Folks, I have a confession to make: I was in a good mood after the Morocco game on Saturday.

I know, I know. The sky-is-falling reactions extended well beyond our own small and sometimes pessimistic community. Lots of people saw Brazil make countless sloppy giveaways and struggle to get anywhere near Morocco’s passing moves and assumed the worst about our World Cup chances, but I can’t say I did. Blame the fact that I had guests over for the game and was a couple of caipirinhas deep by its end, or blame the Knicks for winning the NBA championship later that night and sending all of New York into an infectious good mood. Either way, I felt all right about things after the game, and in the moment, this was my reasoning:

– The Seleção historically starts a little slow in their first game of the World Cup. On top of that, they’d never before opened their tournament with a game against a top-four team from the previous edition. (In 2002, they opened against Turkey, who would go on to finish third, but had absolutely no previous World Cup pedigree; they hadn’t qualified since the 1950s.)

– A draw still very much leaves Brazil with a good chance of winning the group. It may well come down to which team can rack up a bigger goal difference against Haiti and Scotland, and while this game reinforced wider doubts about the team, I do think we have the talent to beat up on lesser teams.

– This team is still very much a work in progress. Although Morocco very recently replaced their coach, even more recently than us. But they at least have the benefit of much more coherent planning from their federation, don’t they?

– Also, uh, it was really hot, I think the hottest game of the first round so far. That makes things harder, right?

Anyways, I figured I should watch the game again, to see if the doomerism on here was justified or whether my rosy outlook actually owed to something other than drinking a bunch of rosé. (I didn’t actually drink rosé, but the pun was right there.) So I did that, and here are my thoughts…

I came away thinking almost that everybody viewed the game along the wrong axis. It wasn’t a particularly good performance, but neither was it nearly as catastrophic as the doomers would have you believe. But it was still… ominous. Concerning. Weird.

Let me see if I can explain. I won’t dispute that Brazil were substantially outplayed for good chunks of the first half. The shot count at the break was 12-6 in Morocco’s favor, and at one point it was as high as 12-3. All game long, Morocco had a pretty easy time getting the ball from the middle of the field to the perimeter of Brazil’s box. But did Morocco lay siege to our goal? Not really, no. Pretty much all of their shots came in a couple of brief flurries when they were able to recover rebounds and second balls quickly and take several shots in succession—six shots from minutes 6 to 11, five more from minutes 27 to 31. In between was a sustained period of Brazil possession—albeit without as many shots to show for it, and ending in Ismael Saibari’s goal, but then again, Vini Júnior’s goal came right at the end of that second flurry of Moroccan shots. And from there, Morocco didn’t manage another shot until the ninth minute of second-half stoppage time.1 For comparison, in securing their draw against Spain on Monday, Cabo Verde, a team infinitely more outmatched, went from minutes 38 to 90 without a shot.

More notable is how, despite the frequent sloppiness, shakiness, obvious lack of talent, whatever you want to call it, that led to all those Moroccan forays forward and eventual shots, we actually kept them largely at arm’s length for the entire game. It’s the sort of praise that damns, something I remember saying about the ill-fated 2022 World Cup side as well, but it’s not nothing: for as easily as Brazil let the opposition get into the box, once they got there, they gave them next to nothing. Most of Morocco’s shots were low-percentage and easily blocked, and their better openings (for instance, Saibari in the 29th minute) were well marshaled, often by a commanding Marquinhos. It’s a reminder that there is a really capable defensive core there, even if the rest of the team has yet to match.

But that’s hardly satisfactory. Marquinhos and Gabriel backpedaled as a gaping hole opened up in front of them, opening a lane that Saibari snuck through for his goal. For Morocco’s two other best shots—the cutback to Neil El Aynaoui in the sixth minute, blocked by Bruno Guimarães, and Alisson’s double save at the very end of the game—the chances owed directly to the inadequacies of our fullbacks. Douglas Santos’ attempted clearance just sent the ball perfectly to the top of the box for the latter, and the former came after Roger Ibañez got beaten on the dribble for the second time in the opening few minutes. Ibañez was particularly bad, dribbled past multiple times and coughing up the ball with bad touches. It’s a reminder that my first impression of him on his return to the national team, before I and everybody else started thinking, “well, at least he’s got to be better than Danilo, doesn’t he?”, was that he was absolutely terrible in a second-half cameo against France. And so his woeful performance here—ended at halftime after he got a yellow card late in the first (for a tactical foul after he gave the ball away with an awful first touch)—serves as an indicator of something that can’t be so easily fixed as the tactical inadequacies we also saw on Saturday.

In 2018, with Dani Alves absent and a much younger and more capable Danilo seemingly struggling with an undisclosed injury like half of his teammates, it fell to Fagner to hold down the right side of Brazil’s defense. And bless him, he played his little five-foot-six heart out, and I don’t recall him doing anything expressly bad or that directly led to Brazil’s defeat to Belgium. But he also just wasn’t as good as we needed him to be, and now that might be true of every fullback we have on both sides.

And just as Marcelo on the other flank was world-class on paper but a defensive liability in practice, there might be other players who don’t rise to the level of their own talent, or are just a bad fit for the situation. I’m not saying this is true of Bruno Guimarães, but… remember how in the last World Cup, we were all calling for him to play, but when he finally got playing time, he looked really nervous and missed a bunch of presentable chances? I couldn’t help but reflect on that while rewatching Saturday’s game. He didn’t lose possession quite as spectacularly as Lucas Paquetá did, but I kept count, and he did so almost as regularly. Ancelotti and several players pointed to anxiety as a reason for the shaky debut, probably with good reason, but when the same player shows the same symptoms of anxiety four years apart, perhaps that indicates a problem with that particular player that goes beyond the general pressure of playing for Brazil at the World Cup.

I hope that’s not the case with Bruno. I hope he finds his calm, along with the rest of the team, and rises to the occasion like we need him to. Ditto Paquetá, who was maybe the most visibly bad player in the team’s worst moments on Saturday. Looking back at my notes, all of his worst moments came exactly in those periods of Moroccan ascendancy in the first half, committing several horrible giveaways including the one that led to the goal. And yet when he settled a bit, we saw glimmers of his positive qualities: he had a hand in Vini’s equalizer, pulled off a sweet chapéu to start a sequence that ended with him almost scoring with an acrobatic volley, and created a great chance with a clever throw to Igor Thiago.

Okay, Zetona, you say, but this is all about individual players so far. Where’s the systematic critique? Are you saying nothing went wrong with Brazil that isn’t ultimately about the fixed and unchangeable quality of the players we brought to this tournament? Well, I say, it’s when we get to the third element of Brazil’s midfield that things get… weird.

I had an odd revelation on rewatching the game. Namely, are we pressing too much? Should we be pressing at all? We tried to press, as usual kind of disorganizedly, and often Morocco were able to play past us and right into the space we’d exposed when one or two players came up to try and harry the guy on the ball. Perhaps the symbol for this disorganization was Casemiro. At many points in the first half, he was the furthest forward of the three midfielders, whether because he was trying to press or looking to be in scoring position, as he’s become very good at doing for Manchester United. Unfortunately, as the postgame stats revealed, he is slow as fuck now, slower than I’d previously realized. Not only did he reach the slowest top speed on the team, he was, by Monday, the third-slowest of the 471 players to have recorded a top speed at the World Cup so far. A guy with that little recovery speed positioning himself so that the people he’s trying to stop are already past him is a recipe for trouble, and I think it’s notable that when Fabinho replaced him at the half, the team seemed to have more control, which might have been nothing more than the product of his straying less from his assigned position.

But Fabinho was also not terribly fast according to those metrics, and he’s not alone. Brazil’s press seems to be based around having three or four energetic, quick forwards, plus one or two energetic midfielders, pushing up the field to try and win the ball. Unfortunately, our midfielders are not quick. (Bruno was slower than Fabinho, and Paquetá was only a bit faster.) And because the press isn’t tactically developed enough to consistently win the ball or even just not be played around, when the forwards have pushed high and left space behind them, it’s left to two or three slow-ass midfielders to try and cover against players who now have a ton of room in which to build up speed. Playing this way just seems… ill-conceived with the players we have available. It’s also worth noting that some of the tournament favorites who’ve made a successful start, namely France and Argentina, seem to play at a slightly lower intensity (or maybe I didn’t watch them closely enough) and trust that even if they don’t play especially well, they can get the ball to their world-beating forwards in positions that will let them make the difference. International football is less tactically advanced than the club game, with its intricate presses and elaborate set-piece routines and kicking the ball straight out of play from goal kicks2, in a way that feels refreshing after a club season that turned “haramball” into a global meme. The tactical game state is simpler in international football, and the differences in ability between teams are often more pronounced, in a way that lets a super-talented scorer like Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé, whose lack of will or physical ability to run when out of possession might be a millstone around the neck of a team trying to win the Champions League, use their attacking gifts to make the difference without their other shortcomings compromising the team.

Vini might be the sort of player we can trust to resolve games like this. Maybe. He does finally seem like he’s figuring out how to take command of games for Brazil like he can for Real Madrid. But he’s not as reliable of a something-out-of-nothing goalscorer as Messi or Mbappé, perhaps not even a reliable goalscorer period, and nobody else on the team has proven they can be either. Brazil can’t necessarily play like those teams (and France can be so dour to watch that we shouldn’t even if we could). But whatever we are trying to play like isn’t really working, and given that we have, if not a world-class scorer, certainly a world-class attacker, maybe even two, perhaps we should see if there’s anything about their example worth following.

Early indications are that that won’t happen against Haiti, though.

Brazil vs. Haiti

Lincoln Financial Field (AKA Philadelphia Stadium), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 19, 2026

Kickoff: 9:00 PM EDT / 10:00 PM BRT / 1:00 AM GMT

US TV: FOX, Telemundo

US Streaming: FOX One, Peacock

Possible Starting XI: Alisson; Danilo, Gabriel Magalhães, Marquinhos, Douglas Santos; Casemiro, Bruno Guimarães; Luiz Henrique, Raphinha, Vini Jr, Igor Thiago.

Whither Brazil?

At time of writing, there’s no firm lineup news, only that Ancelotti seems to be reverting towards the 4-2-4. Danilo for Ibañez and Luiz Henrique for Paquetá sound like the most likely changes. I can’t say I like this, and not just because the 4-2-4 exacerbates those same problems with pressing I brought up above. LH and Matheus Cunha came on late on Saturday, and they ended up playing as the right and left midfielders respectively, positioned very much on as part of a middle line of four, so deep that LH in particular really couldn’t do much of anything. “What’s the point?” I wrote in my notebook. Rather than isolate defenders on the edge of the box, he found himself isolated from his teammates and pinned against the touchline, unable to do anything. Why bring on forwards just to do this? Why not use someone who’s more of a passer than a dribbler?

Indeed, why not just use Paquetá? I know he was awful when it counted on Saturday, but he was outstanding three weeks ago against Panama, a team much closer to Haiti’s level, when he plucked the defense apart with pinpoint passes. I worry that we might find ourselves lacking those sorts of through balls on Friday. Then again, his overall body of work this month has been in keeping with what we knew about him before: brilliant just often enough to make you think he can be a consistent difference-maker, but rarely so when the stakes are highest.

As for injury news: Raphinha’s been dealing with some blisters on his feet, but should be fine. The staff are monitoring some muscle fatigue with Gabriel Magalhães (oh great, just what we need), but hopefully that’ll just require some load management rather than keep him out when we need him most. Neymar remains out, perhaps because he was busy getting his girlfriend pregnant again. I kid, but it actually sounds like he’s finally getting closer to being ready to play! Unfortunately, it’ll come too late for him to get a run against Haiti, which would surely have been the best and maybe only chance for us to see what if anything he can offer without much risk to the team.

The Opposition

When the groups were drawn, Haiti seemed like the easiest group stage opponent Brazil have ever had at a World Cup. We’ve faced them twice this century, winning a 2004 friendly 6-0 and beating them 7-1 in the 2016 Copa América, when we fielded a team so pathetic it couldn’t even score in its other two group stage games. I thought that Brazil might even have realistic chance to match or beat their all-time record for biggest World Cup win (7-1 against Sweden in the final group stage in 1950, for those wondering).

But even with the expanded World Cup format, easy wins are pretty hard to come by in the modern day. (Spain can certainly attest to that.) The underdog teams are motivated and the big teams are a bit tired and more than a little complacent. And even beyond the general hunger and motivation of a team making its first World Cup appearance in over 50 years, Haiti might have some genuine ability to surprise. They straight-up crushed fellow World Cup team New Zealand, 4-0, in a pre-tournament friendly, and went toe-to-toe with Scotland in their first group stage game, losing 1-0. Their recent record against what we might loosely call World Cup-caliber teams, in lieu of a better term to describe non-CONCACAF teams plus the USA, Canada, and Mexico, is still overwhelmingly a losing one, though they’ve kept most of those games fairly close, on the scoreboard if not necessarily the underlying stats. It’s not hard to imagine them trying to execute something like what Cape Verde pulled off against Spain: defend with extreme concentration, know that you’ll have desperately few chances to get out of your own half, but take those chances with vigor. If we don’t get an early breakthrough and Haiti start feeling confident, this game could be a tough watch for us.

While we’re here, a fun fact: since we beat them 7-1 a decade ago, Haiti have lost plenty of games, to the USA, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina among others. Their biggest losses in that time, though? 6-1 to Bahrain, and 5-1 to Curaçao, the very same Curaçao that just lost 7-1 to Germany. Funny how that works.

Still, despite all that, and despite the angst surrounding the Seleção right now, this is a game we should expect to win, and comfortably. If we don’t win, that collapses all our questions around whether this team is good enough to win or even just make a good, competitive deep run to a simple answer: No. Obviously not. A draw or even a loss wouldn’t doom us to a group stage exit, necessarily, but a team that can’t beat Haiti isn’t a team we can count on to beat anybody good when it matters. (And it’s also about when we’d start getting into “time to rip up Ancelotti’s contract extension” territory.)

But this team is not nearly that bad. Haiti will probably give us the toughest game they’ve ever been able to give us, but that could still just mean they lose by two or three goals instead of six. I’ll lean even slightly more optimistic than that and say Brazil 4-0 Haiti. I’m even sticking out my neck and calling that we’ll keep a clean sheet for once! Hopefully we win by even more, and even if we don’t, hopefully it’s not nearly as nerve-wracking as when I called a 4-0 win against Costa Rica in 2018 and we ended up stuck 0-0 until second-half stoppage time.

  1. A note on Alisson, sicnce I couldn’t fit this into the main article. In one sense, his save from Ayoube Echghouyab at the very end was exactly what we’ve been demanding of him: a difficult, clutch save at a crucial point in an important game. On the other hand, he only had to make that save because he tried to save Neil El Aynaoui’s shot, which was clearly going wide, and spilled it back in Echghouyab’s path. Plus, I’m not sure what he should have done on Saibari’s goal, but it probably wasn’t coming out like he did and getting chipped. ↩︎
  2. It’s become a fad at this World Cup too; Morocco tried this from the opening kickoff and basically just gave us the ball. I think sooner or later we’ll see a team ship an early goal because they gave up possession like this and then everyone will realize that this is actually a really stupid thing to try if you don’t have an extremely well-orchestrated tactical scheme and a sovereign wealth fund’s worth of elite players to pull it off. ↩︎