It’s a new year, and that means it’s time to look over everything we can expect from the Brazil national team in the 12 months ahead, in a regular feature I would like to call, “oh, whoops, the last time I did this was actually five years ago“.

Anyways, here’s what’s on the docket for the Seleção:

January-February: The South American U-20 Championship

It’s become a tradition for me in odd-numbered years: settling down on some January evenings, opening up a sketchy, under-the-table streaming site, and dodging an onslaught of popup ads for gambling and porn sites to watch Brazil’s newest young generation in action. I first got around to doing this in 2011, and let me tell you, I got into this tradition at a bad time. That 2011 team, which somehow managed to free Neymar from his club obligations at Santos and supplemented him with Oscar, Casemiro, Danilo, Alex Sandro, and Lucas Moura, who announced himself in the final game with a hat-trick that briefly made us all think he might be as good as Neymar, was genuinely magical. It was also Brazil’s third-straight win in the tournament, their 11th overall, and capped a stretch of 18 tournaments, dating back to 1977, in which Brazil won nine times, finished second six other times, and never ended up worse than fourth, nowadays the last spot that will earn a team entry into that year’s U-20 World Cup. In that context, what’s happened since is almost unfathomable: Brazil failed to qualify for the U-20 World Cup in three of the next four editions, and in 2013 they even failed to advance out of the first round for the first time since 1975.

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