You thought Brazilian football was done for the summer? Think again! There are two Olympic medals up for grabs over the next two and a half weeks, and because I’m a little tired of writing match previews, I’m going to write one big preview for both the men’s and women’s teams and maybe revisit things if either one gets out of the group stage.

Brazil Men

Coach: André Jardine

(Squad is players born on or after January 1, 1997, plus three overage players, marked with an asterisk.)

Goalkeepers: Santos*, Brenno, Lucão

Fullbacks: Dani Alves*, Gabriel Menino, Abner, Guilherme Arana

Center-Backs: Diego Carlos*, Nino, Bruno Fuchs, Ricardo Graça

Midfielders: Bruno Guimarães, Claudinho, Matheus Henrique, Reinier, Douglas Luiz

Forwards: Antony, Gabriel Martinelli, Matheus Cunha, Paulinho, Malcom, Richarlison

On paper, this team is super exciting. Pretty much everyone from the midfield forward is someone who, especially after some deeply unconvincing showings by the senior team at the Copa América, could be said to deserve a look with the full Brazil side. Despite this side being seriously depleted by many clubs prohibiting their eligible players from participating (among the absences: Rodrygo, Gerson, Pedro, Patrick De Paula), there’s still a wealth of talent that will view this tournament as their chance to audition for the senior Seleção.

But I can’t be too optimistic, and that’s mainly down to the coaching. Under André Jardine, they’ve been embarrassingly leaky in defense, conceding multiple goals to the likes of Cape Verde and the UAE (check out the awful defending in last week’s friendly), and have often struggled to turn their attacking superiority into goals. There were at least signs of improvement on the latter front in that UAE game, as the late introduction of Martinelli sparked a four-goal surge. It may be that the right combination of attackers fixes the problem naturally, or that it won’t be a problem during the Olympics because teams of higher quality won’t try and park the bus against us. My bigger concern is with regards to player selection. This is mainly in the defense, where regardless of the quality of Jardine’s tactics, he’s chosen a bizarrely lacking set of players.

Brazil’s U-24 generation has a really healthy contingent of promising center-backs, and somehow none of them are in this squad. Arsenal defender Gabriel Magalhães was, but he got injured; Wikipedia claims Roma defender Roger Ibañez is also hurt, but I can’t find any other sources confirming that. Lyanco and Luiz Felipe, both of whom also play regularly for clubs in the Italian top flight, were not called at, as far as I can tell, the coach’s discretion rather than their clubs explicitly refusing to release them. Between Gabriel’s injury and FIFA’s allowing Olympic squads to have 22 players instead of 18 this year, Jardine was able to call up two new center-backs, and he chose Bruno Fuchs, who hadn’t played in 10 months because of injury, and Ricardo Graça, who isn’t even a regular starter for Vasco in the Brazilian second tier (according to our resident Vasco fan thinkingplague, this is because he sucks). Both were part of the CONMEBOL Pre-Olympic Tournament side that earned Brazil’s place in Tokyo, but that was a year and a half ago, and they were only there because players like Lyanco and Gabriel weren’t released by their clubs. I could somewhat understand that loyalty if the Olympics were being held at their original time, only about six months after the Pre-Olympic tournament; it’s pretty inexcusable eighteen months on. And that’s not even getting into Jardine’s justification for not calling Lyanco, which was some bullshit.

(Oh, and I also have reservations about Jardine’s player selection in the midfield and attack! I feared that he’d incorporate Richarlison and Douglas Luiz, who joined the team late after the Copa América and maybe aren’t as good as their squadmates in those positions anyway, straight into the starting XI for our critical opening game, and that might well be what’s happening.)

With all that said, I think any sort of medal would be an extremely good result for this team. As mouthwatering as this squad looks on paper, the team’s uneven attacking performances and horrendous defending currently make me think they’ll fall far short of expectations. There’s absolutely the potential for a deep run here, but equally, there’s the potential to not even leave the group, especially since we’re in probably the toughest group. Our first game, a rematch of the 2016 gold-medal game against Germany in the same stadium in Yokohama where we beat Germany in 2002 to win our fifth World Cup, should tell us a lot. Will this team look better against an opponent that leaves some spaces? Or will an opponent with some actual attacking quality just completely destroy them? After that is Ivory Coast, who are bringing several big names to this tournament and would hardly be the first African side to stun us at the Olympics (and this team’s already been stunned by both Egypt and Cape Verde in preparatory friendlies), and finally what should be an easier game against Saudi Arabia, before a potentially very tough quarterfinal against, in all likelihood, Spain or Argentina (or maybe Egypt will advance from group C and prove that our recent loss to them wasn’t completely embarrassing for us). If we can make it past all of that, well, then maybe I’ll change my tune.

Group Stage Games:

vs. Germany, July 22, 4:30 AM EDT/5:30 AM BRT/8:30 AM GMT

vs. Ivory Coast, July 25, 4:30 AM EDT/5:30 AM BRT/8:30 AM GMT

vs. Saudi Arabia, July 28, 4:00 AM EDT/5:00 AM BRT/8:00 AM GMT

Brazil Women

Coach: Pia Sundhage

Goalkeepers: Bárbara, Letícia, Aline

Defenders: Erika, Rafaelle, Bruna Benites, Tamires, Jucinara, Poliana

Midfielders: Formiga, Julia Bianchi, Andressinha, Angelina, Duda, Marta, Andressa Alves

Forwards: Ludmila, Giovana, Debinha, Geyse, Bia Zaneratto

Group Stage Games:

vs. China, July 21, 4:00 AM EDT/5:00 AM BRT/8:00 AM GMT

vs. Netherlands, July 24, 7:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM BRT/11:00 AM GMT

vs. Zambia, July 27, 7:30 AM EDT/8:30 AM BRT/11:30 AM GMT

Unlike with the men, the women’s Olympic football tournament is open to participants of all ages, and since nations thus routinely bring their full-strength squads, it carries prestige similar to the World Cup.

Unfortunately, I continue to not follow the women’s team as closely as I should, so I really can’t say much about the relative strengths and weaknesses of this squad. In the past, they’ve been defensively leaky and inconsistent in their ability to actually score goals, but a lot has changed since then, especially on the coaching front. Note that Formiga is still chugging along at age 43 and will be participating in her seventh Olympics (!), while Marta, at age 35, has previously hinted that this might be her last major tournament for Brazil. At the other end of the spectrum, 18-year-old Giovana is the youngest in the squad, and it’s exciting that she chose to play for Brazil when she was also eligible for the US (where she spent most of her childhood) and Spain.

But the main reason for excitement lies in the coach, Pia Sundhage of Sweden. The women’s team has long suffered under mediocre coaching from men who—with all due respect to the recently-deceased Vadão—couldn’t cut it in the men’s game. The CBF hired a female coach, Emily Lima, for the first time only in 2016, and sparked a mass player resignation by firing her the following year. There doesn’t seem to be any risk of that mistake being repeated with Sundhage, who comes in with an excellent track record at the Olympics: two golds with the USA and a silver with Sweden, medaling in each of the past three tournaments. Under her stewardship, Brazil have lost only to France and the USA, and have shown themselves to be on par with medal-contending sides like Canada and the Netherlands.

With that in mind, I think medaling would be a reasonable expectation for the women’s team. They’ll absolutely need some luck, since the USA women continue to be a nigh-unstoppable powerhouse and a quarterfinal matchup against them (or another high-quality team, like Japan or Great Britain) is definitely possible. And even before then, a group with China and 2019 World Cup runners-up the Netherlands will be no cakewalk. But Brazil seem to have the quality, and now the coaching, to give themselves a decent shot of a medal even in an unbelievably stacked competition.