Brazil are a dysfunctional mess. Good luck, Carlo Ancelotti

Say what you want about Ednaldo Rodrigues, the beleaguered head of Brazil’s beleaguered football federation; the man knows his way around a soundbite.

“This is more than a strategic move,” he said this week after finally reeling in Carlo Ancelotti, his own white whale. “It’s a declaration to the world that we are determined to get back to the top. The best coach in history is now in charge of the best national team on the planet. Together, we will write new, glorious chapters in the story of Brazilian football.”

There is a lot to unpack there. You could use a hundred adjectives to describe Rodrigues’ pursuit of Ancelotti, which lasted two and a half years and managed to feel even longer; “strategic” would not be one of them. Then there are the galactic quantities of hubris that underpin the penultimate sentence. The best national team in the world? Sure, but only if you’ve just woken up from a two-decade-long coma.

The reality, as Ancelotti will be well aware, is rather less rosy. Brazil were insipid at last summer’s Copa America and have gone downhill since. Argentina battered them 4-0 in the final game of Dorival Junior’s catastrophic reign. Confidence is snake-belly low. You don’t even have to zoom out to the federation’s ongoing woes and broader state of the Brazilian game to feel a strong pang of pessimism.

One year out from the World Cup, Brazil simply do not have a team. There is no tactical blueprint — no great surprise, given there have been three different coaches since January 2023 — and no consensus about personnel beyond two or three key players. This is not a case of building on existing foundations, because there are none.

In the defence, the main issue is at full-back. What was once an area of strength for Brazil has become a wasteland: none of the 65 or so options tested since the Qatar World Cup has made a compelling case for a starting spot. Ancelotti will have to make lemonade from lemons.

Against Argentina, there was no sign of anything approaching a Brazil midfield. The return of Bruno Guimaraes from suspension for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers will help; Casemiro is also expected to be brought in from the cold. What is really required, however, is a bit of humility. You might get away with picking four attackers if you have two world-class all-rounders behind them, but Brazil do not.

Ancelotti, ironically, has spent much of this season picking four attackers for Real Madrid — and being criticised for it. Things are complicated further by the fact that two of them, Vinicius Junior and Rodrygo, have yet to put together a compelling body of work at international level. Can Ancelotti unlock their potential, as he did in Spain? Will he have the authority to drop one of them if he deems it prudent?

There is an elephant in the room here, too. Neymar may not be fit enough to make Ancelotti’s first squad but he is still seen as the big kahuna in the Brazil setup despite his waning relevance in club football. Even assuming he still has something to contribute, his presence would raise questions about the direction of travel. Neymar has not just been Brazil’s best player since his debut in 2010; he has been the team’s centre of gravity, for better and for worse. Ancelotti must decide whether he is happy for that to continue.

These are not minor conundrums. Ancelotti must solve them at speed and under intense scrutiny. It is often said of football-mad countries that every citizen is a wannabe national team manager. Nowhere, though, is the effect as strong as it is in Brazil: 212million people can make a lot of noise, especially when a World Cup is looming. If Ancelotti was after some respite after his second spell in the Madrid hothouse, he should probably have gone to Saudi Arabia instead.

The good thing, when it comes to Ancelotti and Brazil, is that Rodrigues is pretty much alone in his starry-eyed optimism. There is a level of excitement, sure, but it is tempered by an appreciation of the circumstances.

Ideally, Ancelotti would have arrived much earlier. He would have had longer to form a side but also longer to share his expertise beyond the playing squad, to create a culture of excellence, to shape the Brazilian game more broadly. Instead, there is already a sense of opportunity wasted. The federation has placed all of its chips on World Cup success; Ancelotti’s contract ends after the tournament.

Brazil fans’ expectations are not sky high (Tercio Teixeira/AFP via Getty Images)

That this is par for the course for Brazilian football doesn’t make it any less galling. “It’s a poverty of vision, a repetition of old mistakes,” wrote Carlos Eduardo Mansur in newspaper O Globo, later expanding upon that idea in his column for GloboEsporte: “Winning the World Cup would be the validation of the cult of the short term, of improvisation, of contempt for projects, reinforcing the idea that work should be judged by results, not by how they were achieved.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t? Such are the contradictions of the Brazilian game. This is what Ancelotti is walking into. Throw in the uncertainty surrounding his boss — Rodrigues is accused of having falsified documents relating to his re-election last year, a claim rejected by the federation — and you have a picture of dysfunction on every possible level. The endless psychodrama surrounding the national team is merely a symptom of the chaos.

One of the many Ancelotti memes doing the rounds in Brazil this week shows an old clip of the Italian on the touchline, apparently choking back the tears. The caption — the joke — is that this is what he’ll look like when he’s forced to immerse himself in Brazilian domestic football, with its half-empty stadiums, scrubland turf, laughable refereeing, strategic short-sightedness and crushing sense of ennui.

The video is soundtracked by a section of the Radiohead song No Surprises. “A job that slowly kills you,” runs the lyric, “bruises that won’t heal.”

Gallows humour, at least, is alive and well in the Brazilian game. Ancelotti will need to keep that famous eyebrow raised high to negotiate the hard knocks that await him and come out smiling on the other side.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

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