Nothing touched the heart of Brazilian football more than Argentina’s unbridled celebrations in Qatar. The crowning of Lionel Messis and his team as world champions, while Brazil lost to Croatia on penalties in the previous quarter-finals, sent the record world champions’ country into a football depression. That holds, at least as far as the national team is concerned, to this day. Marquinhos’ miss also ended coach Tite’s tenure. Since then, the Brazilian association CBF has been looking for a new coach for the Selecao. It’s actually already been found.
From 2024, Carlo Ancelotti is set to take over what he believes to be the most important national football team on the planet. And then – at least that’s what the top management thinks – lead to the sixth World Cup title. Ednaldo Rodrigues, President of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), previously installed a Brazilian governor in Fernando Diniz (49), who will act as interim coach until Ancelotti’s arrival and will lead the team with the five stars on its chest. Diniz is currently the coach of Rio’s traditional club Fluminense and is considered an innovative, emphatic specialist.
But in Brazil, football was and is more than just the nicest thing in the world. In the past few decades, the respective presidents have exploited the Brazilian love of “jogo bonito” – the beautiful game – for their own purposes. It didn’t always end well. The 2014 World Cup, brought to the country by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, not only ended in trauma with a 7-1 loss to Germany in the semi-finals, but instead of blooming landscapes, brought corruption, several investment ruins and finally, as a long-term consequence, Jair Bolsonaro, who benefited from the scandals.
With nationalistic tones
The right-wing populist posed for a group picture with the Selecao in 2019 after they won the Copa America after a long dry spell in the Maracana. During the corona pandemic, he brought the tournament back to Brazil because Colombia and Argentina failed to host at short notice. This earned him the accusation that he only wanted to use the Selecao to improve his own image. Successor Lula da Silva is now also jumping on the bandwagon and interfering in the debate with nationalist tones that one would have expected from Bolsonaro.
“I like Ancelotti, but he was never the coach of Italy. If he wanted to solve Brazil’s problem, then why not solve Italy’s problem, which didn’t even take part in the last World Cup,” Lula said after news of Ancelotti’s imminent engagement circulated. That fits in with Lula’s basic protectionist attitude, who is currently very skeptical about everything that comes from Europe. Lula also sees the European demands for more environmental protection in a free trade agreement between the South American Mercosur states, which include Brazil, as interference in internal affairs.
Instead, the Selecao’s crisis should be resolved by the interim coach: “I’m a Diniz fan, I like his creativity and his personality. It’s a good chance and I understand he’ll take it.” Diniz has the skills that Lula doesn’t seem to see in Ancelotti: “Diniz has mastered the dressing room. In football, the coach has to master the dressing room to do a good job,” said Lula. Choosing the right coach for the Selecao is of great importance to the President, because the 2026 World Cup falls in the middle of the 2026 presidential election campaign.
“The boys are leaving the country”
However, Lula also addresses an issue that is actually a big problem for Brazilian football and that actually requires political intervention: “The problem is not Diniz, the problem is that we no longer have the quality of players that we do had at other times. The boys leave the country at the age of 16, 17 and come back at 36.” In fact, Brazil loses hundreds of players to clubs around the world every year. As a result, the Brazilian national team is also losing its cultural identity more and more, because the best players only grow up and receive their final training in Europe, adopt the way and way of thinking of European clubs and lose their Brazilian touch as a result.
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With his criticism of Ancelotti, Lula has now turned the issue into a state affair. Should Diniz win the Copa America in the USA with the Brazilian national team in 2024, the debate will start very quickly as to whether the Selecao even need a Carlo Ancelotti. He may have won the Champions League four times as a club coach and is the only coach to date to have won the championship in Spain, England, Italy, Germany and France, but that’s not enough for Lula: “It’s very easy to lead a team with eleven national players in Europe lead,” Lula said. “It’s difficult to come here and train the Corinthians. I would like to see if Ancelotti would get along well with Corinthians.”
But maybe Ancelotti will get help from a completely different side in the next few weeks. Brazil’s women’s national team has also relied on a real international coaching icon for four years: The Swede Pia Sundhage has actually advanced the Selecao. Should she lead Brazil to the title for the first time as a foreign coach at the forthcoming World Cup, resistance to an Italian coach on the men’s bench should also ease.