I think I speak for many of us when I say this feels like a particularly hard time to get excited about the Brazil national team.

It’s not hard to see why. The Seleção capped off four years of chaos with a deeply underwhelming World Cup campaign and exit. While the premature exit is hardly a new occurrence, it also feels like past World Cup cycles began with an ember of hope that seems all but absent this time. Whether it was confidence that the likes of Neymar and Thiago Silva would continue to be among the world’s best, or that a new generation of midfielders like Allan and Arthur might finally resolve Brazil’s weakness in the sector,1 or that Vini Júnior would keep blossoming into one of the world’s best players, it combined with certainty that some new world-beating talents we’d never heard of would emerge from Brazil’s vast footballing youth ranks and establish themselves near the top of the Seleção’s depth chart.

This year it’s hard to feel that confidence. Neymar long ago crumbled into dust, probably around 2023, but this is the first time we’ve really, definitively had to acknowledge the reality that there is no possible universe in which he might still save us. Vini, easily Brazil’s sole outstanding player at the World Cup, has been so calamitous since his return to club football that people are only half-jokingly wondering whether the jaw-enchaddening procedure he supposedly got in the offseason was in fact a cover for his being killed and replaced by a body double. Endrick and Estêvão, Brazil’s current leading barely-out-of-childhood vessels for the nation’s footballing hopes, are both stuck in horrible quagmires at clubs which seem willing neither to acknowledge their talent nor let them pursue opportunities elsewhere. (Though you might well put some of the blame for Endrick’s situation on the man himself, or perhaps on his lord and savior Jesus Christ, of whom he is apparently such a devout follower that he is reportedly unwilling to go to AC Milan on account of the club being nicknamed “Il Diavolo”.)23 While there are, as always, exciting young talents coming up through the pipeline, it’s hard to see anybody who’s in a position to make a difference any time soon. Soon-to-be-debutants Alisson Santana and Allan, for instance? Both fine players, and it’s a credit to Allan’s ability and versatility that he’s immediately getting decent minutes, even as a rotation player, for Man City. But it’s hard to see him starting for Brazil at the Copa América, for instance.

But compounding that is just the general malaise around the Seleção’s play right now, which is doing even less to herald a positive change in fortune. It’s safe to say the glorious new Carlo Ancelotti era has already turned sour. After the World Cup disappointment, we were just hoping to draw any optimism from the team’s start to the new cycle, and now we’re starting to feel silly for having hoped. The road to 2030 began with a dismal performance against Australia, saved only by Rayan’s last-minute equalizer. A 4-2 win in the rematch four days later offered some improvement, particularly an absolutely gorgeous game-winning goal. But the closing match of that last FIFA date was when I really felt the pessimism seep into me.

Which is ridiculous, right? We were playing India, a team we were expected to beat easily and did beat easily, in India, roughly a million miles and about as many hours by plane away from home for every player on Brazil’s roster. That our players, probably longing at that point to just finish the game uninjured and get back to their regular lives, didn’t play their best was to be expected.

And yet. This game was somehow so stultifying, so below the level I would expect from Brazil, that I couldn’t help but despair. A 4-0 win sounds impressive until you look at the quality of opposition. India might legitimately be the worst team that Brazil has played in more than a decade. I really do believe that a sufficiently motivated Brazil wouldn’t have had much trouble putting 10 goals past them. And yet only Samuel Lino’s late, late strike pushed the game into goleada territory,4 the absolute minimum that could possibly have been expected. And the scoreline wasn’t that “close” because India played out of their skins or their goalies had the game of their lives. As the use of the plural indicates, that was decidedly not the case: India pulled their starting keeper at the break, after he’d let Brazil’s first two goals go right through him, and then his replacement let the fourth goal go right through him too. In other words: three of our four goals came from goalie errors. We just had to shoot on target with power to score, and we still could only manage that three times, nor could we create any decent chances that didn’t count on the goalies letting shots slip right between their hands. It’s genuinely possible that if India had even a decent, baseline-competent keeper—I’m talking like a starter for a Championship side—we would have struggled to win this game more than 1-0. We always lament how often opposing goalies seem to have the game of their lives when facing Brazil (among the examples that immediately spring to mind: Justo Villar in 2011, Thibaut Courtois in 2018, Ørjan Nyland this year), and yet here we had the exact opposite, an opposing goalkeeping performance that was about as bad as it could have possibly been, and without which we may not have won.

And in that, I see the same thing I saw in that Haiti game at the World Cup, and which I’ve seen throughout Carlo Ancelotti’s tenure and, to be fair, the tenures of the Brazil coaches before him. If there’s fire there, a thirst for blood, a desire to put on a show, it’s impossible to see. If the players have fun going on these long jags across the world for meaningless friendlies, they’re sure not showing it on the pitch. I get if the players are unmotivated, if years of World Cup futility have so dulled the luster of the Seleção that they don’t feel the swagger that once used to come from putting on the yellow shirt, if it just feels like an obligation to them or if the historical expectation feels like a burden. I can resent them for it, but I understand it. But I can’t condone coaches who don’t seem like they have any idea what to do about it, if they even have an interest in doing something to begin with. And it unfortunately feels like Ancelotti is failing on both counts. He is perfectly content to have Brazil entirely abandon positive football when he thinks the result is secure (see the Haiti game) or to never even aspire to positive football in the first place if he thinks it’s not a winning strategy (the Norway game). And that assumes he actually wants to play beautifully or entertain the fans or anything more than come away from less important games with a win. The alternative might be worse, and I’m starting to think it might be the truth. Couldn’t—shouldn’t—a coach of his caliber see the first half against India and deliver a halftime pep talk that brought the boys out of the locker room with a little more fire in their bellies? Shouldn’t he understand, as the former coach of Real Madrid, as someone who coached at the top levels of the club game during Manchester United’s entire downfall, that a team’s success partly manifests through its own self-belief, and that part of building that self-belief is having your team prove that it can crush the teams it should expect to beat, not just find a way to beat the teams it didn’t?

Shouldn’t he understand by now that four forwards in the lineup is a bad idea?

And yet that’s what he’s going to do once again, by the sound of it. It might be a bad idea, but perhaps he doesn’t have any better ones.

Brazil vs. Japan

Saturday, November 14, 2026

Singapore National Stadium, Singapore

Kickoff: 5:15 AM EST / 7:15 AM BRT / 10:15 AM GMT

US TV/Streaming: none 

Likely Starting XI: Pedro Morisco; Wesley, Jair, Gabriel Magalhães, Douglas Santos; Andrey Santos, Bruno Guimarães, Rayan; Estêvão, Raphinha, Vini Júnior‘s clone.

On the Bench: Bento, Lucas Perri; Arthur Dias, Carlos Augusto, Jonathan Jesus, Vanderson, Vitor Reis; André Luiz, Gabriel Bontempo, João Gomes, Marlon Gomes; Alisson Santana, Allan, Endrick. (Danilo Santos was called up, cut due to injury, and not replaced.)

Brazil vs. Singapore

Tuesday, November 17, 2026

Singapore National Stadium, Singapore (again)

Kickoff: 5:00 AM EST / 7:00 AM BRT / 10:00 AM GMT

US TV/Streaming: none 

Rayan might have been the subject of the iconic photo of Brazil’s last game against Japan, if not their whole World Cup campaign, and I’d be all for working to turn him into a central player, but the lineup has him listed as the number 10, and that just doesn’t seem right. If his future is through the center, then I’d think it’s as a center forward, which is surely where we’d want Raphinha to play in this game.5 The only way I can see this working is if Estêvão, in fact, is the one being played through the middle in defiance of the reported forward and midfield lines.

There are some interesting new faces in this squad, but as I mentioned previously, it’s hard to see any genuine new difference-makers emerging from these games. Who knows, maybe André Luiz or Marlon Gomes will make their case, or João Gomes will demonstrate that this particular dart finally grew a few feathers. But it would all be a surprise at this point.6

With that in mind, we rematch with a Japan side that beat us around this time last year and then gave us an almighty scare at the World Cup. Gabriel Martinelli spared our blushes that day, but silly him, he took the Saudi money after the World Cup blacklisted himself from the Seleção (or at least I wish that’s how that worked). Japan once again demonstrated at the World Cup that they’re a really talented, well-coached, athletic side that can make life difficult for anybody, and while this this is far from a home game for them (Tokyo is about as far from Singapore as New York is from London), they’ll be motivated to get some more revenge for what happened at the World Cup. I think Brazil loses this game 2-1.

Singapore, meanwhile, are at best marginally better than India; they have either tied or narrowly beaten them in all their recent meetings. Like India, Brazil and Singapore have never met, at least at senior level: I found highlights from a 2008 game where Brazil’s Olympic squad beat them only 3-0 despite featuring the likes of Ronaldinho, Diego Ribas, and Alexandre Pato. But I stand firm that we can and should clobber them if so motivated. This is a side that has in recent years been clobbered by the likes of Malaysia and South Korea. And if Brazil feel a little stung by the loss to Japan I’m predicting, or if they feel like they should have done more against India, maybe they’ll push a little harder in this game. Still, I’m going to make the same prediction I did against India: a 5-0 win.

  1. Damn, Black Matt sure called it in that linked article from 2018 when he said Brazil’s big concern going forward might be the fullback positions. I mean, the midfield continues to suck, but fullback has been increasingly catastrophic. ↩︎
  2. that story just dropped today and it’s real i swear to god ↩︎
  3. i mean it could very well be tabloid nonsense and the player’s own camp says it’s patently untrue but it’s so absurd i want to believe it ↩︎
  4. Some Brazilian media will call a 3-0 win a goleada, a word that literally translates to something like “goaling” as a noun and which means a victory by a large, it is implied overwhelming, number of goals but I reject that notion. For me, a goleada must have these things: 1) the winning team must win by three or more goals; 2) the winning team must score four or more goals; 3) the winning team must score at least double the goals of the losing team. Hence: 3-0? Not a goleada. 4-0, 5-0, 4-1, 5-2, even 6-3? Goleada. 7-4? Not a goleada. ↩︎
  5. Raphinha’s taken a little heat recently for saying that he knows Ancelotti and co. will need to “manage his minutes” in these games in light of his grueling club schedule, though they in turn are appreciative that he pushed forward a minor surgery to fix a painful cyst on his ear rather than have the procedure interfere with his ability to play for Brazil. ↩︎
  6. The one guy I really wanted to see and who I thought might actually make a positive difference, João Pedro, went ahead and got hurt just before the FIFA date again. It’s like something in his very metaphysical being is straining against the prospect of him succeeding for the Seleção. ↩︎