when not injured, but if he’s stuck on the bench for too long, at what point does he fall out of match fitness? Or, if PSG makes him suffer the indignity of playing with the under-23 squad to keep up his fitness, how much pent-up frustration is he going to want to let out every time he puts on a Brazil shirt, and what might that cost us?

Hopefully none of this plays out, and both players end up in a situation where they play regularly, but if not, Tite’s considerable skills as a man-manager will be put to the test.

What to do about next summer?

Another big question revolves around the Tokyo Olympics next summer.

First of all, Brazil’s qualification is far from guaranteed; CONMEBOL will host a tournament in January to determine who will play at the Olympics. The format has yet to be announced, but the last time this tournament was held, the ten confederation teams were split into two groups of five and then the top two from each group qualified for a four-team second round, from which only the top two went to the Olympics. You may recognize this as basically the format of the South American U-20 Championship, where Brazil has recently struggled badly, in part because the mid-January date makes it unlikely that European clubs will release eligible players, and a larger proportion of our good young players play in Europe than, say, Venezuela’s do. In all likelihood, we’ll have a similar dilemma this January, having to put together a grab-bag of U-23 players that likely won’t include any of our eligible stars. Vinícius Júnior, Gabriel Jesus, Richarlison, Lucas Paquetá, David Neres, Éder Militão—they all meet the age criteria for next summer and they’re now all Copa América winners. If we make it to Tokyo, we can field a truly menacing lineup. But there’s no way that any of these players’ clubs would let them leave for a month in the middle of the season for the qualifying tournament.

Tite, for his part, will have a selection problem for at least the next five months, possibly more. He’ll want to start incorporating in more players from this Olympic generation, but he’s going to have to decide whether each player is better served by getting a crack with the senior Seleção or helping the U-23 squad get to the Olympics. And if we qualify for the Olympic tournament, he’ll have to decide which players to take to the Copa América and which to let go to Tokyo. A few players played in both tournaments in 2016, but that year, there was over a month between the final of one and the start of the other; this time, there’s twelve days, during which players will have to cross the Pacific Ocean and adjust to a twelve-hour time difference. Tite, and maybe as many as a dozen players, would have to make some tough choices.

(Oh, also, the U-23 team is still without an official coach, even though André Jardine did a very good job with the side at the Toulon Tournament. That’s okay! We’ve still got five whole months until things start really mattering!)

What players might come in, anyway?

Glad you asked! To be perfectly honest, I’m basing much of this on Globo’s reporting about which players Tite and his staff are interested in trying out and which teams they’ve been watching recently. I’m also going to pass over a few of the slightly older players who might earn a chance soon but are also more of a known quantity and/or have played very recently for Brazil—Fabinho, Lucas Moura, Alex Telles, those guys.

That said, here are a few names that have been floated around…

Vinícius Júnior: The most obvious choice. There’s no way he’s not getting a chance before the end of the year, even if he’s yet to recapture the form he was displaying at Real Madrid before his injury.

Gabigol: He was part of Tite’s initial Brazil squad, right before he began the tenure at Inter Milan that almost sank his career. Back in Brazil with Flamengo, he’s very much righted the ship over the past year, and has been on a red-hot streak since the league resumed play after the Copa América. Nine goals in ten games make him the league’s clear top scorer, and Tite was in the stadium for his two-goal display that rescued Flamengo against Emelec in the Copa Libertadores round of 16. He’s more of a second striker than a center forward, which is fundamentally the same problem that’s dogging Roberto Firmino in a Brazil shirt right now, and that might drag him down. I think he’s a fairly solid bet to get a call-up sooner rather than later, though.

Pedro: The Fluminense striker was part of Tite’s first squad after the World Cup, only to immediately be sidelined for months with a serious knee injury. He’s back, and in decent form for a sputtering Fluminense side, but I do get the sense that Tite’s personal bias weighs heavily on this one. He’s always liked the player, despite not seeming to care much about similarly gifted players like Willian José or Matheus Cunha. Indeed, at the recent Toulon Tournament, Cunha was the far more impressive striker, scoring a tournament-high four goals while Pedro never found the net. Given that Cunha’s club is more likely to keep him out of the Olympic qualification tournament than Pedro’s, it’s especially odd that Pedro seems far more likely to get a chance with the senior Seleção first.

Rodrigo Caio: The star-crossed center-back remains one of the most gifted tacklers I have ever seen, but after suffering a spate of injuries and falling badly out of form, the door may have closed on a move to Europe. Still, he was part of a fantastic partnership with Marquinhos at the last Olympics, and Tite has long admired him, so he’s likely to get another shot.

Renan Lodi: Having just been signed from Athletico Paranaense to fill Filipe Luís’s shoes at Atlético Madrid, it’s very possible that the 21-year-old is about to be given the chance to do the same for the national team. Luís was a starter for about half the Copa América, but lost his spot to Alex Sandro after getting injured, and between that, his age, and the fact that there is such a backlog of talent waiting to get a chance at left-back, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve seen the last of him in a yellow shirt. I don’t know much about Lodi, but I seem to recall that our very own thinkingplague doesn’t think very highly of him. Either way, it strikes me as a bit odd that we might be passing over a slew of quality players born in the seven years between him and Alex Sandro. (Alex Telles, at the very least, deserves more than the single game he’s played for Brazil.)

Bruno Guimarães: I am being brutally exposed here for having watched very little of Athletico-PR in the past year. There’s a ton of hype around this defensive midfielder, rumor has it he might reunite with Renan Lodi at Atlético Madrid in January, and he’s definitely on Tite’s watchlist, but I really don’t know much of anything about him.

Léo Pereira: Ughhhhhh. Now I really wish I’d watched Athletico-PR more than once in the past year. Pereira is 6’2″, a center-back, and just barely too old to make the age cutoff for the Olympics, and with Tite observing him so recently, he might get a chance with the first team before long.

Hey, where are all the right-backs?

I honestly have no idea. The left-back pipeline continues to overflow with exciting young talent, and yet there are, like, no right-backs out there who look like they could inherit the position from Dani Alves. (Juventus do have the 19-year-old, delightfully named Wesley Gasolina, but he’ll need a little while longer to be ready for the big time.)

But actually, everything I’ve seen of Éder Militão suggests that he has a ton of potential as a marauding, Maicon-style fullback—indeed, perhaps more potential as a fullback than as a center-back, which is where Tite and Real Madrid seem to think that he’s most useful. Even if they were to have a change of heart, he would perform a very different function to Alves. It might be a necessary change, but I doubt Tite will immediately want to change the team’s functioning so drastically. If there’s another right-back on his radar who can do something more like what Alves does, he’ll likely get a shot before Militão.

Regardless, under no circumstances should we assume that Alves will still be able to play at a high level, or at all, in another three years. The time to start looking at potential alternatives is now, while we have a few low-stakes friendlies.

What players should be monitored in the coming months?

Here are some other players that might be worth keeping an eye on even if their names aren’t being thrown around in reference to the very next callup:

Douglas Luiz: There’s been some hype around Luiz in the past, but two consecutive failures to get an English work permit, and thus two seasons on loan at Girona, put a real damper on expectations there. At the third time of asking, he’s finally been let into the UK, joining the newly-promoted Aston Villa. After a summer in which he was voted the best player at the Toulon Tournament, he’ll hope to prove that he is indeed a genuinely high-class midfielder in more than flashes. If he does, Manchester City will be tempted to trigger the buyback clause they inserted in his contract.

Wesley Moraes: Wesley adds further Brazilian flavor to Aston Villa, who are now of more interest to this blog than at least three-quarters of the teams in the Premier League. Having previously played in the Belgian league, England could be a daunting step up for the striker, but if he finds success, the fact that he’s a 6’3″ striker is sure to get him interest from both bigger clubs and the Seleção very soon.

Joelinton: Joelinton’s another new face in the Premier League (Newcastle spent a club-record £40 million on him) who’s appealing for being a big, physical forward. He’s got good technique and can move all over the front line while still being effective, but Newcastle are clearly looking to him to replace the departing Salomon Rondón. I fully expect it won’t be enough (not through any fault of his, but more because they lost Actually Good Coach Rafa Benítez and replaced him with mediocrity artist Steve Bruce), but I wouldn’t be surprised if Joelinton does well enough to get a shot with a larger team when the Toon are inevitably relegated at season’s end.

Gabriel Martinelli: I wasn’t going to include him in this list, because he’s not quite ready for the big time; he’s 18, he just made a giant leap from third-tier Brazilian team Ituano to Arsenal, and I figured there was no way he would get any sort of substantial playing time this season. That may still be the case, but he just made a 10-minute cameo in Arsenal’s first official game of the season, so it might be that he gets the chance to shine before the end of the year. A dark horse to make the Olympic team, I’d say.

Léo Duarte: Like Léo Pereira, he’s a center-back born in 1996. Unlike him, he doesn’t seem to be the focus of immediate attention from Tite’s staff despite just completing a move to AC Milan.

Luiz Felipe: The Lazio center-back recently rebuffed interest from the Italian national team, saying he’d prefer to play for his country of birth. I’ve seen reports that he’s on Tite’s radar, and he’s of Olympic age, so it may be that he’s being groomed for that in the short term. If that’s not the case, he may run out of patience if Brazil doesn’t come calling before long.

Matheus Henrique: He’s been mentioned as a possible choice for the Olympic team next year after playing in the Toulon Tournament this summer. Supposedly the folks at Grêmio see him as Arthur’s successor. I don’t know much about him otherwise.

Are we ever going to play a European team?

I think I speak for everyone here when I say that Brazil is not well served by playing European opposition so infrequently. During the month of the 2018 World Cup, including the warm-up friendlies, we played against five European teams, which is as many as we’ve faced in all other games since the start of 2015. That’s not likely to change any time soon, as we’ll be busy with CONMEBOL World Cup qualifying during every FIFA date in 2020 and 2021; there’s another Copa América next summer which will make it impossible to travel to Europe for friendlies in June; European teams will be busy for their part with Euro and World Cup qualifying; and the Confederations Cup has been formally abolished, meaning we won’t get a chance to face off against France or the Euro 2020 winner.

Logistically, the upcoming FIFA dates in September, October, and November might represent the last chance to play European teams before 2022—albeit with a very limited selection, since Euro 2020 qualifiers will be happening that whole time and only a handful of nations from five-team qualifying groups will have a day off. Naturally, the CBF has not shown any particular initiative to make this happen. They were quick to book a September tour to the United States (to face Peru and Colombia) and another trip to Saudi Arabia to face Argentina in November (because if they didn’t have a problem with appearing as a public showcase for the Saudi regime right after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, why would they a year later?).

That leaves October as the only potential time, and by my reckoning that leaves us with the following selection of teams who are free on either the first or second matchday of the international break:

Matchday 1:

  • Germany. Hopefully negotiations to schedule this friendly are the reason we haven’t heard anything about October friendlies.
  • Serbia. One of the better available teams, but also one we recently beat comfortably at the World Cup.
  • Azerbaijan. There’s enough oil money there that I could see this happening if Germany falls through.
  • Kosovo. I doubt Serbia would be very happy if we did this.
  • Gibraltar. At the very least, they seem to be marginally better than San Marino.

Matchday 2:

  • Czech Republic. i.e., the only European team we faced the last time we tried to schedule something like this.
  • Denmark. The best team we could play that we haven’t faced in the last 18 months.
  • Northern Ireland. Got very close to the last World Cup on the back of a very tight defense, so they might be a decent test.
  • Slovakia. Only a decade removed from their only World Cup appearance.
  • Luxembourg. They drew France that one time, so that’s something, right?

We’ll have to see if anything comes of this. Playing Germany and Denmark or Northern Ireland would be a reasonable use of our time. Much else would be a waste.

In conclusion…

Tite has the benefit of a very strong foundation to work with, but he has a lot of work to do in the coming months. Brazil’s next games are friendlies against Colombia on September 6 in Miami and Peru on September 9 in Los Angeles. After that, we have the October and November friendlies I detailed above, and then the winter off before CONMEBOL World Cup qualifying starts on March 23, 2020. That’s six games to address all these questions and begin overhauling the team before things start to really matter.

We won’t have to wait long to start getting some answers. Tite will call up the squad for the September friendlies this Friday, the 16th. That’ll be our first real indication of just how much is going to change over the next year. (Update: Well, partly. With the Copa do Brasil semifinals wrapping up on September 4, no players from the four teams involved—Grêmio, Athletico-PR, Internacional, and Cruzeiro—will be called up.) Until then, we can speculate away.