Last December, Botafogo rolled in to what had been known, in years past, as the Club World Cup, having survived a brutal gauntlet of games. Two draws after the year’s last international break had left them tied with Palmeiras with three games to go in the league and a suddenly winner-take-all clash between the two up next on the calendar. They handily beat Palmeiras in Rio, but four days later they had to be in Buenos Aires for the Copa Libertadores final, a product of CONMEBOL restructuring the tournament in 2017 to conclude far later in the year than the previous July-August range. Once again, they handily beat Atlético-MG in that game—something of a shock given that they went down to ten men after just 30 seconds—then returned to Brazil for their final two league games, each just four days after the previous game, each against top-six teams still fighting for a Libertadores spot next season, still needing to win them both to be assured of the title. Botafogo won them both, securing their first Brasileirão title since 1995 to go alongside their first Libertadores trophy ever, and their reward? Fly to Qatar and play Pachuca of Mexico, this time just three days after their last game, in the newly rechristened Intercontinental Cup. The reward for the winner? A match against Al-Ahly of Egypt just three days after that, all for the ultimate prize: the coveted showdown between the best club in Brazil and the best club in Europe.

Did I mention that those two draws after the international break were also three days apart, and thus that Botafogo’s game against Pachuca was going to be their seventh in just 22 days, all of them carrying unbelievably high stakes for the team and thus making it hard to rest any of their regular starters? Did I also mention that Pachuca came into the match having not played a single game in over a month? Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised that Botafogo lost handily after falling apart in the second half.

But then again…

This June, Botafogo came into the new Club World Cup—an invite their reward for that unlikely Libertadores triumph—eleven days after their last league game. Paris Saint-Germain, by contrast, had a 15-day gap after their Champions League triumph, and had played a downright luxurious one game a week for most of May—the sort of respite Botafogo hadn’t enjoyed since March. And on the back of some dogged defending and a bit of luck going forward, Botafogo gritted their way to a historic 1-0 win. It was certainly a bit fluky, though Botafogo did play an excellent defensive game, but it was a seminal moment: the first competitive win by a South American club over a European club in over twelve years.

And then, roughly seventeen hours later, Flamengo played Chelsea like equals and dog-walked them.

If Botafogo’s win felt like a weight removed from the shoulders of Brazilian football, confirmation after a decade of futility that its clubs are in fact still good enough to beat the world’s best, Flamengo’s win was a sea change.

For an explanation, let me start close to home—by which I mean this blog, for those of us who read and comment here regularly. I think we’d all agree that the consensus position of the Brazil World Cup Blog commentariat is that Brazilian football is something of a backwater (as I described it not that long ago), a place where—thanks to the combination of a dementedly overstuffed calendar; European clubs plucking away the nation’s best talents while still teenagers from the cash-strapped clubs that raised them; and an insular, backwards-looking football establishment, already reluctant to accept that any other country’s footballing ideas might have any merit for the nation that’s won more World Cups than any other, turning inward towards the players and tactics they can watch firsthand rather than the ones playing a whole ocean or ten-hour flight away—the local game has been reduced to a shadow of its glory days, where tactics that haven’t evolved since 2002 combine with the outrageous workloads imposed upon the players to create a league of dreary, low-scoring games, where the players left in the country are desperately inferior in quality to their compatriots who established themselves at Real Madrid or Manchester City, but the fans and pundits baying for Hulk to return to the national team ahead of Savinho are too blind to see it.

This was undeniably true for a while. I remember Brazilian pundits sincerely claiming in 2011 that Neymar was already better than Messi, that his and Ganso’s Santos team was going to beat Barcelona in that year’s Club World Cup. Barcelona, instead, absolutely vaporized them (and then, for good measure, did so again twice as hard a year and a half later in a game played as part of Neymar’s move to Catalunya, a defeat so humiliating that Santos reportedly canceled the second game guaranteed as part of the transfer.) Tite won with Corinthians in 2012, but the year after that, Ronaldinho’s Atlético-MG couldn’t even win their semifinal to secure the promised match against a European foe (an embarrassment Palmeiras and Flamengo shared in 2020 and 2022 respectively). At the same time we had to endure the travails of the national team, with the inadequacies of Brazilian coaching leading to the humiliating defeat to Germany in 2014 and the arguably more heartbreaking losses in 2018 and 2022.

But, while we were scarcely willing to believe it, things were indeed beginning to change. Brazil has seen an influx of foreign coaches, arguably sparked by Jorge Jesus’ all-conquering spell with Flamengo in 2019. The proceeds from all those sales to Europe, combined with smart management, new laws in Brazil allowing the sale of football clubs to investors, and I’m sure some other factors I simply do not understand well enough to speak on, have greatly improved the financial health of some—as a Santos fan, I will be quick to point out: not all!—Brazilian clubs to the point where they can afford to not just repatriate Brazilians abroad at the end of their careers, but to bring back players in their prime and even attract some notable foreign names. In the former category, Flamengo recently signed 25-year-old Samuel Lino home from Atlético Madrid; in the latter, they also signed former Spanish international Saúl Ñíguez in the same week! Even clubs that aren’t Flamengo have gotten in on the fun: just look at Arthur Cabral and Danilo at Botafogo or Memphis Depay at Corinthians1.

And—but I get ahead of myself—this is only likely to continue thanks to the hefty sums paid out to every Club World Cup participant, particularly the successful ones. By my math, the four Brazilian clubs each pocketed anywhere from 28 to 62 million dollars.

But I’ve gotten desperately off track from the first, most important lesson of this Club World Cup, the thing I’ve spent 1100 words getting to even though that was the whole conceit of this piece: Brazilian club football is in a better place than we feared. I’m so off track that I haven’t event mentioned the other two Brazilian clubs at the tournament, both of whom made it further than Botafogo or Flamengo. Palmeiras made it to the quarterfinals, and Fluminense all the way to the semifinals (netting that cool $62 million) and trust me, I’m going to talk about them plenty.

But let’s start with the broadest picture. If there was one thing the Club World Cup was always going to be good for, it would be as a measuring stick. The old format only gave a single European club two measly games against the rest of the world, one of which might involve a Brazilian team. It’s hard to get a good sense of just how good the best team on your continent is when it has a single, pressure-packed chance to go up against a team everyone is sure is better. The new format, stuffed as it was with European teams, gave far more opportunity—28 games in the group stage alone—for the rest of the world to see how they stacked up. The “only two teams per country, as determined by UEFA’s arbitrary rankings” metric, which kept out a few clubs from Europe’s current elite (Arsenal, Liverpool, Barcelona) out in favor of Benfica, Borussia Dortmund, and a couple of others from the rung below them, also helped by offering something less than the absolute pinnacle of European football for competition.

And the result? Well, still kind of grim. In 35 Europe vs. Rest of World games including the knockout stages, the rest of the world lost 22 times, drew seven, and only won five. But three of those wins came from Brazilian clubs. Through the group stages, in fact, Brazilian clubs were 2-2-1 against European clubs, Botafogo letting a late Atleti winner slip through in a game they could have lost by three goals and still advanced. The picture got worse in the knockout stages, as Flamengo, Palmeiras, and Fluminense all met their ends at European hands, but not before Flu snagged a memorable round of 16 win over an Inter Milan side barely a month removed from their Champions League final appearance.

The final picture: a 3-2-4 record against the two uppermost strata of the European football, teams that regularly compete for their league titles and appear in the Champions League knockout phases. That’s 1.22 points per game (compare to .42 for the rest of the world combined), or about 46 points over the course of a 38-game league season—arguably midtable, comfortably safe from relegation. You can certainly argue that Brazilian clubs took this tournament more seriously than the Europeans, or that they had the benefit of more rest (more on that soon), but on the flipside, drop a Brazilian club into any European league and they’re going to face a lot more Brightons and Hoffenheims than they will Chelseas or Bayerns. I choose to take all of this as evidence that the best Brazilian clubs are at least good enough to easily survive in any of the top five European leagues. I’d even go out on a limb and say that Flamengo and Palmeiras, who seem to have the best management and have already amassed the strongest squads on paper, could finish in the top half in any of those leagues.

Can we learn any more from this tournament, though? After all, pretty much any team capable of getting to a major footballing nation’s top flight is probably good enough to spring the occasional surprise on even the very best teams in the league, and that doesn’t mean they’re actually as good on the whole as the team they beat. Indeed, we got evidence both ways.

On the one hand, in several cases Brazilian clubs genuinely equaled or outplayed some of Europe’s best clubs. Flamengo’s upset of Chelsea was the clearest example, of course, but we also saw this when Palmeiras and Fluminense drew with Porto and Dortmund, respectively. In all of these games, rather than wilt under the pressure or fold in the face of superior European tactics, the Brazilian clubs played their opponents as complete equals, and if anything had the better of the games’ best chances to score. We can even extend this to Flamengo’s ill-fated round of 16 game against Bayern, which they lost handily—we’ll get to that—but had more possession, more shots, and even more xG by one source’s estimation than the best team in Germany and a perennial Champions League favorite. I’d call that compelling evidence that Brazilian clubs are capable of competing with, if not always Europe’s absolute elite, then certainly its upper middle class.

(Further evidence of this: days after the Club World Cup final, Flamengo’s U-20 team absolutely obliterated Bayer Leverkusen, 5-1, in a friendly in Rio. This was, to be fair, a bit of a misnomer: Bayer’s starting XI was mostly composed of U-20 players with only a few older players, and Flamengo’s U-20 team also had its own contingent of overage players. But still! More of Bayer’s starters were overage than Flamengo’s, and yet it wasn’t until they subbed in eight senior players while down 5-0 in the 60th minute that they gained anything approaching a foothold in the match.)

On the other hand, plenty of games belied the gulf in quality that remains. Flamengo-Bayern provided a stark illustration of this: as well as Flamengo played, they got caught out repeatedly by Bayern’s press, and Bayern were good enough to convert the openings that resulted. And yet the Germans also got lucky: the first goal was all Erick Pulgar’s mistake, but it came after the ref wrongly awarded two consecutive corners to Bayern; the second took a perfect little deflection off Léo Ortiz to beat the diving Agustín Rossi. The third and fourth goals were beautifully and cleanly taken, and between them Bayern’s four goals remind us that games often hinge on these little arbitrary moments, better players are generally better able to produce better moments, and that’s why it’s VERY important to not needlessly hand the other team a moment of their own, Flamengo. Again: all four of Bayern’s goals started with Flamengo giving the ball away in midfield, and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Fla’s unlucky first two goals felt so reminiscent of two infamous goals the Seleção conceded in recent World Cups.

In the aggregate, Flamengo played a stellar game; in the moments, they flubbed things pretty badly (and got very unlucky). Compare and contrast with Botafogo’s win against PSG, in which they defended excellently and capitalized on the scant opportunities afforded them to go forward—but Igor Jesus’ decisive goal came thanks to a big deflection.

Or with Fluminense’s win over Inter Milan: they got the perfect start with Germán Cano’s third-minute goal, a product of a cross deflecting high and dropping almost perfectly on his head. To be fair, they played on much more even footing with their Champions League finalist opponents than Botafogo did; they created a couple of great chances to go 2-0 or even 3-0 up in the first half, they didn’t seriously start bending under Inter’s pressure until about the 70th minute (and survived a couple of very close calls), and they ultimately did score a second goal to kill things off.

On the whole, as impressive as it was to see Flamengo imposing themselves upon two recent Champions League-winning teams, Brazilian clubs generally found themselves needing a lot of things to go right to come away triumphant. (We can see how that didn’t happen in Flu’s semifinal against Chelsea: if Jhon Arias’ shot hadn’t been cleared off the line, if VAR hadn’t overturned that penalty, and if João Pedro hadn’t scored two of the best goals of his entire life for the opposition… there was a definite path to another Fluminense victory, but it would have probably required most if not all of those moments to break the other way.) But it’s also clear that the gap is smaller than we thought it was.

Don’t let the empty seats fool you—this game kicked off at noon on a Tuesday, and the Flu fans still turned out in the tens of thousands.

Let me take a little break to talk about how much Brazilian fans rule. I went to two games: Flu vs. Dortmund in the group stages, and Palmeiras vs. Chelsea in the quarterfinal. In both cases, I enjoyed the best stadium atmosphere I’ve experienced since I was last at a game in Brazil, which, yeesh, it’s been more than a decade. I was sat above Chelsea’s end in the quarterfinal, and the Palmeiras fans still drowned them out for almost the whole game. It was unforgettable, and it also gives me a chance to say something nice about Palmeiras, who were the only Brazilian team to not come away with a European scalp. That game, too, illustrated the power of moments: a brilliant Estêvão goal—my eyes went towards the middle of the penalty area, thinking he was crossing it, before I saw it bounce off the crossbar and realized he’d shot it instead—gave some life to a team that had been desperately inferior to Chelsea in the first half, before Weverton’s unlucky own goal sank a recovery effort that seemed like it was at least destined to push the game to extra time. The fans deserved a better ending, even if the team didn’t.

So what else did we learn? Well, the brief digression to Palmeiras’ struggles gives me a chance to bring up something else that bugged me. Have Brazilians forgotten how to shoot? I thought, probably around the time Palmeiras missed this fucking chance in their scoreless draw against Porto, or maybe after Fluminense did similar right in front of me a few days later. It is a question that deserves further examination on another day, but for the purposes of this tournament I think it ultimately proved itself to be a Palmeiras problem above all else. Much of it owes to the dour nature of Abel Ferreira and his José Mourinho-lite approach to the game, I think, but I think there is also some degree to which the players on the pitch just didn’t seem capable of executing in these key moments. It felt telling that Vitor Roque, ex-Barcelona striker (kind of a flop, to be fair), the most expensive signing ever by a Brazilian club, spent most of the game against Chelsea running down the left channel rather than trying to get on the end of crosses in the box, with the result that generally nobody was there to get on the end of crosses into the box. Not that he did his job badly, and this could be just as much down to Abel’s tactics (did he care more about defending from the front than creating chances?) as Roque’s limitations, but I got flashes of Gabriel Jesus: a once-the-next-big-thing forward whose scoring ability proves limited and thus finds his place as more of a utility player with good technique and athleticism.

Still, the Brazilian clubs accomplished all they did even with these shortcomings in front of goal. I’ll take that as a plus.

And at long last, I must circle back to the fatigue question. This was on everyone’s minds from the moment the expanded Club World Cup format was announced: Man, another month-long international tournament? When the players are already griping about the excessive demands being placed on them, and the World Cup is also about to be drastically expanded? Rumor has it the top European clubs had to be essentially bribed to compete with disproportionately large payouts from the prize fund, and I’ve seen more than a few people arguing, probably rightly, that with so many players not getting a full summer break this year, many of them will be thoroughly burnt out by the time next year’s super-size World Cup rolls around.

But of course, this is something Brazilian clubs have been dealing with for ages. Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca embarrassed himself in his press conference before the semifinal with Fluminense, when he lamented that Chelsea had already played 63 games that season, “so the European teams come to this competition in a different way than the Brazilian teams or the South American teams, because of the number of games we have played”—only for a Brazilian journalist to point out that Flu had, in fact, played more games in the same period. (The journalist said they’d played 70, but Globo checked the numbers and found that Flu had in fact played 75 to Chelsea’s 62, which only makes the disparity more striking.)

In fact, Brazilian clubs came into the Club World Cup having played more in the past year, substantially more, than every other participant. Look at this analysis from Globo, counting the number of games each club played in the past 365 days, taken from the eve of the third round of group stage games. Look at it! There are only three European clubs within 10 games of any Brazilian club! Flamengo beat Chelsea despite having played 18 more games than them, and Fluminense went toe-to-toe with Dortmund despite a full 20 games more! Heck, even Botafogo’s loss to Pachuca in December takes on new context when you see the Mexican team near the polar opposite end of this chart, with the fourth-fewest games played. Plus, of course, every European club a Brazilian club faced had more rest coming into the tournament, often significantly more. Bayern in particular had almost a month, on top of playing a third less games in the previous year than Flamengo had.

And the Club World Cup will only push these numbers to new heights! At time of writing, Fluminense have now played 46 games in 2025. With most of the league season still ahead, and them being still alive in both the Copa do Brasil and Copa Sudamericana, they’re guaranteed to play at least 73 games before the end of the year, which could rise to a mind-boggling 82 if they reach both Copa finals.

Maybe the Brazilian success we saw was simply a result of FIFA’s ruthless expansion-at-all-costs moves finally bringing the global game in line with where Brazilian club football has been for decades, the rest of the world struggling to adapt to the brutal two-games-a-week, no-true-time-off death march that Brazilian clubs long since got used to. (In this view, it certainly didn’t hurt that the sweltering heat and humidity of the United States would have felt far more familiar to someone coming from Brazil as opposed to Europe.) But I prefer to think of it as further evidence of just how good Brazilian clubs are: even having to deal with such an exhausting workload, as long as they’re not totally burnt out like Botafogo were at the end of 2024, they’re still good enough to give more talented, better-rested teams a run for their money.

Lastly, let’s talk a bit about some individual standout performers, because this piece is already a barely cohesive ramble and I might as well make it less so. Here are a few Brazilian players who stood out. (Estêvão, pictured above just after equalizing against Chelsea, isn’t among them, but I still wanted to give him some more props for such a good goal.)

João Pedro was probably the breakout star from the tournament, which is wild because he wasn’t even part of it until the knockout stages. Chelsea officially signed him from Brighton just two days before their July 4 quarterfinal against Palmeiras, and despite the quick turnaround he got to play the final 35 minutes of that game. Watching him in the stadium, I was impressed—I’d really thought his signing had been a pointless one, given that Chelsea already had so many other forwards and had just signed Liam Delap for the same role a month earlier. But in his cameo, he made Delap look like the pointless signing, and came close several times to scoring or setting up a goal.

Then he backed it up with a stellar brace against Fluminense, and an ice-cold chip against PSG in the final. It was utterly out of keeping with the João Pedro we knew, in all the best ways. He had decent technique, but the guy never scored goals like these for Brighton. Hell, other than taking penalties, he was barely scoring for them, period! These three non-penalty goals in his first three Chelsea appearances were as many as he’d scored in his previous 29 games—dating back to the start of last September.

As I write this, he’s also just scored a cool finish in Chelsea’s first friendly ahead of the new season. Is this scoring form for real? Sometimes players really do blossom when surrounded by better teammates, or as they mature out of their early twenties. Here’s hoping that’s what’s happening here, rather than something more fleeting.

Marcos Leonardo was instrumental to the big non-Brazilian upset of a European team, when Al Hilal shocked Manchester City in the round of 16 and gave us this guy:

But let’s not discount Leonardo’s contribution. With four goals, he was part of a four-way tie for top scorer of the tournament, and two of those goals came in this game, including the extra-time winner that thrust Mr. Hangman up there into instant meme status. Another tied the quarterfinal against Fluminense, though Al Hilal ultimately lost. On top of that, he won the penalty that earned the Arabian club a crucial point against Real Madrid in the group stages. At a time when Brazil is lacking for proper strikers, those big contributions against tough opposition make a decent case for him, even if he spends most of his time racking up goals in an easier league.

On the other hand, I do have some doubts. The only one of Leonardo’s goals at the Club World Cup that wasn’t poking in a scrappy goalmouth scramble came on the break against a Pachuca side pushing everyone forward for a desperately needed equalizer. His penalty win against Real Madrid came after missing a golden chance, and let’s be honest, he went to ground pretty easily on that penalty too. The Seleção’s recent games have shown how desperately Brazil needs someone who knows how to be in the right place to mop up those loose balls in the box, and Leonardo has proven elsewhere that he’s certainly capable of taking those most difficult chances. Still, I can’t help but have a gut feeling that I’d rather have a striker who I know will bury those tricky half-chances—as, say, Harry Kane did against Flamengo.

In any case, if there’s another thing we’re learning about Brazilian football right now, not necessarily from the Club World Cup, it’s that players can have a second life after going to the Middle East young. Igor Jesus is the most notable example of this, as he went from being plucked out of Dubai by Botafogo’s scouts to scoring against PSG in less than a year, but I doubt he’ll be the only one—and maybe Marcos Leonardo will return to Brazil or make the leap to Europe before too long.

Now we go from an Al Hilal player to some Fluminense players, so it’s only fitting to bridge them with the highlights from the game between the two.

Thiago Silva was Flu’s clear standout. Others on the blog have been shouting for him to get called up again for Brazil, even at age 40, and I’ve been reluctant to join them. For one, he’s 40 (41 in six weeks!), with the limitations to speed and mobility that come with that, and on top of that I’m not sure how far we can trust his fitness, as he had to be rested for Flu’s final group stage game against Mamelodi Sundowns. On the other hand, he played every other game in the tournament and has started five of Flu’s six games since (and came on for an injured teammate in the other), so that impression of mine might simply be false.

More to the point, he’s still an absolutely stellar defender. He’s not as slow as his age would suggest, he’s as technically excellent as always (very useful when wriggling away from attacker he’s just dispossessed), and more than anything he’s just so smart in his reading of the game. I watched him in person against Dortmund; he had one or two moments of flash as he bamboozled a player bearing down on him in the box, but more than anything he did his job so well that he didn’t even have to turn on the style to begin with.

And, of course, his team talk before the Inter Milan game went viral, showing that long years of experience have tempered him and turned him into a true leader:

And how about his halftime tactical suggestions to coach Renato Gaúcho2 in that same game? Maybe that can be his true value to Brazil right now: as a player-assistant-coach, if you will, a tighter link between those on the pitch and the man on the sideline. (It helps that he played under Carlo Ancelotti at AC Milan and PSG.) I’m still not sure I’d want him with one of just four center-back spots at the World Cup, just because his age makes him a bit slower and thus less tactically versatile, but if FIFA allows for 26-man squads again like in 2022? I think he should be on the plane.

Props as well to Fábio, who at age 44 and in sight of Peter Shilton’s all-time appearances record made plenty of superb saves during Flu’s title tilt. Given that he doesn’t have any caps for Brazil, there’s less of a case for him to get called up now, but it’s baffling that he never got called up when he was key to Cruzeiro’s 2013-14 title-winning teams, for instance. Hércules and Matheus Martinelli both strike me more as the kind of guys who get inordinate hype from one or two noteworthy goals at a big tournament, but damned if those goals weren’t nice. Hércules in particular offered some serious fresh energy as a second-half sub (replacing Martinelli in both the games in which he scored, against Inter and Al Ahli).

And lastly, a shoutout to Paulinho (the good one). He played with a stress fracture in his leg that caused him immense pain and limited him to 30-40 minutes per game, but he nonetheless was often the only part of Palmeiras’ attack that ever seemed to work. His movement and industry sparked their comeback against Inter Miami, and he scored a clutch extra-time winner in the round of 16 against Botafogo, after which Abel promptly subbed him out. Watching him in the defeat to Chelsea, he came closer than any of his teammates to equalizing.

Paulinho finally had his leg operated on once Palmeiras’ tournament run ended. I’m hoping he’ll return better than ever. Maybe there’s a parallel there to Brazilian football as a whole. After some rough years, the nation emerged from the Club World Cup looking better than it has in a long time.

  1. Maybe Memphis to Corinthians isn’t the best example, because as we’re discovering in real time right now, that club is not well-run. ↩︎
  2. Renato is undeniably a blowhard, and also one of those insular, “why does Brazil need to look at the rest of the world?” establishment types I bemoaned earlier, so it’d be really fun to believe that Thiago Silva’s halftime tactical suggestions were in fact what won Fluminense the game. But I have to be fair: the man is a genuinely pretty good coach. Plus, he produced the Club World Cup’s best moment of shithousing, when he casually kicked a ball off its little sideline dais as Henrikh Mkhitaryan went to take a quick throw-in. ↩︎