The last time Brazil won the World Cup was 2002, in Japan and South Korea, when Ronaldo Nazário scored twice in the final against Germany and a nation with five titles finally exhaled after the long humiliation of the 1998 final in Paris, the near-miss of 1994 without Romário being quite enough, the weight of expectations that had been accumulating since the last triumph in 1970.
Twenty-four years have passed. The tournament that was meant to end in 2006 with Ronaldinho, in 2010 with Kaká, in 2014 on home soil before the catastrophic 7-1 against Germany, in 2018 before Neymar went down and Belgium played better and everything fell apart — that tournament has now passed to a new generation. And the new generation’s most vivid player, Vinícius Júnior, is twenty-five years old and arguably the most electrifying forward in the world. And the man now managing Brazil, Carlo Ancelotti, has collected Champions League trophies as though they are seasonal produce.
What could go wrong.
The Manager Who Was Never Supposed to Be There
Carlo Ancelotti took charge of Brazil in May 2025, following the dismissal of Dorival Júnior after a 4-1 defeat to Argentina in Buenos Aires. Dorival’s tenure had been marked by tactical uncertainty and a squad that never quite coalesced into the coherent unit the results demanded. The defeat in Buenos Aires was the tipping point — a scoreline that represented not just a loss but a statement about the relative directions of South America’s two dominant football nations.
Ancelotti’s appointment was unprecedented in the history of the Brazilian national team: for the first time, a foreign coach would lead the Seleção at a World Cup. The Brazilian Football Confederation voted to break with nearly a century of convention to bring in a manager whose track record in club football was essentially unimpeachable — five Champions League titles, trophies with every major club he managed — and whose reputation for man-management and psychological intelligence was exactly what the CBF believed the squad needed.
He is sixty-seven years old. He spent the 2025-26 season managing a national team rather than a club for the first time in his career. What he found in the Brazil squad was not the disarray some had feared but a collection of individually outstanding players who lacked the defensive structure and collective discipline that his best club teams had always prioritised.
The squad he has assembled for this tournament reflects those priorities. It is, by the conventional assessment, extraordinarily talented in attack and somewhat short of the defensive solidity that World Cup football at the later stages demands.
The Group
Brazil find themselves in Group C alongside Morocco, Scotland and Haiti. It is, on paper, a group Brazil should navigate comfortably — and the footballing conversation will be dominated, from the moment the first whistle sounds, by the match between Brazil and Morocco, which represents both the technical highlight of the group stage and one of the most intriguing tactical encounters of the early tournament.
Scotland, under their current manager, have qualified for a World Cup for the first time since 1998, a twenty-eight-year drought ended. Their presence is a story in itself. In the context of Group C, they are likely to be competitive and difficult to beat but not a genuine threat to Brazil’s progression.
Haiti are the CONCACAF representatives and face a significant step up in quality. Their involvement is the tournament’s most significant upset of convention, arriving against the three other group members.
The Squad
Carlo Ancelotti has named twenty-six players whose collective value on the transfer market would exceed most estimates of what a nation’s worth of talent should look like. At goalkeeper, Alisson Becker remains one of the two or three best in the world, his positioning and distribution establishing a quality baseline behind the defensive line that few squads can match. Ederson, currently at Fenerbahçe following his exit from Manchester City, provides experienced backup.
In defence, the squad is built around Marquinhos as the most experienced and authoritative centre-back, with Gabriel Magalhães from Arsenal alongside him as the principal partnership. Gabriel has been extraordinary this season — a key component in the Arsenal side that went unbeaten across the Champions League group phase, the dominant aerial presence in a back four that kept nineteen clean sheets in the Premier League. Bremer at Juventus provides defensive depth. The fullbacks — Danilo, Alex Sandro, Wesley at Roma and others — carry questions about whether the high-water mark of Brazilian fullback quality from previous generations is quite recaptured here.
In midfield, Bruno Guimarães is the player on whom the most responsibility rests. His season at Newcastle has confirmed what anyone who watched him at Lyon already knew: he is one of the two or three best central midfielders in the world, combining a defensive intensity reminiscent of the Brazilian holding midfielders of the 2000s with an ability to carry the ball and switch the point of attack that makes him dangerous in transition. Lucas Paquetá, restored to the squad after a lengthy absence related to an ongoing Football Association betting investigation that complicated his status for several months, provides creative depth from midfield.
Casemiro, at thirty-four, has been included as a senior presence and potential tournament starter — his understanding of international football at the very highest level, accumulated across four World Cups and multiple Champions League campaigns with Real Madrid, providing the positional discipline the midfield will need against top opposition. Fabinho, currently in Saudi Arabia, and Danilo Santos from Botafogo complete the central options.
Vinícius Júnior
There is a version of Vinícius Júnior that is hard to contain in writing because the quality of what he does — at speed, in tight spaces, with a left foot that redirects the ball at angles defenders cannot anticipate — is fundamentally visual. Watching him run at a backline, the first touch inside always somehow unexpected even when you know it is coming, is one of the distinctive pleasures of watching football in 2026.
He is twenty-five years old. He has now scored thirty-seven goals and provided twenty-nine assists in La Liga across the past two seasons. He won the Ballon d’Or in 2024. He is, when the conditions are right and the team around him is functioning, almost certainly the best player in the world at doing what he does: running at defenders in space, creating chaos in the final third, finishing in the positions that conventional wingers don’t reach because they haven’t made the run to get there.
The challenge for Ancelotti at this tournament — and it is a significant one — is constructing a team that gives Vinícius the conditions in which that quality can be expressed consistently, not just intermittently. At Real Madrid, the structure of the team around him was built over years with a manager who knew the players individually and could adjust in real time. Ancelotti will be working with that structure for only a year before the tournament starts.
What Ancelotti does better than almost any manager alive is find the organisational framework that lets individual talent express itself without being strangled by collective demands. His best teams have always contained exceptional individual performers given enough freedom to be exceptional, with just enough defensive structure to prevent the resulting openness from being fatal. Applied to Brazil’s attacking talent — Vinícius, Raphinha, Martinelli, Endrick, and now Neymar — the task is substantial.
The Neymar Question
On the eighteenth of May, in Rio de Janeiro, Carlo Ancelotti named his twenty-six-man squad. The name that dominated the headlines was not Vinícius. It was Neymar Júnior, thirty-four years old, playing for Santos in the Brazilian league after returning to his first club on loan, included in a World Cup squad for the first time since the catastrophic knee injury sustained in October 2023 that kept him out for the entirety of 2024.
The decision to include Neymar is the most debated selection in this squad by some distance. The arguments against it are real: he is thirty-four; he is coming back from one of the most serious injuries available to a footballer; his last competitive football at the top level was with Al Hilal, where the injury occurred, in a squad context that did not require him to contribute defensively; he has been playing in Brazil’s domestic league, which, while improved in quality over the past decade, is several levels below the demands of tournament football against the world’s best.
The arguments for it are equally real: he is, across his career, the most technically accomplished Brazilian footballer since Ronaldinho; he has scored seventy-seven goals in one hundred and twenty-four international appearances; his creativity in tight spaces, his ability to draw fouls, his capacity to unlock deep defensive blocks with moments that no one else in this squad can produce — these remain qualities that thirty-four and a partially recovered knee have not removed.
Ancelotti’s logic, stated plainly in the announcement press conference, was that Neymar provides something the other forwards do not: the ability to combine in tight spaces in the final third and to create goalscoring opportunities from situations where the defence has organised against the pace of Vinícius. He is a different attacking threat. The combination of Vinícius and Neymar, at their peaks, would be the most dangerous attacking partnership in Brazilian football since Ronaldo and Ronaldinho were simultaneously available. Whether they remain capable of approaching that standard, at their current ages and fitness levels, is the question the group stage will begin to answer.
Raphinha and the Barcelona Connection
While Neymar’s inclusion is the story, Raphinha’s form is the foundation. Playing for Barcelona under Hansi Flick, the Brazilian winger had the season of his life in 2025-26 — thirty-four goals and twenty-six assists across all competitions, a total that places him among the most productive attacking players in Europe. He arrived in Catalonia as a squad player. He is leaving the season as the second most important player in one of the most exciting attacks in club football, behind only Lamine Yamal.
Raphinha at his best represents something slightly different from Vinícius — more directness down the right channel, a willingness to cut inside and shoot, a set-piece delivery that adds a specific threat at dead balls. In Ancelotti’s Brazil, he and Vinícius provide width on both sides of an attacking shape that, at full force, should be capable of troubling any defensive system in the tournament.
Gabriel Martinelli, from Arsenal, adds a third wing option with similar directness and a hunger in transition that has defined his development under Arteta. Endrick — on loan at Lyon from Real Madrid, where the eighteen-year-old was judged to need more regular playing time before stepping into Ancelotti’s squad at the Bernabéu — provides a genuine goalscoring threat from centre-forward, his movement in the box and his finishing composure already marking him as a potential successor to the line of great Brazilian forwards.
The Ghost of 2014
No conversation about Brazil at a World Cup on this continent can fully avoid 2014. The tournament was held in Brazil — in Belo Horizonte, in Fortaleza, in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro — and the catastrophe that unfolded in the Estádio Mineirão in the semi-final against Germany remains the most traumatic single result in the history of Brazilian football. Seven goals conceded in the first fifty-eight minutes. The images of weeping supporters, of an entire country trying to process what it had just seen, have not faded.
This World Cup is not on Brazilian soil. It is in the United States, Canada and Mexico. But the weight of expectation is still Brazilian in character — no other footballing culture lives with this tournament so intensely, so personally, as though the result is a reflection of something beyond sport. The twenty-four-year drought is, by Brazilian standards, not just a prolonged wait but a kind of ongoing national wound that each successive team is expected to heal.
Ancelotti, who has managed in pressure environments across four decades, will understand this. He is not Brazilian; he does not carry the weight in his own body the way a Brazilian manager would. Whether that detachment helps him or limits him — whether the players around him can find in his calm the permission to play without the specific anxiety that has haunted recent Brazilian tournament campaigns — will be one of the more interesting psychological subplots of the next five weeks.
How Brazil Win It
The path to a sixth title runs through Group C comfortably, then through a round of sixteen, a quarter-final, a semi-final and a final — against opponents that will include, in the knockout stages, at least one of the other genuinely elite squads in this tournament.
The strengths are clear: Alisson in goal, Gabriel and Marquinhos at centre-back, Bruno Guimarães as the midfield engine, and a forward line that, on full function, is the most individually talented in this tournament. Raphinha in career form. Vinícius at twenty-five with a Ballon d’Or on his shelf and the World Cup as the specific prize his career still lacks. Ancelotti bringing a quality of man-management that the Brazilian national team setup has not experienced before.
The vulnerabilities are equally clear: depth at centre-back if Gabriel or Bremer is injured or suspended; the question of whether Neymar can contribute for ninety competitive minutes against top opposition; the degree to which Ancelotti, in his first year with a national team, has been able to install the defensive intensity that tournament football requires when it matters.
The Verdict
Group C offers Brazil a comfortable passage to the last thirty-two. The match against Morocco will be the most watched game of the group phase — Morocco under their new manager Mohamed Ouahbi, after Regragui’s departure, carry real technical quality in midfield and exceptional defensive organisation, and they represent the legitimate test of how quickly this Brazil team can perform at its highest level.
After the group, the difficulty depends on the draw. If Brazil reach the quarter-finals — which they should — they could face Germany, France or Spain. Any of those matches is winnable. Any of them could also be lost.
What distinguishes this Brazil from recent squads is the combination of a genuinely elite manager, a forward line of extraordinary individual quality, and a twenty-four-year narrative that makes this particular tournament feel different to the ones that came before it. That narrative is not, by itself, a reason to expect success. Tournaments are not won by storylines. But it is a reason to watch very carefully, because if the pieces fall into place — if Vinícius reaches his highest level, if Raphinha sustains what he has done for Barcelona, if Guimarães dominates midfield the way he has at Newcastle, if Ancelotti finds the organisation that gives all of this expression — this could be the tournament that finally ends the wait.
Twenty-four years is a long time for a nation to carry something this heavy. The squad is there. The manager is there. The moment is there.
Whether that is enough for the sixth star is the question that the United States, and the summer, will answer.