IT IS HERE. The World Cup. The biggest, greediest, most bloated, most extortionate, possibly most confusing, though probably not the most outright evil (yet), World Cup in history.

To say that people are excited would be an overstatement. Here in New York City, a place perhaps best known as the partial namesake of the world-famous New York New Jersey Stadium that will host the final, some bars have put up little flags and streamers, many of which got shredded in a weekend storm, and my local CVS has some World Cup merch. I did see this slightly creepy bust of Lionel Messi in the window of the West 34th Street Macy’s, at least:

Okay, that last paragraph is slightly unfair. Today, the first day of the World Cup itself, I started seeing a fair few people in Manhattan wearing national team gear, and I definitely saw more Brazil shirts than any other. (Though the Knicks are lapping everybody else in the apparel department, especially after that Game 4.) And now that the first games have started, I can’t help but start getting into the spirit of things, even with all the bullshit surrounding the tournament. (That’s how they get you!)

It’s just two days (maybe less by the time you read this) until Brazil’s opener against Morocco, which is being played at that very New York New Jersey Stadium, so close to me and yet so far away (not just because getting there from the city is a fucking nightmare, but because the cheapest ticket I’m seeing on the FIFA website right now is going for $1,384). Since I last checked in, Brazil won their final preparatory friendly against Egypt, a 2-1 win that included a bunch of encouraging signs (a ton of chances created, Endrick’s first Seleção goal for two years) and saw a few old concerns bubble up (we missed a lot of those chances, and Egypt’s goal was the product of yet another defensive fuckup). I’ve already made most of my thoughts on our situation clear, I hope, but I’d like to cover a few last questions and concerns before our debut at the tournament itself.

Before anything else, an up-to-date look at the squad:

  • Goalkeepers: Alisson (Liverpool), Ederson (Fenerbahçe), Weverton (Grêmio).
  • Defenders: Alex Sandro (Flamengo), Bremer (Juventus), Bad Danilo (Flamengo), Douglas Santos (Zenit), Gabriel Magalhães (Arsenal), Ibañez (Al-Ahli), Léo Pereira (Flamengo), Marquinhos (PSG).
  • Midfielders: Bruno Guimarães (Newcastle), Casemiro (Manchester United), Good Danilo (Botafogo), Fabinho (Al-Ittihad), Lucas Paquetá (Flamengo), Éderson (Atalanta; soon to be Manchester United???).
  • Forwards: Endrick (Lyon), Gabriel Martinelli (Arsenal), Igor Thiago (Brentford), Luiz Henrique (Zenit), Matheus Cunha (Manchester United), Neymar (Santos), Raphinha (Barcelona), Rayan (Bournemouth) e Vini Jr. (Real Madrid).

There’s been a change since last week, and it’s an unfortunate one for poor Wesley, who came off in tears 15 minutes into the Egypt game and has now been cut. There goes our last halfway decent right-back, joining Éder Militão and Vanderson, whose injuries kept them from even being considered in the first place, and raising the horrifying specter of us running back the same fullback duo of Alex Sandro and Danilo that started the last World Cup, and wasn’t nearly good enough then when they weren’t both pushing 35.

And yet… might we be better off for it? Carlo Ancelotti chose to replace Wesley not with another right-back but with Éderson, a tough midfielder whose exploits for Atalanta over the past few seasons have had many of us clamoring for him to be given more of a Seleção role. With that, Ancelotti might have rectified his single biggest mistake with the World Cup roster1, only picking five midfielders. That this could have been a huge unforced error isn’t likely to be news to anybody reading this, as myself and all our regular commenters have been agonizing for months about Ancelotti’s fixation with lining up Brazil with only two midfielders, but a fair portion of the Brazilian punditocracy and public only seemed to pick up on it after the Panama game two weeks ago, when he experimented with three in the middle and was rewarded with a spectacular second half. Perhaps Ancelotti also realized this (though he still seems to see Brazil’s formation as more of a 4-4-2), but with only five midfielders in the squad, he would have been very hard-pressed to pivot to a three-man midfield, as we would have been left with desperately few options in case of injury or if we needed a tactical shakeup. The sixth midfielder gives us the roster depth to support that pivot should it ever prove necessary. It’s not a great sign that Ancelotti needed the mulligan afforded him by having to replace an injured player to fix his mistake, but I feel more assured knowing that we now have the personnel to switch to a 4-3-3 if it proves to be the better option.

In fact, I think I’m starting to feel a more general assurance, even some glimmers of optimism, around this team. Perhaps I should stop drinking the World Cup Kool-Aid, but the performances and results these past two weeks have shown some genuine improvement. Everyone looks extremely motivated, Vini Jr. looks like he might finally have figured out how to take charge of games for Brazil like can for Real Madrid, the three-man midfield has emerged as a genuine option, and several bench players have played so well that they’re making a legitimate case for starting (Lucas Paquetá isn’t even making the case anymore; it sounds like he will be starting on Saturday).

On top of that… well, has this ever happened to you? You’re putting together an important project for work, or planning a big event, or you’re performing in a play or a concert that’s opening soon. Doesn’t have to be high-stakes or recent; all that really matters is that you were doing something that required coordinating and getting in sync with a bunch of other people, and for the longest time it was chaos, and you clearly didn’t have enough time, and there was no way you were going to get everything sorted out, and you could feel the whole production hurtling towards catastrophe, and then in the last few days everybody hunkered down, focused, worked hard2, and everything ended up, well, coming together at the last moment and going off without a hitch. I think I see a little bit of that with Brazil right now. We’re not having to labor quite as hard, huff and puff quite as much, to create chances. Plays that would have fallen apart six months ago are now putting forwards through on goal. Things might be, for lack of a better word, finally starting to click.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to temper that optimism. The forwards are still missing too many of the chances we’re creating. None of the goalies really inspire confidence. Our defense keeps making almost comical errors at a rate of at least one per game. But I want to share some reason for hope on at least that last point.

Perhaps salvation from our defensive woes will come in the form of Gabriel Magalhães. It’s hard to properly gauge his importance to this team, as he has only played three games under Carlo Ancelotti—a combination of injuries, squad rotation, Champions League final duties, and just being left out at Arsenal’s request having kept him from featuring more regularly. But in the small sample size we have, the difference is pretty stark: Brazil haven’t conceded a goal when he’s played—three clean sheets. In the nine games where he didn’t play, we’ve only kept two clean sheets, and conceded 11 goals. In Dorival Júnior’s more chaotic era, the pattern is similar: six goals in the eight games he started, 11 in the eight games he didn’t. Even if you add to that the goals Brazil conceded in Fernando Diniz’s brief tenure, during which he started every game, it doesn’t change the outcome: no matter the coach, the defense concedes fewer goals when Gabriel is starting. Is it possible the guy who anchors one of the strongest club defenses in world football is a really good defender? More at 11.

Now we just have to hope he doesn’t get hurt! Him or anybody else. I think we’re due for a little good injury luck after losing Wesley, Miltão, and Estêvão, don’t you?

I know Spike Lee hopes so.

On a different note…

I want to spare a few sentences to a question I’ve been turning over in my head. Carlo Ancelotti has already renewed his Brazil contract until 2030. What sort of result at this World Cup would make that seem like a bad idea?

It’s a possibility that feels more remote after the team’s recent improvements, though I can’t say I’ll be fully convinced with some of his more esoteric choices until they deliver us a big win or two. And even if Brazil plays well, there’s every chance that an unfortunate deflection or a questionable penalty call3 sends us home sooner than we deserved. One potential bracket sees us meeting England in the quarterfinal. If we lose that game—yet another loss to a European team in the quarterfinals—would it mean we’d gone through this whole song and dance, thrown a boatload of money at one of the greatest coaches in history, only to not improve at all and fall at the same hurdle as we have for the past 20 years? Should we count it as an improvement because of the addition of a round of 32, meaning that we would have won two knockout games instead of just one to reach that point? What if we’d technically beaten the “lose to the first European team in the knockout rounds” hoodoo by knocking off Norway or the Netherlands a round or two before?

The flipside to that conundrum is that I think just about anything beyond a quarterfinal exit would absolutely be considered a success. (Perhaps even another 7-1, god forbid.) Reaching the semifinals (unless we suffer another catastrophic loss once we get there) would be unequivocally the best World Cup result for Brazil since 2002. In all likelihood, to get there we would have had to dispel the curse of European teams in the knockout rounds anyway.

Personally, I’m not sure I can ask for much more than breaking the curse. Hopefully we can do that and also make it past the quarterfinals for once. I’m sure a sufficiently disastrous early exit would get Ancelotti fired, but barring that, he’ll be working on this team for another four years, a far cry from the twelve chaotic months he’s had so far. If, even with that short time in charge, he can give Brazil its most successful World Cup in a while, and dispel a few demons along the way, he’ll have laid a very promising foundation for still greater success in 2030.

All that said, and despite my doubts, and while acknowledging that this team probably isn’t among the four or five favorites for the tournament right now, I do think there is a path to the Hexa this year. It’s a narrow one, which probably requires all our key players remaining in perfect health, the team continuing their recent trend of improvement, and our fullbacks and goalies shaping up to at least the point where they don’t feel like active liabilities. It’s certainly not what I expect to happen.

But there’s nothing wrong with hoping.

Now, as for Saturday’s game specifically.

Brazil vs. Morocco

MetLife Stadium (excuse me, New York New Jersey Stadium), East Rutherford, New Jersey, June 13, 2026

Kickoff: 6:00 PM EDT / 7:00 PM BRT / 10:00 PM GMT

US TV: FOX, Telemundo

US Streaming: FOX One, Peacock

Likely Starting XI: Alisson; Danilo, Gabriel Magalhães, Marquinhos, Alex Sandro; Casemiro, Bruno Guimarães; Lucas Paquetá, Raphinha, Vini Jr, Matheus Cunha.

Notes and Storylines

Not only are Morocco far and away our toughest opponent in the group, this is arguably the toughest matchup on paper of the entire group stage, as it is the only one between two teams in the top 10 in the world rankings. That they’re good isn’t a surprise; after all, in Qatar they became the first African team to reach the World Cup semifinals. Their record since then is quite something: they’ve only lost one of their last 45 games dating back to March 2024, if you don’t count the result on the field in the Africa Cup of Nations final (we’ll get to that). That is padded somewhat by playing several tournaments (AFCON, the African Nations Cup, the Arab Cup) that aren’t held over the regular FIFA dates; Brazil’s only played 28 games in that span.

But that still reinforces this team’s strength: they won even the two out-of-season cups, in which they couldn’t use players based in Europe, and that is because the Moroccan federation has spent over a decade executing a long-term strategy to develop the nation into a football powerhouse. The depth of talent they’ve nurtured is immense, even without many outright superstars to point to. Achraf Hakimi is their only household name right now, and aside from him only Noussair Mazraoui, Brahim Díaz, Neil El Aynaoui, and Ayyoub Bouaddi play for anything approaching a title-contending club in the major European leagues. I recognize embarrassingly few of the other names on the roster, honestly. But they’ve demonstrated that there isn’t a scrub among them.

There are a few things that might hold Morocco back. For one, they’re having their own spat of bad injury luck, and they just cut Marseille defender Nayef Aguerd and Real Betis winger Abde Ezzalzouli from the squad, while the fitness of several other players remains a concern. Another is that AFCON final. You know the one: Senegal have a stoppage-time winner waved off for a push on Hakimi; Morocco go up the other end and are awarded a penalty for a hold on Díaz; in both cases the fouled Moroccan sure looked like he went down a bit too easily; Senegal abandon the pitch in frustration, but are convinced to return to the field and finish the match; Díaz finally takes the penalty in the 21st minute of stoppage time and attempts one of the worst Panenkas of all time, which is easily saved; Senegal win it in stoppage time; two months later, a court strips Senegal of the title for leaving the pitch in protest and awards it to Morocco. All that (plus the Moroccan ball boy who tried to steal goalie Édouard Mendy’s towel) was enough to give Morocco more than a little bit of a villainous patina, and for Díaz, his penalty miss was the sort of career-defining embarrassment that I described as “an unbelievable aura loss moment” a few months back (dang, “generational” would have been a way better word). Has any of that caused the sort of psychic injury that can tear a great team apart?

Brazil’s reported lineup, meanwhile, does have a couple potential issues. One is that I think I have more trust in Ibañez at right-back than I do Danilo, and I’m not sure the latter’s leadership qualities make up the difference. The other is Matheus Cunha’s continued inclusion in the starting lineup, after Endrick and Igor Thiago both outshone him in the last two games. The Manchester United forward still only has one goal for Brazil and, in games where he doesn’t contribute more broadly to the attack, I find myself asking, “What does this bum even do?” Indeed, why is he still starting? The answer may lie in the difference between the 4-2-4 system we accuse Ancelotti of using and the 4-4-2 he himself envisions. Globo reports that Cunha and Paquetá will be tasked with dropping into the left and right sides, respectively, of the midfield when defending. Perhaps this still isn’t enough of an answer; if we’re asking a forward to drop back and defend, isn’t Igor Thiago, the best defensive forward in the Premier League this season, still the better choice? Maybe not, if you consider that Cunha, a much more dynamic dribbler and passer, is clearly the better choice if they win the ball in a deeper position and have to try and advance it themselves.

Paquetá might be the key player to watch. He was spectacular against Panama, so spectacular that he seems to have played his way straight into the starting lineup, but even those of us who are fans of him can agree that wasn’t a level of play he’s ever produced consistently. Indeed, against Egypt he was quite a bit more muted, and Morocco will be a harder test still. His particular pedigree, his ability to actually function as a third midfielder in a way an out-and-out forward could not, even when on paper he’s lining up as one of the four forwards, could provide a more consistent balance between attack and midfield. The hope is that he can be more than just a balancing presence and consistently provide the sort of line-breaking passes we saw against Panama, as well as the goalscoring touch he’s recently rediscovered for Flamengo. (On a separate note, he’s going to play alongside Bruno Guimarães, which I’ve always been surprised previous Brazil coaches didn’t do more often, especially during the two years when they were club teammates at Lyon. I hope they haven’t lost all their chemistry in the four years since, since it can only be a positive for the team.)

I don’t really know what to expect from this first game. It’s going to be H-O-T on Saturday (89° at kickoff) and while both Brazil and Morocco are no strangers to that sort of heat, there are plenty of other reasons for them to be cautious. World Cup opening matches always tend to be a little cagey, and both teams have very recently cut players due to injury, so they might be especially wary of straining too hard at the very start of the longest World Cup in history. With that in mind, while I think both teams have a legitimate shot to win this game, and I’d say Brazil are marginally to modestly more likely to win it than Morocco, I think the most likely outcome is actually a draw. Brazil 1-1 Morocco is my guess, leaving it possible that the magnitude of both teams’ expected victories over Haiti will determine who wins the group.

We have waded through three and a half years of questions, of frustrations, of doubt and uncertainty, of all-too-infrequent hope. All that time of anguish and expectation centered around what, if anything, this strange, unprecedented, dysfunctional era of the Seleção could possibly produce over these next five weeks. Soon, very soon, we will wonder no longer.

The World Cup. IT IS HERE.

  1. Your personal feelings on the Neymar pick aside. ↩︎
  2. Maybe harder than was reasonable; being in this situation isn’t always a good thing. ↩︎
  3. This penalty call was a topic of discussion on the blog the other day, and I gotta say, looking at it again… I think the ref made the right call. Yes, Vincent Kompany gets all of Gabriel Jesus and absolutely none of the ball, but that’s because Jesus was in the process of dribbling the ball straight out of play. In no world would he have kept that ball from crossing the touchline even if Kompany had phased straight through him like a ghost. ↩︎