I’ve tallied all the votes from the lengthy nomination period, and I am pleased to announce the complete bracket of the greatest Brazil goals of all time, as chosen by you. (You can also check out the spreadsheet I made that lists every goal that was nominated.)

I won’t make you make any longer to start the voting: the first round of votes, to determine which four goals from youth sides are included in the main bracket, is further down the page. You can scroll straight down there if you want; otherwise, I’ve got a few bits of info about the bracket and takeaways about the goals nominated to share with you all.

About the format and seeding

• In the comments to my last post, we all submitted goals we thought were worthy of consideration. Goals for any Brazil national football team, men’s or women’s, at any age level U-17 or higher, were eligible. I asked people to upvote goals they thought were worthy.
• The bracket is seeded, first and foremost, according to the total number of upvotes. (I counted the submission of a goal as a vote in and of itself, which I didn’t make clear earlier. Some people upvoted their own submissions to make sure their voices counted—in those cases, I counted their vote once.)
• If goals were tied in votes, I generally tried to award the higher seed to the goal that happened in the bigger game, prioritizing games in tournaments over friendlies, and games in the later stages of tournaments over games earlier on. If that wasn’t enough, the more recent goal generally got the nod.
• There are a handful of exceptions near the bottom of the bracket, where I gave some goals a higher seeding simply because I liked them more and thought they’d been undervalued in the initial voting.
• There was something like a 30-way tie in votes for the last two spots in the bracket, so I just went with two goals I particularly liked: Willian’s volley against Colombia in 2018 and Formiga’s goal against Germany in 2008. Let me know if you object to this.
• Goals from U-23 level and below are seeded at the bottom, even if they got more upvotes. This means that a couple of really nice goals are likely to get flattened in the first round when they go up against the very top seeds, despite getting enough votes to land them squarely in the middle of the seeding. We can discuss changing this; today, we’re only voting on which of these “16 seeds” make the final 64-goal bracket.

A few takeaways from the submission process

• Here’s who appears in the bracket most often. Romário and Ronaldinho were the two most-nominated players, each with six goals nominated, but Romário gets the edge by having five goals make the bracket to Ronaldinho’s three. Following them up in the nomination race are Pelé, Marta, Zico, and Bebeto, who each had four goals nominated. Pelé has the distinction of seeing all four of his nominated goals make the cut.
• “Unknown Player” is this bracket’s assist king. Due to age and poor video quality, it was hard to determine who provided the assist on many of these goals, and on many of the volleys, free kicks, and solo goals, there simply wasn’t any assist given. But among the players I was able to identify as giving an assist, the clear leader is Neymar. All four of the nominated goals he assisted made the bracket, as did both of the ones he scored himself. With two assists both making the cut, Pelé also has a 1:1 being nominated/making the bracket ratio. In total, each scored or assisted six of the goals in this bracket, more than anybody else.
• Romário was so fucking good. Watching all these goals gave me a new appreciation for just how unbelievably gifted O Baixinho was on the field. It’s not just that he’s scored more bracket-worthy goals than anybody else; it’s the incredible diversity of the goals that made the cut, showcasing a mix of skill and audacity few players throughout history have ever matched. There are a couple of incredible dribbles through tiny spaces in the box, there’s a smart first-time finish, there’s a laserlike volley from the edge of the box, there’s even a flying backheel. It’s truly tragic that ill-timed injuries kept him from starting in more than one World Cup. Had he been fit in 1998—and maybe 1990 as well—we might be talking about Brazil as six- or seven-time World Cup winners by now.
• We did Garrincha dirty. Yes, he’s hurt by having only 12 goals for Brazil and playing in an era before every game was filmed, but we nonetheless slept on gorgeous strikes like this one and this one. Not a single one was nominated, let alone features in the final bracket. He doesn’t even get the consolation of having an assist be nominated, even though this one quite possibly saved Brazil’s 1962 World Cup hopes from dying at the group stage. I even looked at some of these goals during the nomination process; I don’t remember what moved me to not include them.
• I have a new theory about what we’re missing these days. Watching a bunch of old highlight videos to find forgotten goals meant I watched a lot of footage of Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and Adriano in their pomp, and what stood out to me was the sheer confidence and audacity behind many of the goals they scored. Not only were many of their finest goals hit first-time or on the bounce, they were often absolutely smashed (take, for instance, Ronaldo’s goal in the 1999 Copa América final), as if they were so sure that they could put the ball on target that they put as much power in the shot as possible just to make extra-sure the goalie couldn’t get on it. Adriano stood above them all, capable of absolutely staggering power and accuracy from seemingly anywhere in the box (even if neither of his goals in the bracket really fit that description). I think the Brazil of today is desperately missing players of that sort. We have players capable of great precision, like Neymar, but he rarely marries that with great power unless he has a lot of room to wind up. We’ve recently had players capable of immense power—I’m thinking particularly of Hulk, but as we know all too well, the composure necessary to use that power effectively always left him when it mattered.
• Is Bebeto Brazil’s most iconic number 7? When you picture Brazil’s number 10 shirt, you picture Pelé wearing it. The 9, probably Ronaldo; the 11, most likely Romário. Beyond that, at least for me, the picture starts getting a little fuzzy. Cafu’s tenure at right-back was extraordinary, yet amongst such an extraordinary collection of right-backs, he hardly claims sole ownership of the number 2 in my mind. Ditto Roberto Carlos on the other side with the 6, Sócrates in midfield with the 8, anyone else you care to name. And yet Bebeto, despite wearing the 16 in two of the three World Cups in which he participated, comes readily to mind when I think about the number 7. Maybe it’s that he wore it in several other major tournaments, including the 1989 Copa América. Maybe it’s that he wore that number for his cradle-rocking celebration, which surely ranks alongside Pelé in Jairzinho’s arms as one of the most iconic images in the Seleção’s history.

But that’s enough talk for now. It’s…

TIME TO VOTE!

Here are today’s matchups:

Two goals from the same U-17 game

These two goals came from the same U-17 World Cup quarterfinal. They got enough upvotes to be comfortably in the bracket, but they were nominated in the same comment, so rather than try and determine which goal would get which upvotes on their own, I figured I’d include both and just pit them against each other here.

Video of both goals is here (it’s one of those that prompts you to Watch on YouTube if you embed it). The link will take you to Weverson’s goal; Paulinho’s goal follows it at the 1:20 mark.

Two goals near the end of comfortable wins

There’s not much more of a connecting thread here than that. Maicon’s solo goal capped off a 3-0 win over Paraguay in the group stage of the 2004 CONMEBOL Pre-Olympic Tournament:

Adaílton performed this juggling act late in a 10-3 win (no, really) over South Korea in the group stage of the 1997 U-20 World Cup. It was the last of his six(!) goals in the game. (That whole campaign has to be one of the strangest in Seleção history. Brazil scored 10 goals in two consecutive matches, and scored more goals in their first four games than any other team has across the entirety of a U-20 World Cup, as far as I know, only to subsequently get shut out against Argentina and crash out in the quarterfinals. I’d love to explore it in more detail one day.)

Two goals from a long way out

Oscar’s goal in extra time completed his hat trick—at the time, making him only the second player after Geoff Hurst to score a hat trick in a World Cup final at any level—and clinched a 3-2 win over Portugal to win the 2011 U-20 World Cup. Once again, it’s an official FIFA video, so you have to watch it on YouTube.

Before he began struggling with his weight, Walter showed some real promise, including this super long-range effort against Paraguay that opened Brazil’s campaign in the 2009 South American U-20 Championship.

Two goals in games where Brazil scored five goals

Ronaldo, playing with the Olympic side in the buildup to the 1996 Games in Atlanta, scored this goal to round off a 5-1 friendly win over Denmark.

Cássio’s goal opened the scoring, and the floodgates, as after a scoreless first half Brazil ultimately won 5-0 over Mali in the group stage of the 1989 U-20 World Cup.