We have an unusual treat during the prolonged period without any Brazil games: the first all-Brazilian Copa Libertadores final since 2006, and it’s even between two clubs from São Paulo. It’s almost like soccer’s version of the Subway Series! Except Santos is like an hour away from São Paulo proper and I don’t think you can get from one to the other by train.

2020/21 Copa Libertadores Final

Sociedade Esportivo Palmeiras vs. Santos Futebol Clube

Estádio Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, January 30, 2021

Kickoff: 3:00 PM EDT / 1:00 PM BRT / 8:00 PM GMT

US TV / Streaming: Bein Sports

Format: Single game, 30 minutes extra time and penalties if needed.

Before I go into a more in-depth preview, I’d like to make two things clear: one, I am a Santos fan, and I come from a family of Santos fans, and two, I haven’t watched or followed either of these teams very much this year. I would’ve made more of an effort to follow Santos closely if this run to the final hadn’t come basically out of nowhere.

Team Profile: Palmeiras

Palmeiras have been about as close to a consistent force as Brazilian football can have in recent years, emerging from a rocky start to the 2010s to become a powerhouse in the league with reliably one of the strongest squads in the country. As has become their custom, they’ve assembled an enticing mix of former stars and rising ones. There’s Felipe Melo, Luiz Adriano, Marcos Rocha, all past Brazil internationals whose best days are behind them. There’s Weverton, Lucas Lima, and Luan Garcia, called to the Seleção or the Olympic team more recently but never really establishing themselves. But most interesting is the club’s incredibly rich crop of young, homegrown talent. A few of these names should be well known by now. Versatile midfielder Gabriel Menino has already been called up by Tite as a right-back, though he has yet to see any game time; right-sided forward Gabriel Veron was the breakout star of the side that won the 2019 U-17 World Cup and the tournament’s best player, and has already scored three times in the Libertadores despite barely being past his 18th birthday. Less known are midfielders Patrick de Paula and Danilo, and left winger Wesley, all of whom have shone at various points during the competition, though unfortunately Wesley will definitely miss out through injury and Patrick’s fitness is doubtful.

Their path to the final has been rather more obvious than Santos’, in that they’ve thumped most of their opponents (they’ve won three separate games 5-0), either massively outshooting them or making the most of their superior quality from a similar number of shots. But then they faced River Plate, admittedly one of the strongest teams on the continent, in the semifinal. And they were so lucky to not be humiliated, let alone ultimately win the tie. River missed two point-blank tap-ins in the first 20 minutes of the first leg before Rony opened the scoring for the Verdão thanks to a subtle deflection, and added in a few more close calls for good measure before a deserved red card for Jorge Carrascal let Palmeiras grab the upper hand. Palmeiras emerged with a historic 3-0 away win out of something that could have been much more fraught.

Like the second leg. Palmeiras flirted with one of the all-time great footballing collapses—not just in almost choking away a three-goal lead at home, but in coming close to an unforgettable, Mineirazo-style demolition. River were already 2-0 up after 44 minutes, and that was before things really got ugly. Palmeiras utterly collapsed, barely proving capable of holding onto the ball in their own half. River thought they had their third goal just seven minutes into the second half, only for a lengthy VAR review to find a River player had come back from an offside position to play the ball much earlier in the buildup. Even another deserved red card for River couldn’t cool the temperature on Palmeiras’ meltdown; down to 10 men, River hit the post from three yards out and had two penalty shouts that looked stonewall in real time but were ultimately overturned by VAR. (Watch the highlights and tell me that at least one of those shouldn’t have been given.) The final stats were horrific: River had 23 shots, 11 of them on target. Palmeiras had just six, just one of those was in the second half, and none were on target. Weverton, making a case for his continued inclusion in the Seleção, was their only player who didn’t disgrace themselves that night.

So does this cast any doubts on their shiny new coach, the 42-year-old Abel Ferreira? Palmeiras got on the “hire a Portuguese coach because it worked so well for Flamengo” train fairly late, only bringing Ferreira on board at the end of last October. He’s only been in charge for the Libertadores knockout stages, and while his record there and overall is solid, he’s arguably benefited from facing relatively weak opposition. Delfín and Libertad were the two worst teams to advance on the knockout stage, based on their group stage record; in league play, he’s only 3-3-2 against sides currently in the top half of the table. It’s possible that he, or Palmeiras as a whole, got found out against a properly good team.

Oh also, Palmeiras are the favorite team of Brazilian president and criminal against humanity Jair Bolsonaro. And the team offered Bolsonaro a tacit endorsement in return by letting him celebrate with the players and lift the trophy when they won the league in 2018, as pictured above. So that’s cool.

Team Profile: Santos

Like, this really came out of nowhere. Santos have been an interesting beast since Neymar left in 2013, very firmly entrenched in the top half of the league table, and even finishing in the top three three times in the last five seasons, but rarely ever looking like they could get over the hump and actually win something more significant than a couple of Campeonato Paulista titles.

Keeping half an eye on the team as I usually do produced no real signs that they were capable of such a feat. They crashed out of the Campeonato Paulista in the quarterfinal and the Copa do Brasil in the first round, and they’ve spent the whole league season bouncing between fifth and tenth. Yes, they had an excellent record in the Libertadores group stage, with five wins and a draw, but they scraped each of those wins by a single goal (even against Delfín, who Palmeiras stomped 8-1 on aggregate in the round of 16) and even in the round of 16, they were sneaking through on away goals.

Plus, they’ve been in serious financial trouble that has recently meant they haven’t paid players’ salaries and have yet to complete payments to other clubs for various transfers, the latter of which currently has them in a FIFA-imposed transfer ban. As a result, this is a squad totally bereft of obvious stars. There isn’t a single Brazilian international in the squad, and even Yeferson Soteldo isn’t a consistent starter for lowly Venezuela. Instead, Santos have had to rely on products of their historically excellent youth system as well as cheap, obscure players. Their top scorer, Marinho, is 30 and scored double-digit goals this season for only the second time in his career.

But even their youth products are arguably not quite as impressive as the ones at Palmeiras. Most of them, like Lucas Veríssimo and Alison, are well into their twenties without ever having changed clubs. Of their younger players, 19-year-old Kaio Jorge is the obvious standout, and he paired with Gabriel Veron in that U-17 World Cup victory. But I’m not convinced that he has nearly the same potential. Though he’s Santos’ top scorer in this Libertadores, he’s also missed a fair number of very presentable chances, and while this is also true of Veron, Kaio doesn’t bring as much to the table in terms of dribbling or creating for others. Beyond him, 18-year-old midfielder Sandry is the most likely teenager to see playing time.

Much like Palmeiras, Santos’ coach is not the same one they had at the start of the season (Santos, amusingly, already got over their “let’s get a Portuguese coach” phase when they sacked Jesualdo Ferreira in August), but unlike Abel Ferreira, this is not Alexi “Cuca” Stival’s first rodeo. Cuca seeks to join the small, odd group of managers with two Copa Libertadores titles—a group that includes legends like Telê Santana but also footnotes like Paulo Autuori. He led Atlético Mineiro to the trophy in 2013, a team and a campaign that seems to have very little in common with Santos this season. On the team side, Atlético were even heavier on established stars and veteran talent than this year’s Palmeiras, with a 33-year-old Ronaldinho delivering his last great professional season, Bernard and Luan the only starters under age 28, and no fewer than nine current or former Brazil internationals in the squad.

Really, the only obvious similarity between the two squads is that they both relied on a man of the sort the internet has come to affectionately dub a “short king”. The five-foot-four-and-a-half Bernard was Atlético’s creative spark just as much as Ronaldinho was, and the five-foot-three Soteldo fills a similar role for Santos.

The two teams and campaigns have been just as disparate. I’ve been profoundly impressed with how thoroughly Santos have controlled their knockout ties, spending far more time in the opposing half and denying their opponents clear chances when they do get upfield through immaculate defending. In the knockout phase, they haven’t yet trailed a tie on aggregate, and have only conceded the first goal once. Cuca cuts an absolutely ludicrous figure on the sidelines, with his elaborate gestures, wild, thinning hair, monogrammed jacket, and undershirt depicting the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, but his team of undecorated one-club men plays with no fear or anxiety, almost like they haven’t been in enough games of consequence to know to be scared.

Atlético was a profoundly different story. After stomping their way through the group stage and round of 16, they went the rest of the way to the title without once leading a tie on aggregate. In three straight knockout rounds they came back from a two-goal deficit of one form or another, each time sealing the comeback with a miraculous last-second equalizer (against Tijuana, both a last-second equalizer in the first leg and a last-second penalty save in the second leg), and then won the tie on away goals or penalties. The nervousness, the wing-and-a-prayer attitude of it all, was palpable. Atlético players—and again, this was a team full of veterans and even World Cup winners—were so anxious during penalty shootouts that some vomited on the pitch. At the time, it felt like Cuca, whose aesthetic was mildly more subdued but who still prowled the sideline like he was impatiently awaiting God to do a little ex machina in their favor, was passing his own nervousness onto the players. With the benefit of hindsight, and of watching him bring another team to this stage in such a different manner, I’m no longer so sure. Maybe the fact that most of those Atlético players were near the end of careers where the Libertadores would stand out as their greatest accomplishment had a lot to do with it. But then again, when are most of these Santos players ever likely to get another chance like this?

Prediction time!

This is an interesting game to try and predict. On paper, Palmeiras are surely the stronger side, but after the River game I can’t count out that they’ll completely crumble if placed under the slightest stress, such as conceding the first goal. Luckily for them, if there’s one flaw with this Santos side, it’s that they’ve struggled with scoring the first goal, even when they have control of the game. In the three games against Grêmio and Boca where they scored, their first goal came from a defensive slip: respectively, a bad punch from the goalie, a horrible backpass, and defenders freezing because they thought the ref would give a penalty. If Santos can’t get that edge, then maybe Palmeiras in turn won’t be a position where they start to panic and throw the game away.

If there’s one thing that might diminish the quality of this game, it’s that both these teams are playing in midweek ahead of it! What the fuck. They played on Sunday the 24th and they’re playing on Tuesday the 26th. Two games in three days in the runup to the biggest game of the year? Presumably they’ll rest all their starters, and at least they’re mutually in this predicament so one side won’t be more tired than the other, but still, appalling scheduling from the Brazilian federation.

So I’m going to predict a somewhat cagey match, where Palmeiras’ superior-on-paper talent runs up against Santos’ excellent defense. (Oh, yeah, forgot to mention, Santos’ defenders have been immaculate, affording opponents very few chances and putting in superhuman blocks and tackles when they have to—Lucas Veríssimo will join Benfica after the final, and it looks like he’ll be a superb addition.) Santos will take a while to get a goal, which will keep Palmeiras from a potential collapse. I say Palmeiras 1-1 Santos, with Palmeiras either grabbing a second goal in extra time or the game going to a penalty shootout, the winner of which I daren’t predict.