Brazil vs. Argentina

Estadio Monumental, Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 25, 2025

Kickoff: 8:00PM EDT / 9:00 PM BRT / 12:00 AM GMT

US TV/Streaming: Telemundo (network TV), ViX Deportes ($8.99/month), Fanatiz ($25 pay-per-view)

Likely Starting XI: Bento, Wesley, Marquinhos, Murillo, Guilherme Arana; André, Joelinton, Raphinha; Vini Jr, Rodrygo, Matheus Cunha.

On The Bench: Weverton (replaces Alisson – injured), Lucas Perri; Alex Sandro, Vanderson, Lucas Beraldo (replaces Gabriel Magalhães – suspended), Léo Ortiz; Éderson (replaces Gerson – injured), João Gomes (replaces Bruno Guimarães – suspended); Estêvão, Endrick, João Pedro, Savinho.

Notes and Storylines

The good news is that we got the best possible result from Thursday’s game against Colombia. Vini Jr.’s last-gasp, deflected winning goal secured us three points, and losses for Bolivia and Venezuela now place Brazil eight points clear of the intercontinental playoff (or worse) with five rounds left in qualifying, which is a cushion that I don’t think even Dorival Júnior can throw away.

The bad news is that Dorival is still in charge of this team, and boy did it show. Brazil scored very early, Vini winning a penalty off an excellent through ball from Raphinha, who then converted the spot-kick, and then very, very late, almost as late as Casemiro’s 90+10th-minute winner against these same opponents in the 2021 Copa América. In between those two goals, we had 90 minutes of Brazil playing like varying degrees of ass. The first half was particularly bad. There was a stretch when I was reminded of nothing so much as the catastrophic performance under Fernando Diniz in our last World Cup qualifier against Colombia: a two-man midfield being thoroughly overrun, the opposition pouring into gaping holes between the lines and behind the fullbacks… except in the Diniz version, at least Brazil was producing some coherent attacking play and genuine chances! Dorival’s Brazil couldn’t manage to string anything together even close to the Colombian box.

To his credit, Dorival offered a remarkably cogent breakdown of Brazil’s first-half problems after the game in his postgame press conference, and I’m reproducing some of that here:

But in reality, I think the advantage the Colombian team had after this substitution [he’s referring to when Joelinton had to replace the injured Gerson in the 28th minute] is that they changed how they were marking us, because we had been finding plenty of spaces. They tried a change, we tried to match them, which is sometimes difficult, you can’t convey information clearly. Our two players for bringing the ball out of the back became easy targets for marking, with the opposing defensive midfielder being practically free. Alisson spent a lot of time with the ball at his feet because we didn’t have options. At the half, we made an important change, reset our positioning, and had enough of the balance of play that we deserved the result.

Dorival Júnior

He’s pretty spot on here, and Brazil did indeed improve after the break. So why is this scant comfort? Well, let me count the ways.

– This mess didn’t start with Gerson’s injury. I’m as shocked as the rest of you that the team generally played better before Gerson was injured. Joelinton was absolutely dismal as his replacement, with shaky passing in general and just a horrible 15 seconds or so leading to Luis Díaz’s equalizer. But take a look at this screenshot from a tactical breakdown on Globo.

This is the sort of positioning that was causing so many problems for Brazil. The Colombian press shuts off easy passes to our ball-playing midfielders. The center-backs, sitting either side of Alisson, don’t offer any sort of meaningful outlet either. The fullbacks, possibly having been lured off the field by the jingle of a passing ice-cream truck, are nowhere in shot. Perhaps they’re in position to receive long balls, but a long ball forward from Alisson or the center-backs is really the only option, and because the center-backs are so deep and the fullbacks so high, if Colombia can contest the ball forward and win the second ball, they can exploit huge, gaping holes all over Brazil’s back line, as in this screenshot I took from the 20th minute. Except this wasn’t from a Brazilian goal kick! This was from a long ball forward from the Colombian defense after a sustained spell of possession! This was Brazil’s defensive shape in ideal circumstances! THERE ARE MORE COLOMBIAN OUTFIELD PLAYERS THAN BRAZILIAN ONES IN THIS FRAME!!!

And both of these screenshots happened with Gerson still on the pitch. He’s labeled in the first one; for the second, he’s not even on screen. Yes, Joelinton brought such a downgrade in passing ability that he significantly worsened the situation. But the situation was already profoundly fucked before he ever saw the field. Dorival still doesn’t know how to organize this team to stay compact defensively to prevent this sort of mess at the back, nor is he producing any sort of cohesion at the other end of the field.1

– This still owed itself to Dorival’s personnel choices. Dorival only called up four midfielders for this squad, leaving him desperately short of alternatives if the two-man midfield didn’t work or if, as also happened, his starting midfielders ran into injury and discipline trouble. (Considering both Bruno Guimarães and André came into this round of fixtures one yellow card away from a suspension, he had to expect that he might not be able to count on at least one of them for the Colombia game. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to bring more midfielders on board from the start, at least so they could spend more time training with the team?)

And more to the point, while only two proper midfielders might work in a 4-2-3-1 or 4-4-2 where the attacking players have significant tactical responsibility to provide cover, Brazil only ever seems to be able to send them out in a 4-2-4 where the forwards have little responsibility to supplement the numbers in the middle when necessary. This leaves the midfielders with more gaps to cover and more opposition players coming at them, which leaves them in more situations where they might feel forced to stretch for a loose ball or commit to a tactical foul that gets them a yellow. (It’s not clear what happened to injure Gerson, but his last involvement we were shown before the camera cut to him on the ground in pain was a sprint to chase down a ball tackled off Bruno’s foot.)

In short, Dorival’s created something of a self-defeating prophecy: he decides upon a system that badly exposes and puts heavy demands on his midfield, commits to it by not bringing the personnel to change things if necessary, sees his first-choice midfielders get chewed up and made unavailable as a result, and finds himself without adequate replacements for them.

– Brazil didn’t improve that much in the second half. Okay, yes, after rewatching the second half, they were much better organized and didn’t leave those gaping spaces in behind for Colombia to exploit. But they persisted with some of the strange tactical choices that caused problems in the first half—in particular, the extremely deep positioning on goal kicks I mentioned above. One of Brazil’s best chances of the game, in the 64th minute, was very nearly a gilt-edged opportunity for Colombia, as the only thing that saved Alisson’s sloppy goal kick and let it become a chance for Brazil was that the two Colombian players who converged on the loose pass tripped over each other and let the ball trickle to Matheus Cunha. 5:48 in the video below:

What that highlight reel misses is that this sequence began with Alisson looking over his options from a goal kick, playing a safe lateral pass to Gabriel Magalhães, who passed it right back to him, and then trying the riskier pass to Bruno that so nearly ended in disaster. In short, having the center-backs so deep alongside Alisson didn’t improve Brazil’s ability to pass the ball out of the back; it just meant all three were equally boxed in by the Colombian press when they had the ball.

Still, whether it was a lucky bounce or not, it resulted in a great chance, and Brazil created a few much better chances to win the game than the one that ultimately won it. By which I mean they created two such chances, maybe three. (The other two: Raphinha’s shot early in the half that Vini nearly put away on the rebound, and the late header Guilherme Arana sent over before clobbering into the post.) I wouldn’t exactly call the football scintillating either (ironically, this chance that stemmed from Alisson’s near-fuckup was probably Brazil’s best play of the whole game). While the shot count for the second half ended 13-4 in our favor, that owes itself mainly to what happened after the seven-minute stoppage for the clash of heads between Alisson and Davinson Sánchez. In the 23-ish minutes after play resumed in the 78th minute, Brazil managed eight shots and totally shut out Colombia, whereas in the first 25 minutes of the half the shot count was 5-4, barely better for Brazil than the 4-6 of the first half.

So what changed during this stoppage? Well, in addition to Alisson entering the concussion protocol and being replaced by Bento, Dorival also subbed on Wesley, André, and Savinho for Vanderson, Bruno, and Rodrygo. The players already on the pitch got a decent break to catch their breath. And Dorival, to his credit, very likely took advantage to give them some updated instructions. The result was a noticeable difference once play resumed. Brazil played with more urgency and a higher tempo going forward, bypassing the Colombian press by moving the ball too quickly for their opponents to keep up, and also seemed to be a little more compact at the back. Wesley and Savinho, both faster and more willing to run into space and at defenders than the players they replaced, not only complemented this higher tempo and created dangerous overlaps in attack, they managed to jointly push back the Colombian left flank and stifle some of their threat going forward. Though Colombia tried to maintain their previous tempo and pressing, it was no longer nearly as effective—although Brazil still only managed to create one halfway-decent chance, scoring the winner because Vini’s long shot took a helpful deflection. Still, I’m willing to concede that this sort of play could bear much more fruit going forward if maintained for a whole 90 minutes.

– But again, the system is flawed at a conceptual level. One more moment that stood out to me. This was in the 68th minute, or 6:31 in the highlight video linked above. Colombia surges forward, and with Arana holding a slightly higher position on the pitch, Bruno tracks back to mark the Colombian ball carrier. With none of the forwards tracking back and no other midfielders on the pitch, Joelinton is left to cover a vast empty space on the edge of the penalty area, into which James Rodríguez runs to create an excellent shooting opportunity for himself. If James makes cleaner contact with the ball, or Bruno doesn’t deflect the pass just enough to throw him off, this very likely ends up in the back of the net.

Again, if you’re going to build a system around so few midfielders, you need the rest of the team to be ready to drop deep and supplement their numbers in situations like these. This was a problem under Fernando Diniz and even Tite as well, but Dorival doesn’t seem to know how to deal with it any better than they did. (Tite, indeed, did a much better job of dealing with it.)

So now we face Argentina with, at least, the comfort of a win against a particularly annoying rival and a much more solid position in the standings than we had a week ago. With four of the starters from last game either injured or suspended, Dorival is pretty much being forced into a markedly different lineup. In comes Murillo—”the most watchable center-back in modern football”, raves The Athletic—and whole new starting midfield in André and Joelinton, after they finished out the game against Colombia. Joelinton had a really poor game, but again, when you only call up four midfielders and your two starters are unable to play in the second game, you kind of have to start the two other players you called up originally rather than any replacements you bring in at the last minute. In goal, Bento replaces Alisson as he goes through the concussion protocol, which may well be a relief to those of us who’ve been less than impressed with his shot-stopping or his ball-playing for the Seleção. Unfortunately, Bento has this on his highlight reel from just a couple months back. And remember, he’s going to be thrown into the same dysfunctional scheme for playing out of the back that pressured Alisson into so many sloppy passes.

But the most interesting changes are the ones that Dorival isn’t being forced to make. After an impressive performance off the bench, Wesley looks like he’ll replace Vanderson, who had a very bad game against Colombia, including sloppily turning over the ball in the leadup to their goal. The 21-year-old’s willingness to sprint forward to overlap and back to defend felt like a refreshing change of pace, though I swear we were feeling similarly optimistic about Vanderson just a few games ago and look at him now.

The first reports had Wesley’s partner off the bench, Savinho, joining him in the lineup in place of João Pedro, giving ominous signs of when a similar strikerless formation totally flopped at the Copa América, but instead it looks like it’ll be Matheus Cunha coming in. Pedro’s exclusion is understandable: he was awful on Thursday, playing inaccurate passes that might be most charitably described as being totally out of sync with his teammates. Part of me did want to see Savinho come in as well, as Rodrygo still has a bad case of hero-ball-itis in a yellow shirt, but this’ll have to do for now.

Argentina might well be an interesting opponent for Brazil at this particular juncture. Without Lionel Messi or Lautaro Martínez, Lionel Scaloni appears to have loaded the fuck up on midfielders, fielding four against Uruguay. And the guy has proven that he knows how to set up a midfield; I’ve written before about how Croatia was able to bog down Brazil in midfield at the World Cup, only for Argentina to cut through them with ease in their very next game. So a Brazilian setup with only two midfielders—especially if they’re in a system that leaves huge gaps for them to cover—could find itself cut to ribbons.

That said, I think back to Brazil’s last game against Argentina, which also came just days after a game against Colombia—that same Fernando Diniz disasterclass I was mentioning above, in fact. Going in, it felt like a massacre would be on the cards, but Argentina’s relative lack of pace, combined with a more pragmatic approach from Diniz, led to a very cagey, fairly even game that, yes, Argentina won 1-0 but without painting the pitch in Lusophone blood. Even in Buenos Aires, they may not be able to turn tactical superiority into a huge advantage on the scoresheet, especially without Messi—but I do expect they will be superior. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends in another 1-0 loss to Argentina.

That said, maybe Dorival will continue his recent trend of outperforming Fernando Diniz against the same opponents in World Cup qualifying. Diniz lost three straight to Uruguay, Colombia, and Argentina—the first time Brazil had ever lost three qualifiers in a row. Faced with the same three opponents in the same order (albeit with more home games), Dorival drew with Uruguay and beat Colombia, not that either performance was especially convincing. Maybe he can scrape something against Argentina. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

  1. This doesn’t really fit within this list, but it bears mentioning how many of Brazil’s goals under Dorival aren’t coming from open play. Thus far under Dorival, we’ve scored 24 goals. Of those, five were penalties, two were free kicks from Raphinha, and just as a bonus, three have taken significant deflections, including the winning goals against Colombia and Ecuador in World Cup qualifying. That’s 10 of 24, or 41.7%. Restrict things to just the games since qualifying resumed last September and the picture gets even worse. Of Brazil’s 11 goals in that span, seven, or 63.6%, have been either dead balls or deflected. This team is not creating the sort of scoring opportunities we should expect of its attacking talent. Raphinha is the top scorer of the Dorival era without a single goal from open play. ↩︎