It is February 2026, and the Brazil national team slumbers still through international football’s comically long (northern hemisphere) winter hibernation. The memories of the Seleção’s last games in November have begun to fade; it is still a little too early to be thinking too hard about the upcoming end-of-March games against France and Croatia. And yet, it is beyond time to be worrying about what the heck will happen at the World Cup in June.

More so than in the leadup to any other World Cup I can remember, it is wildly unclear what, if anything, we should expect from Brazil this summer. The entire cycle since Qatar 2022 has been an unmitigated disaster, with the scandal-ridden CBF administration thrusting one incompetent coach after another into the Seleção job1 to the tune of several historic losses—right up until, somehow, just before his rampant corruption and comical mismanagement finally toppled him, federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues actually managed to sign Carlo Ancelotti as Brazil’s new coach.

Signing one of the best coaches of the 21st century understandably lifted the general mood. Brazil’s results have improved since Ancelotti took over, the team officially qualified for the World Cup with games to spare (though things might still have been hairy if not for the expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams, which increased the number of automatic qualifying spots in CONMEBOL from four to six), and the draw put us in a very winnable group with a potentially clear path through the knockout rounds until (checks notes) oh great, a possible quarterfinal rematch with Croatia.

But I want to delay worrying about that for just a little longer. Instead, I’ll be kicking off 2026 by digging into the current state of the Seleção and the burning questions still surrounding the team ahead of the World Cup.

And what better place to begin than:

So how is Carlo Ancelotti doing?

Is it fair to feel a bit concerned?

There’s no doubt that in taking the Brazil job when he did, Ancelotti put himself into an incredibly unenviable position. He had to straighten out a team whose play had spiraled under the mismanagement of Dorival Júnior, Fernando Diniz, and Ramon Menezes into the catastrophic, immediately get them playing well enough enough to secure a World Cup qualification that was by then likely but not guaranteed, and in those games plus only a handful afterward settle on a group of players to take to the World Cup, not to mention drill them into an actually functional team before the tournament. A year to do that all doesn’t seem like an impossible task, but with the vagaries of international football that means Ancelotti will have coached just 10 games by the time he has to name his World Cup team.

With that in mind, there’s plenty to praise. The team undeniably looks better, if not always as good as we’d like. The defense is conceding goals at about half the rate they did under Dorival, without an equivalent drop in goals scored. Even Brazil’s more questionable performances under Ancelotti are very excusable. His two losses, to Japan and Bolivia, both came when he named a heavily rotated starting XI to observe more players. And, because there’s a “but…” coming, I must emphasize: in its best moments, this team has played some really lovely and exciting football with beautiful interplay between our forwards. Case in point, the first half against Senegal, where we rocketed forward every chance we got and scored twice and hit the woodwork twice more:

That was some of the best football I’ve seen from Brazil all cycle, and surely a template for what Ancelotti thinks is the best way to win with this team: four high-quality forwards with the sort of deep understanding that lets them combine and work the ball up the pitch at lightning speed, with a well-coordinated high press to create chances in transition and hedge against the two-man midfield getting exposed. Dorival Júnior can pretend his tenure with the Seleção wasn’t that different,2 but his team never, ever played like this. It was lovely to watch, and if we can produce this sort of thing every game, we can go far at the World Cup.

BUT…

You don’t have to look far to see the cracks start appearing; in fact, you just have to keep watching the video above until it gets to the second half. As I’ve lamented for years, Brazil so rarely play two good halves of football in the same game, and here the intensity and attacking verve really dropped off after the break. Though we still handily dispatched the soon-to-be AFCON champions, we then dropped an absolute clunker against an ostensibly weaker Tunisia side in which our only decent scoring chances were a couple of VAR-assisted penalties and a last-second bit of Estêvão heroism that clipped the far post. And in those three halves, and the games before them, I saw Brazil haunted by the same problems as always, even with someone of Ancelotti’s caliber in the dugout:

  • For as effortlessly as we can sometimes make it to the edge of the box, we so often have a desperate time trying to create clear shooting opportunities.
  • When we can’t immediately set up a good shot, we’re frustratingly quick to just shoot willy-nilly from outside the box.
  • While all our forwards resort to tunnel-vision hero ball to some degree, Rodrygo has an especially bad case of it.
  • Somebody in defense completely shits the bed at least once in what feels like every game.

Then there’s the issue of formation. Ancelotti named his first Brazil XI with a three-man midfield of Casemiro, Bruno Guimarães, and Gerson, but just five days later he found himself where every Brazil coach has for a good five years now: two proper midfielders behind four players who are undeniably forwards by trade. The dreaded 4-2-4.

Now, I think this is inherently a bad thing, and I’ll expound on that, but first let me present some valid counterarguments. The foremost of these is that the results speak for themselves: Ancelotti has started with three men in midfield on three occasions (yes, I’m counting Lucas Paquetá as a midfielder, and I’ll explain later why that matters), in which Brazil drew once and lost twice (albeit with heavily rotated lineups in both those games), whereas in the five games where he lined up with just two midfielders, we have four wins and one draw. Maybe, even if it feels like it goes against all my personal instincts, this really is the best way to make this collection of players win games. I suppose it does make some sense: the talent pool is absolutely loaded with quality forwards, whereas Casemiro and Bruno might be our only two midfielders who deserve to exist anywhere near the term “world class”. Some of our forwards are also particularly gifted athletes (I’m thinking Raphinha, Vinícius, and tentatively Estêvão and Endrick) with the speed and stamina to create an effective high press or drop deep to supplement the numbers in the middle. More generally, the distinction between forward and midfielder can be fuzzy at times, and players often thrive playing a much higher or deeper role than anyone expected.

But forgive me if I still have alarm bells going off in my head whenever I see a 4-2-4. Some of it is principle, but I mostly owe my skepticism to painful experience. All too often in the past few years Brazil has demonstrated why a 4-2-4 doesn’t work. The midfielders end up overwhelmed and struggle to properly shield the back line. The defense and midfield find themselves unable to get the ball forward with any sort of consistency. The attack and defense become visibly separated from each other, resulting in your classic broken team. Never has this been more clear than in my favorite and most painful example, the 2022 World Cup quarterfinal loss to Croatia. I have always believed that we owe much of our loss in that game to fielding only Casemiro and Paquetá in midfield, allowing Croatia’s three men to dominate the sector and stifle our ability to get the ball up to our forwards—something that only felt like more of a misstep after Argentina, fielding a proper midfield three, tore through that same Croatian setup with ease in the semifinal. Yes, that was under Tite, and many of the worst examples we’ve seen of Brazil playing 4-2-4 have come under coaches far less capable than Ancelotti, but we also saw these same issues in Brazil’s very most recent game.

(I do want to come to Lucas Paquetá’s defense for a second, and I can’t believe I’m writing those words. Part of the reason why 4-2-4s seem feasible at all is that positions are fuzzy. Forwards can drop deep or be primarily used to open up spaces for their teammates; midfielders can play in the attacking line or even at striker, or line up in midfield but be most valuable in how they show up in the box to score. But I think this is more likely to flow one way than the other: it’s more likely that a midfielder can be used effectively as a forward than a forward used as a midfielder, and this is simply because midfield play requires a set of skills that are hard to acquire without actually playing as a midfielder. A forward dropping deep to collect the ball doesn’t really learn how to read the opposition, block passing lanes, or set the tempo; an attacking midfielder playing on the wing is presumably doing so because he already has the technical ability to beat a man, play a precise cross, slip in a teammate, curl one in from distance, what have you—see Bernardo or David Silva, Andrés Iniesta, or our own Philippe Coutinho when Tite played him as a winger rather than one of the midfield three. And all this is why Paquetá, who often behaves like more of a forward, is still not just a better midfielder, but an actual midfielder, in a way that someone like Raphinha or Rodrygo isn’t: he has extensive experience actually playing the position, even if it’s arguable how well he plays it.)

Still, the specter of the 4-2-4 lingers, and, strangely, its presence seems to be at least in part the result of a conscious decision from on high within the CBF. We’ve seen it rear its ugly head at U23 level and younger, often as the seeming last resort when a more traditional starting XI finds its back against the wall (it rarely improves matters, but perhaps that speaks more to the fallibility of the coaches and the available game plans), and in the women’s team too, where Arthur Elias (whose silver-medal-winning Olympic campaign has earned him years of benefit of the doubt, to be clear) has often called up teams with just four or five listed midfielders. (He did this again just last week!) Brazil has a well-documented problem with producing quality midfielders,3 but this risks perpetuating a vicious cycle. Why develop midfielders if they’re not wanted at the Seleção level?

And has this systemic mentality affected Ancelotti? After all, he almost immediately moved away from a more typical (for him) three-man midfield to a 4-2-4. Still, again, the 4-2-4 seems to be working better, at least so far. But even if they have no say in his tactics, I get the uneasy sense that Ancelotti is more beholden to the CBF establishment around him than he should be. This comes across mainly in his player selections. While he’s done a great job of calling up and getting a look at almost everybody who deserves a look (48 players in just four squads), some of his choices have the whiff of “somebody else recommended him” about them. Why is Bento, who is playing fairly unremarkably in Saudi Arabia and hasn’t exactly been outstanding in his Brazil appearances, still the apparent third-choice goalkeeper, other than that he got some attention when he played for Athletico Paranaense two years ago? Why is Fabrício Bruno still not just being called after his horror show against Japan, but seeing playing time, other than that he’s been on some of the most successful Brasileirão teams of the past couple years?4 What are Danilo and Alex Sandro still doing in the Brazil setup when they’ll be 35 this summer and weren’t great for Brazil even when they were younger, other than that they’ve been playing for a very successful Flamengo team? (This goes double for Danilo, who’s been used as a center-back, one of the positions where we have the most depth.) Does Murillo, one of our most promising center-backs, deserve to have been totally frozen out after a nightmare performance against Argentina under the tutelage of the clueless Dorival Júnior? Ancelotti is drinking through a firehose when it comes to assessing Brazil’s talent pool, and with the tight turnaround between his last game for Real Madrid and his first with Brazil, he leant on CBF coordinators Rodrigo Caetano and Juan to compile on his behalf a long list of players from which to choose his first callup. I have no way to prove it, but I feel like he’s still leaning on them, and they’re overvaluing Brazil-based players as Brazil-based football knowers often do. (Or maybe I’m guilty of underestimating just how good Brazilian club football has gotten.)

That aside, I have a concern specific to Ancelotti himself, and it’s that he’ll play favorites towards some of his old charges even when they don’t deserve it. Right now this is mainly aimed at Vini Jr. and Rodrygo, whom he coached at Real Madrid; while they’re both excellent players, and their chemistry at club level is a great asset to transfer to the Seleção, they’re also both players who haven’t been anywhere near their best for a while. (Hopefully Vini has emerged from his slump; Rodrygo seems like he’s regressing back into his after a mini-revival last month.) Of course, as James Rodríguez will happily tell you, certain players can always be trusted to deliver for their national team even when their club form is nonexistent, but Vini has never quite lived up to that hype for Brazil, and Rodrygo has regressed into those frustrating tunnel-vision tendencies over the last year and a half or so. All this while Raphinha and Estêvão have delivered more consistently for Brazil, and while we could certainly fit all four of them into the same lineup in this system (if they’re ever all healthy at the same time), I can’t help but worry that Ancelotti will make any changes at the expense of the latter two even if the Madrid duo aren’t thriving.

Then there’s Richarlison, who knows Ancelotti from their Everton days, and while I love the guy, and I may even make a possibly half-hearted argument for his presence at the World Cup later on, it’s just hard to justify his being included in all four of Ancelotti’s callups so far, when he hasn’t scored in any of them (nor for Brazil since the 2022 World Cup) and we desperately need to find some kind of reliable goalscoring center-forward if we possibly can.

BUT.

For all my grousing, I want to end on a note of genuine hopefulness here. That first half we saw against Senegal? That setup, with four of our best forwards in a devastating high press and flying forward in transition, Estêvão playing like a multiyear veteran rather than a literal teenager, Éder Militão finally used as a right-back and absolutely thriving… that genuinely felt like a model for how we could win the World Cup. It is, I’ll admit, an unbelievably fragile model, both because we haven’t sustained that level of play for a whole tournament or even a whole 90 minutes and because it seems extremely dependent on Militão, whose physique is basically that of the guy with glass bones and paper skin from SpongeBob SquarePants.

Still, I live in hope. But you may be asking, what makes my hopes so reliant on Militão, a man who has already ruptured both of his ACLs and may only return from his latest injury in April? Well, that leads me right into our next question:

How does our current talent pool look?

I’m actually going to wait a bit to address the Militão question so I can go position-by-position here. This piece is anarchic enough as it is; I need some structure to it where I can find it.

So, first off…

GOALKEEPER

…where I’m worrying we might have something of a problem brewing.

There’s always been something very vibes-based about assessing a goalie’s ability and performance. A spectacular save in a comfortable win doesn’t mean as much as a flub in a closer game; a big number of saves doesn’t say much if they were all comfortable shots right into the keeper’s body. Even modern stats don’t feel like they capture the whole picture. (You’re telling me Thibaut Courtois only saved a net 1.85 goals in the 2021-22 Champions League? And he was underwater before saving 2.50 expected goals in the final? That… well, now that I think about Real Madrid’s run that season, it doesn’t seem that outlandish.) And, speaking for myself at least, I don’t often find myself tuning into Liverpool to study Alisson (let alone Fenerbahçe for Ederson). I catch highlights, or watch them when they play for Brazil; I get bits and pieces at most, and I form a bit of a gut feeling.

And I think it’s the same gut feeling that some of us on this blog have had for a while now. There’s a sense, unfair or not, that Alisson hasn’t shown up for Brazil when we really needed him to, that he should’ve done better on Belgium’s two goals in 2018 or gotten a hand to Bruno Petković’s deflected shot in 2022, and there’s also quite robust evidence that he isn’t a particularly outstanding saver of penalties, in an era when Croatia and Argentina have made it to the final partly on the back of goalkeepers who made multiple saves in penalty shootouts along the way. Still, he’s undeniably been very solid for Liverpool for a long time, except… has he? When I watch highlights from this season, I find myself noticing moments where I can’t help but feel like Alisson could be doing better. Sometimes it’s ultimately harmless, like parrying a shot back into the six-yard box that nobody’s close enough to pounce on. At other times, it’s something a little more consequential but hardly egregious, like letting two straight goals in between his legs, which doesn’t seem great to me, a guy who has never played goalie and has no idea what he’s talking about. But then sometimes he just does stuff like this. And the stats actually back me up here: he’s having his worst season since SofaScore began tracking expected goals prevented, with a minus-2.31 xG only two-thirds of the way through the season. (It was an even worse minus-3.34 when I first wrote this section, but a couple clean sheets since have made it slightly less terrible.) In fact, after a 2022-23 season in which he saved an astronomical 8.52 goals more than expected, his numbers have become considerably more pedestrian.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear if we have a better option. Ederson isn’t better than Alisson in the ways that I think would really benefit Brazil, and the other players Ancelotti has called don’t exactly thrill me: I’ve made it clear already that I don’t rate Bento; John Victor’s brief time at Nottingham Forest is already marred by this horror show that it seems badly injured his knee; and Hugo Souza was pretty dire in his start against Japan, though his height and proven penalty shootout pedigree may merit him another chance as our very own Tim Krul. Beyond them, who else is there? Maybe Gabriel Brazão, but he’s not exactly keeping Santos out of the various basements of the Brasileirão and Paulistão. João Pedro’s superb U-17 World Cup, in which he saved three penalties in each of two consecutive knockout-round games, hints at a promising future, but given how goalies develop he probably won’t be a viable option until the 2034 World Cup.

CENTER-BACK

Here we’re spoiled for riches, though even riches can be finite. The main concern here might simply be the susceptibility of our stars to injury. Éder Militão might be the most crucial piece of our back line, but he’s made of glass and he hurt himself once again against Tunisia. Gabriel Magalhães, Bremer, and Alexsandro Ribeiro all had monthslong injury layoffs in the last year. Still, if these four are healthy, the biggest question is simply whether there’s any reason to select anyone for the position besides them and Marquinhos. (There are some question marks around Bremer and Alexsandro, who haven’t played very much recently for Brazil, but they seem to have higher ceilings than anybody else in the picture.)

And is there a case for recalling Thiago Silva? He’ll be almost 42 come the World Cup, and lord knows he was already physically fragile when he was younger, but he’s back playing in Europe, and he proved at last summer’s Club World Cup that he can still defend at the highest level and inspire a locker room.

Maybe I just wanted an excuse to post that again. I’d certainly take him or Murillo (who’s probably out of the picture because of his disastrous Argentina game) ahead of Fabrício Bruno or Léo Ortiz or Danilo or any other veteran center-back who’s currently plying their trade in Brazil.

THE FULLBACK POSITIONS

These, by contrast, are a bleak wasteland, but there are at least glimmers of hope on the right. Militão, if he’s fit, would seem to be not just our best option, but a genuinely good one (and isn’t it sad that he’s the only option at either right- or left-back I can say that about). I don’t know enough about Paulo Henrique to say whether he’s actually good, but it is odd that he didn’t get recalled in November after scoring against Japan on his debut. I say give him another shot! Nobody else but Militão has done anything worth a damn as a right-back—certainly not Vanderson, for whom I originally had high hopes.

Things get darker at left-back. The continued selection of Alex Sandro suddenly doesn’t seem that bad when you consider his competition. No one we’ve tried at left-back has looked anything other than replacement-level. Nobody has made a notable contribution in attack. Some have defended worse than others, but nobody has defended outstandingly well. We got excited about Carlos Augusto and Caio Henrique, but they too have done nothing to really distinguish themselves. Alex Sandro may well end up starting at the World Cup by simple dint of having been there before.

But there is one chaos option to consider. There is somebody else we’ve tried at right-back, somebody who initially showed promise before melting down catastrophically. That somebody would be Wesley, and wouldn’t you just know it, more often than not this season he’s played on the left for Roma.

This is the thinnest of limbs to go out on. As is often the case with our fullbacks who seem promising at club level and then disappoint with the Seleção, he plays for Roma as a wingback ahead of a back three, which helps him focus on his greatest strength, bombing forward like crazy without worrying so much about being at home defensively. (And we’ve already seen him struggle defensively as part of Brazil’s back four.) But as I’ve said elsewhere, he’s such an outstanding athlete, and our options in these positions are otherwise so thin, that it’d be a shame not to find a place for him somewhere. In the kingdom of the blind, might as well see if you can make something of the man who can run really fast. Is that how that proverb goes? I forget. Just like Wesley forgets to get back in position defensively. Ha!

(Seriously, though, can you make a better case for anybody else at left back?)

THE MIDFIELD PICTURE

Hmm. Well.

I’ve already talked at length about why this two-man midfield approach makes me uneasy. But I must also acknowledge that we just… don’t have many outstanding midfielders right now. Ancelotti recalled Fabinho for the November games. Fabinho! He’s not that old, but he hadn’t been called up since Qatar, and he’s been playing in Saudi Arabia since 2023.

To quote Jon Bois, his presence reeks of panic.

Do we really have nobody better? Especially to back up Casemiro? If there’s one inevitability about the upcoming World Cup, it’s that Casemiro will pick up two yellow cards and get himself suspended. (With the extra game in the round of 32, it’s possible it could even happen twice.) We’ve seen what happens when Casemiro is suspended for a crucial knockout game, and more than ever we really don’t have an obvious backup to fall back on. Andrey Santos seems to be enjoying a resurgence at Chelsea under Liam Rosenior, and he’s been a consistent inclusion in Ancelotti’s squads when fit, but he’s also not a true midfield destroyer and hasn’t yet really thrived for Brazil. Éderson checks at least some of the same boxes as Casemiro, but he appeared in Ancelotti’s first squad, didn’t actually see the field, and hasn’t been called up since, so you have to wonder if Carlo saw something he didn’t like in training. Lucas Paquetá seems to be embracing a return to a deeper role, but he’s certainly not the same kind of player.

I do at least have a degree of confidence in our starters. Casemiro is Casemiro, even if he’s not as athletic as he once was, and Bruno Guimarães has emerged as an excellent midfielder in the midst of a stellar season for Newcastle, where he is the club’s top scorer in the Premier League. But even here we have reason for concern. A few weeks back, somebody here posted an unconfirmed tweet claiming that Ancelotti was looking to only bring four or five midfielders to the World Cup, despite the expanded 26-man squads FIFA introduced for Qatar being in place once again. Again, this is unconfirmed and The Site Formerly Known As Twitter has hardly Since Become Known For Accurate Information, but it does track with what Ancelotti has done so far; he only called up five midfielders for both the September and November games.

Perhaps this is understandable given the dearth of clear options, but still—choosing so few midfielders would be essentially buying an engagement ring for the 4-2-4 approach. In all likelihood, at some point we’ll need to shore up the numbers to take control of a game, and in that case we’ll really need an actual midfielder or two who can do the job. (As I noted earlier, I don’t think we can trust a Rodrygo or Raphinha to operate effectively as a midfielder.) Not only that, but there’s a good case to be made that we may need a three-man midfield to get the best out of Casemiro now that he’s not nearly as mobile as he once was; he and Manchester United may well owe their recent improvement to new manager Michael Carrick abandoning Ruben Amorim’s eclectic 3-4-1-2 for a system that lets them play three true midfielders.

Meanwhile on Bruno’s side, he’s been such a critical piece for Newcastle this season that he’s been playing almost every available minute, and that recently led to him suffering a fairly significant injury. He should be back well before the World Cup, fingers crossed, but he’ll miss the March friendlies. This’ll give us a chance to see whether anybody else can hop into the midfield pair and still make it work, or whether it working at all is entirely dependent on these two specific guys staying healthy and avoiding yellow card suspensions. And it’ll also let us bring in a name or two who may not have gotten a look otherwise.

So who else should be in consideration? Gerson and Andreas Pereira have both gotten a look under Ancelotti; neither is world-changing or anything, but both have proven themselves at a fairly high level. Pereira is the slightly more attacking option, and might be the best bet should we ever want to bring a true midfielder into that number 10 slot to properly get three men in the middle of the park (he’s also great at delivering set pieces, it’s worth noting). Gerson’s random six-month stay (a “$abbatica£”, if you will) with Zenit St. Petersburg probably hurts his case somewhat. Douglas Luiz is kind of in the same boat as them: another talented and useful player who nonetheless never really reached the heights we might have hoped. I don’t really see him as a good backup to Casemiro—he’s too short—but he’s more familiar with the role than the other two, and we do need somebody who can fill in there. Others in contention have either proven themselves to not be good enough (Joelinton, João Gomes, André) or I simply don’t know enough about them (Jean Lucas).

One name I would like to throw out there is Danilo, now playing for Botafogo. I have to wonder what heights he might have reached had he not broken his leg at Nottingham Forest. He is only now recapturing his pre-injury form, but we’re starting to get glimpses of the player who once looked set to emerge.

Plus… do we really have many better options?

And guess what other position we can say that about?

THE SEARCH FOR A STRIKER

Working on this piece has been slow going for reasons both sensible and not, but in my procrastinations, this was actually the first section I worked on, as I found myself with a lot to say on the ongoing question of whether Brazil could produce even a halfway-decent striker.

Well, since then, something unbelievable happened: all of Brazil’s striker options started playing well! (All the ones in Europe, anyway.) I’m as shocked as you. Igor Thiago’s 17 goals are already the most any Brazil-born player not named Diego Costa has ever managed in a Premier League season, and we’re only two-thirds of the way through this one. Endrick moved to Lyon on loan in January, and repaid the club’s decision to actually give him playing time with five goals and two assists (and became the youngest Brazilian to score a hat-trick in Europe, shattering a record previously held by Ronaldo) in his first four games. Matheus Cunha, after a slow start at Manchester United, is starting to do stuff like this every week. João Pedro keeps scoring impressive goals for Chelsea; he and Thiago are fourth and second on the Premier League scoring chart, respectively. Even Gabriel Jesus, finally recovered from his torn ACL, is scoring all of a sudden (four goals in ten his last games, but still!)

This could, of course, all be a mirage. Since my first draft of the above paragraphs, Endrick went and got himself a silly red card, Cunha’s now on a two-game goalless drought, and Thiago has managed just one goal—a penalty—in his last five games. JP is the only one whose form hasn’t wobbled in recent weeks—in fact he’s showing sides of his game I didn’t even know he had, and cementing his case for deserving to be considered as an actual number 9, not just a second striker enjoying a purple patch:

…but he’s also the striker about whom I have the most lingering doubts. Every time he’s played for Brazil, he’s looked utterly out of sync with his teammates, like he’s playing FIFA5 on dial-up internet.

He and Cunha also still remind me too much of the archetypal “good at everything but scoring goals” center forward of which Gabriel Jesus is the best example. JP may be playing his way out of that categorization, but his historic goalscoring stats aren’t all that great, and that’s despite him basically doubling his numbers for Brighton by being really good at scoring penalties (something he no longer does, being part of Cole Palmer’s team); forgive me if I’d like to see this production maintained for a much longer period before I’m convinced. Cunha’s two double-digit seasons for Wolverhampton still feel like exception, rather than the rule, as for Atlético Madrid and Manchester United he’s either missed a boatload of big chances or simply not gotten himself into position to score too many goals. The recent improvement is exciting, partly because he seems to be the sort of player who really needs to be “feeling it” to play anywhere near his best.

There’s another type of center forward we see all too often: the striker that you get really excited about because you never really watched them but they put up great numbers for a club in a more obscure league. This year’s big disappointment in that regard has been Rômulo, who joined RB Leipzig in the offseason on the back of a 16-goal haul for Göztepe, and has since managed an unremarkable six goals in 19 games, joining a long line of players who absolutely could not repeat their success from lesser European leagues at the top level. (Remember Arthur Cabral? Remember Carlos Vinícius? Remember Wesley Moraes? Luiz Adriano? Evanilson? …I guess Evanilson could still come good.)

I bring this up because Igor Thiago could be the rare graduate from this unfortunate school. Stellar for Club Brugge two seasons back,6 he has overcome an injury-nightmare first season at Brentford to emerge as the second-highest scorer in the Premier League in his second season.7 If there’s anybody who deserves a first look for the Seleção before the World Cup, it might very well be this guy. He’s big (6’3″, 1.90m) and strong and fast enough to be a force whether bearing down on goal or with his back to it. He can run onto through balls or poach goals in the box, and even when coming deeper he has the presence and vision to set up goals for his teammates. Ryan O’Hanlon of ESPN notes that he’s maybe “the best defensive forward in the league”, better than anybody else at winning the ball in dangerous areas, which would make him a great fit for the high press Ancelotti seems to be implementing. It all adds up to exactly the sort of profile I’d love to see in our starting striker. Still, for all the goals he scores, every time I sit down to watch him it seems to be for a game in which he doesn’t score. I’ll see him shooting wide on presentable chances or getting caught waiting too long to pull the trigger.

Still, if your national team continues to be lacking for a reliable goalscorer, how long would you refuse to give a chance to the second-top scorer in the Premier League?

I must also shout out a few intriguing options in the Brazilian league. Kaio Jorge and Vitor Roque were the top and third-best goalscorers in the Brasileirão, with 21 and 16 goals respectively, and the latter even looked good in his cameo for Brazil against Tunisia. Unfortunately, it’s easy to make a solid case against both of them. For Kaio, it’s that he’s never been anything like this prolific at any prior point in his career (it’s the first time he’s ever reached 10 goals in all competitions), and it’s not like 21 goals is even all that remarkable a tally in the Brasileirão. Gabigol scored 25 one year and we all know how little he contributed to the national team. (And like Gabigol, Kaio flopped very badly in his only foray into Europe.) Vitor Roque has some of the same “flopped in Europe” stink about him (though he scored more goals in his one year in Europe than those other two did in four years combined) but my bigger qualm with him is that he might be one of those “good at everything but scoring goals” center forwards we’re producing in such numbers these days. He’s probably more athletic than Gabriel Jesus, and almost certainly a better finisher at this point, but much like the Arsenal man, his energy is often spent running the channels rather than bearing down on goal, and his huge miss in the Copa Libertadores final will haunt him for a while.

Despite some of this newfound optimism, however, we still don’t have anything close to an established number 9. Igor Jesus equalizing at the end of the first half against Chile in October 2024 remains the last time anybody wearing a shirt with a 9 in the number scored for Brazil. That’s right: it has yet to happen under Ancelotti. (Since I mentioned him: despite the occasional huge goal and a strong Europa League campaign, Igor Jesus isn’t nearly prolific enough to warrant serious consideration in my book.) There’s almost no time left to find someone; we pretty much have one more dart to throw at the board and hope we get anywhere near a bullseye. And that is why, in an early version of this article, I found myself making a case for an old friend:

I do not think Richarlison represents a good option at this point, but I think we still need to discuss him. Mainly this is because, as an old charge of Ancelotti’s, the Italian has continued to call him up and give him playing time despite him doing next to nothing. (His goalless drought for Brazil has now reached three years.) I don’t think it would be a good thing if he were to make the World Cup squad ahead of several other options I’ve discussed, but it could very much still happen. And back when all of the other options were playing worse than they are now (and Richarlison wasn’t himself injured), I began to bandy a case in my head for why our favorite golden retriever, himbo, dumb-as-rocks-but-with-a-heart-of-gold footballer might actually be a worthwhile option.

Here is that case. It begins by pointing out that, for a time this season, Richarlison actually had more Premier League goals from open play than Igor Thiago, whose impressive numbers are bolstered by six penalties. (In fact, even now Richarlison’s minutes-per-open-play goal number in the league is 185.7, a notch better than Igor’s 208.5. João Pedro’s goal yesterday morning brought him level with Igor’s 11 non-penalty goals and bumped his scoring rate up to a clean 180.0.) This for a Tottenham team that’s been, well, a total fucking mess. (Perhaps being injured for some of the worst of that mess ended up helping Richarlison’s scoring rate.) In short, the man is still producing at a decent rate for his club.

From there, consider the national team. No, Richarlison hasn’t produced for Brazil recently, but neither has anybody else. As already mentioned, João Pedro has been bafflingly awful in his Seleção appearances, Matheus Cunha has been better recently but still only has one goal in 19 caps, and Igor Thiago hasn’t had a chance yet, though he hopefully might next month. Say Igor gets called for next month’s games at Richarlison’s expense and neither he nor any other striker candidate does anything of note against France or Croatia. We should still want someone with the profile of a number 9 in the team, someone we can send the ball to in the hope that he can turn an improbable opening in the box into a goal. Richarlison has proven that he can do this:

His 2022 World Cup was the best campaign by a Brazilian striker since at least 2006. (I know that’s a low bar, but he had more goal involvements in fewer minutes than Luís Fabiano in 2010, and Fabiano’s own unbelievable World Cup goal would not have stood in the age of VAR.) He is Brazil’s top active goalscorer outside of Neymar.8 In a scenario where nobody else has proven that they can produce for Brazil right now, it may not be a bad idea to turn to someone who has produced for Brazil in spectacular fashion.

Pondering this argument also made me think about the concept of a player’s “floor” and “ceiling”. Some players are more consistent than they are spectacular, or the reverse. To return to an earlier example, Alisson, who’s never outright thrown away a Brazil game in the way someone like Júlio César did several times, might have a high floor, but because he never quite seems to make that tricky clutch save that might have prevented a painful knockout loss, maybe his ceiling isn’t as high as someone like Dibu Martínez, whose occasional clangers belie a lower floor but who also was absolutely massive for Argentina when it really mattered.9 To bring this back to strikers, pretty much everybody we’ve tried has a pretty low floor. Richarlison’s might be the lowest of the bunch, in fact. When he’s having an off day, he looks like he’s never touched the ball in the box in his life. But he also has a very high ceiling, demonstrably higher than most of his competition. Igor Thiago isn’t exactly scoring acrobatic spinning scissor kicks over here, and while João Pedro’s ceiling seems like it could be higher, he’s never shown it for the Seleção, for whom his floor is in about the fifth or sixth circle of Hell by my estimate.

Endrick, though? I want to believe that that kid’s ceiling is up in the exosphere and that he’ll render this whole conversation moot.

WINGERS AND THE NEYMAR QUESTION

The Winter Olympics almost made me wish football worked more like ice hockey and we could swap our players in and out at will, because nowhere are we more loaded than in the vague constellation of positions you can call “forward”. Maybe it’s the ridiculously stacked lines the US and Canada men’s teams were able to put together by combining all the superstars that salary caps keep from playing on the same NHL teams that have me dreaming, but… what if we indulged in a little fantasy here? What would Brazil’s lines look like? I promise I’m going somewhere with this. (I’m also imagining four forwards per line instead of the three in hockey.)

First line: Vini, Endrick, Rodrygo (CAM), Estêvão. Already this is a bit of a flight of fancy, hoping that Endrick will be first-line good by the summer, but this takes advantage of the chemistry at club level between him and Estêvão as well as Vini and Rodrygo (who in this fantasy is playing as the 10).

Second line: Raphinha, João Pedro, Matheus Cunha (CAM), Antony. If we play our cards right, we can build a second straight line around a recent Ballon D’Or contender. I have no idea if Cunha and JP could play together effectively, but this is more about setting a hierarchy than theorizing about chemistry.

Third line: Gabriel Martinelli, Igor Thiago, Lucas Paquetá, Luiz Henrique. Perhaps I overplayed my hand by putting Rodrygo as a number 10 instead of a left winger. Martinelli represents a fair downgrade at winger. (Interestingly, I remember Paquetá playing really well as an improvised left winger in a 4-1 win over Uruguay some years back.) But this already represents more attacking depth than we might be able to squeeze into a World Cup squad, and that’s pretty cool.

Fourth line: Neymar, Vitor Roque, Andreas Pereira, Rayan. That’s right, I Trojan horsed you all! This was the other intention here, aside from putting some numbers to our depth in attack: if, if, he were to return to something approaching match fitness, where would Neymar rank in this depth chart?

I am getting way ahead of myself, I know. Whether it was getting involved in shady deals with right-wing politicians, sleeping around on his partners, fathering an unreasonable number of children in a short time, or just playing way too many video games, Neymar spent pretty much two whole years after his 2023 ACL tear acting more like Elon Musk than a professional footballer.10 His highly-touted return to Santos hasn’t gone as planned for either player, who took months to score a goal from open play, or club, which flirted with relegation from not just the Brasileirão but the São Paulo state championship. But, late last year, when Santos found themselves in the drop zone with just five games to play, it was Neymar, fighting through the pain of yet another injury, who dug deep and scored the goals that got them out of danger.

It was in this stretch that I saw the first signs—still only the very first signs—that Neymar still had something to offer. His injuries have robbed him of much of the game-changing explosiveness he once had, and while his technical genius will never fully abandon him, it is far less effective when he isn’t quick enough to buy himself a yard. But at the very end of the year, I saw glimmers of what was once his most underrated quality: his knack for running off the ball to create scoring chances.

Of course, then he had to have surgery on this latest injury, though he has since returned to playing. So once again, I am going out on a very thin limb on a presumably quite unhappy tree in suggesting that Neymar even deserves to be in the conversation to be considered for a World Cup spot. I am certainly guilty of imagining Neymar the idealized memory of his former glory rather than Neymar the actual footballer who only recently seems to have learned how to run again. Putting him even in the fourth line of my little hockey depth chart might be a stretch. And yet, how much of his former athleticism would need to have survived for him to seem a far more appealing left wing prospect than Martinelli, or a more appealing CAM than Paquetá? There are things he can do that nobody else in the picture can, things that will remain in his arsenal even if his speed and shot power have left him.

In any case, in the real world, we don’t really have squad space for much more than two hypothetical lines’ worth of attackers.11 And does Neymar really deserve consideration above anybody in those first two lines?

Concluding with a brief look ahead

Brazil’s last two games before the tournament will be good tests, against teams that each finished on the podium (or better) in each of the last two World Cups. It will be a particularly excellent test of the viability of our two-midfielder setup—can we effectively slow down France’s boatload of fast, dynamic forwards, and can we compete with Croatia’s ever-potent midfield? And can we do these without a player as instrumental as Bruno Guimarães?

After that, we’ll next see Brazil play after the World Cup squad has been selected. They’ll play Panama at the Maracanã on May 31, then travel to the US, where they’ll be staying in New Jersey. Globo helpfully gave out the details for stalkers enthusiastic fans: the delegation is renting out the entirety of Verizon’s private, security-gated corporate hotel in Basking Ridge (I assume it will be very difficult for fans to get anywhere close to the players there, which is probably for the best), and they’ll train at the New York Red Bulls training facility in Morris Township. So, uh, stalk away, or hopefully they’ll at least have a training session open to the public.

Anyways, from there they play a final friendly against Egypt in Cleveland on June 6, a week before the group stage opener against 2022 semifinalists Morocco back east at the famous New York/New Jersey Stadium (I guess MetLife didn’t pay up?) Morocco are a seriously strong team benefiting from excellent youth development and a well-managed federation; Achraf Hakimi being their only true household name belies just how good they are. Still, they suffered what I believe the kids would call an unbelievable aura loss moment in January’s AFCON final, when Brahim Díaz attempted one of the worst Panenkas in history at the end of regulation and then Senegal, who’d walked off the field in protest after the penalty was given, scored the winner in extra time. Sometimes those moments bring teams together; sometimes they kill entire dynasties. Come June, we may see which was true of Morocco. This is a high-stakes opener because it’ll likely determine who wins the group, and thus who avoids potential early-knockout-round opponents like the Netherlands and Norway.

From there, it’s off to Philadelphia for a June 19 game against Haiti, which I could see going one of two ways. It looks on paper like one of the biggest cupcake games Brazil has ever had in the World Cup; in our only two meetings with them, we’ve won 6-0 and 7-1, and I would love for something similar to happen here, simply because a nice, fun, big World Cup win doesn’t come too often.12 Of course, North Korea looked on paper like quite the cupcake game in 2010 and they ended up giving us a tough enough time that we only won 2-1.The group stage ends against Scotland on June 24 in Miami, and from there we’ll see how lucky we get with our knockout round matchups. I know we’ll all be meeting here to discuss, agonize, or celebrate whatever happens.

Anything beyond the World Cup is definitely too far out to be thinking about, with one exception: the CBF is already discussing a contract renewal with Ancelotti that would keep him in charge through the next World Cup in 2030, and Ancelotti seems very optimistic about staying in the role. After these past few years of utter chaos, and decades before of the Brazil job being entrusted to a murderers’ row of hacks, frauds, and decrepit old has-beens, the prospect of someone of Ancelotti’s pedigree getting a whole World Cup cycle to build the team in his image and incorporate and develop Brazil’s next generation of stars is an exciting one, and more a reason for optimism than even the possibility that Brazil might not suck this summer.

Or maybe all my doubts about Ancelotti prove true, Brazil gets embarrassingly found out at the World Cup, he gets sacked before he can properly develop a team for the future, and we get stuck with another schlub who’s achieved modest success in the Brasileirão and doesn’t know how tactics work. That could happen too! The future holds so many possibilities!

That, my friends, is the note I am choosing to end on. The multitudinous possibilities, I mean. Not the bleak ones specifically. Anyways, enjoy 2026!

  1. And let’s not forget how they seemingly forgot about Brazil’s youth setup during that time, allowing Ramon Menezes to stay in charge through two U-20 World Cup embarrassments, our worst-ever loss to Argentina, and failure to qualify for the Olympics. ↩︎
  2. He can gripe about how his results with the Seleção were “practically equal” to Ancelotti’s until he’s blue in the face, and yes, their win/loss ratios are pretty similar, but until Ancelotti authors a 4-1 humiliation against Argentina or gets outshot and outplayed by Colombia and Uruguay in back-to-back, make-or-break Copa América games, Dorival doesn’t have a leg to stand on here. ↩︎
  3. At least on the men’s side; I regret to say that I can’t speak with authority about the women’s game. ↩︎
  4. There might be a decent explanation for this, actually: while there are many center-backs I’d take ahead of him, Bremer and Alexsandro were injured from about September to December, and when he’s not injured, Éder Militão seems to be our best right-back, which all left two center-back slots to fill behind Marquinhos and Gabriel Magalhães. ↩︎
  5. Oh, goodness, excuse me, I meant EA Sports FC™. ↩︎
  6. Speaking of Club Brugge, I am All In on Carlos Forbs as the Next Big Thing and I bet every European superclub will be scrambling for his signature in another transfer window or two. If only he were Brazilian. ↩︎
  7. With the asterisk that six of his 17 goals at time of writing have come from the penalty spot. He may well pass Diego Costa’s mark of 20 for a Brazilian-born player, but Costa once hit that mark without a single penalty. ↩︎
  8. Philippe Coutinho hasn’t retired from the Seleção that I know of and has scored one more goal than Richarlison, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a 33-year-old who hasn’t been called up for Brazil since before the last World Cup is no longer in the picture. (Also, woof, another talented player whose star burned out way too fast.) ↩︎
  9. A worse example of this is Júlio César himself, who was the hero of the penalty shootout against Chile in 2014, but was just as hopeless as his less experienced teammates during the 7-1. ↩︎
  10. In Neymar’s defense, at least he’s never shown off a terrible Elden Ring build or paid people to make him look better at video games than he actually is. That we know about, anyway. ↩︎
  11. Incidentally, who would have thought two years ago that Savinho would be out of this conversation altogether? What a shame that his career has stalled under Pep Guardiola. I certainly think he has more talent than Luiz Henrique, perhaps also Antony. ↩︎
  12. Remember how fun it was to score four goals in the first half against South Korea in 2022? ↩︎