Lima, the twenty-third of November, 2019
I have written this date down so often, in so many notebooks, that the pen finds it before the brain does. Lima, veintitrés de noviembre, dos mil diecinueve. The Monumental of the U, late afternoon. River Plate, defending champions, leading 1-0 through Rafael Santos Borré. Marcelo Gallardo doing what he had done to a generation of opponents — suffocating the second half with a back five and asking you to find a way through. Jorge Jesus, on the other touchline, looked exactly like what he was: a Portuguese coach who had arrived in Rio five months earlier as a curiosity, a hire the Brazilian press treated with affectionate condescension.
The eighty-eighth minute and the ninety-first are, by now, more myth than match. Gabigol — Gabriel Barbosa, on loan from Inter, a player Internazionale’s scouting department had quietly given up on — met a low Arrascaeta cross and pushed it into an empty net. Three minutes and eight seconds later a clearance fell to him on the edge of the box, he took a touch with his thigh, and he hit the ball low past Franco Armani.
Two-one Flamengo. The Maracanã, three thousand kilometres away, shook in a way the city had not allowed itself to shake since 1981 — since Zico’s team, the team my father still talks about as if it were a religious experience.
Jesus became only the second European coach to win the Copa Libertadores; the first, Mirko Jozić with Colo-Colo in 1991. Milagro de Jesús, the papers ran. The miracle of Jesus. The pun was inevitable. So, by then, was the trophy.
That night announced something the continent has been digesting ever since. Flamengo — Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, founded as a rowing club in 1895, by some measures the most-supported football club in the world — were not just back. They were el modelo, the blueprint every other CONMEBOL club has been trying to copy or defeat.
The era of dominance
Look at the Copa Libertadores roll of honour from 2019 onward.
- 2019: Flamengo
- 2020: Palmeiras
- 2021: Palmeiras (Flamengo finalists)
- 2022: Flamengo
- 2023: Fluminense
- 2024: Botafogo
- 2025: Flamengo — Danilo’s header in the sixty-seventh minute against Palmeiras at the Monumental in Lima, a 1-0 win, a fourth title
Seven Brazilian winners in seven years. Within those seven, Flamengo with three. They are now the most successful Brazilian club in the tournament’s history. Four titles for o Mengão — 1981, 2019, 2022, 2025. The story of South American club football’s last six years runs through one rowing club from the south zone of Rio.
Domestically the picture is more complicated, and Flamengo’s myth machine sometimes is not honest about it. In the 2024 Brasileirão, Botafogo finished first with seventy-nine points, Palmeiras second with seventy-three, Flamengo third with seventy. In 2025 they lifted the championship anyway, defeating Ceará 1-0 at the Maracanã on the final round, in one of those convulsive title finishes that does not exist in any other domestic league. Add the Copa do Brasil, the Carioca state titles, the Recopa Sudamericana — the trophy cabinet at the Gávea is an architectural problem.
The football
Through Jorge Jesus, Domènec Torrent, Renato Gaúcho, Paulo Sousa, Vítor Pereira, Jorge Sampaoli, Tite, Filipe Luís, and now Leonardo Jardim, the Flamengo system has, beneath the surface noise, kept a recognisable spine.
A 4-3-3 in possession. A 4-2-3-1 defending. The fullbacks push high and wide. The pivot — for years Gerson, more recently with De La Cruz alongside or behind him — sits and recycles. The number ten — Arrascaeta, irreducibly Arrascaeta — drifts between the lines, finds the half-space, plays the killer pass Brazilian football still calls o passe-açúcar, the sugar-pass, the one that breaks the line. The wide forwards invert. Pedro runs the channels and finishes.
What makes this football specifically Flamengo and specifically modern is not any one of those features. It is vertical violence. They do not patiently work the ball side to side waiting for a positional flaw. They hunt the second pass after the turnover. Win the ball, give it to Arrascaeta or De La Cruz, look up — and somebody is already running in behind. The press is irregular by European positional-play standards, but the transition is among the fastest in world club football. Es lo que es, and what it is, is a tactical tradition the European positional consensus has never fully understood and that Brazilian football refuses to abandon, because it works.
This is the dominant strain of contemporary South American club football, and Flamengo, in 2026, are its most fully realised expression. They keep enough of the European vocabulary — pivot rotations, fullback inversions, back-three build-up against a high press — to be tactically literate. They reject the parts of the European model that would slow them down. Es Flamengo. Es Brasil. Es otra cosa.
The squad
The team sheet on a good night in 2026 reads like a mid-table Champions League roster. Rossi in goal, the Argentine from Boca who has quietly become one of the best in South America. Léo Pereira and Léo Ortiz in central defence; Wesley and Ayrton Lucas at fullback. In midfield, Gerson and Pulgar with the Uruguayan Nicolás De La Cruz orchestrating in front. Arrascaeta, the captain, the cerebro, at thirty-one producing the most creatively coherent football of his career. Bruno Henrique on one wing, Luiz Araújo or Everton Cebolinha on the other. Pedro through the middle.
Pedro Guilherme is contracted to the club until December 2027 and, when fully fit, is one of the three or four best centre-forwards in the Americas. His combination play with Arrascaeta is the closest thing modern Brazilian football has produced to a sociedade as automatic as Romário-and-Bebeto.
Bruno Henrique, at the club since 2019, has been there for the entire dominance era. He is, literally, what continuity looks like.
The departures matter too. Gabigol — for half a decade synonymous with Flamengo’s aura — left at the end of 2024 in a fractious, mutually exhausted divorce. He signed for Cruzeiro on New Year’s Eve, disappeared into a substitute’s role through 2025, then was loaned to Santos. The man who scored twice in three minutes at the Monumental became, within six years, a footnote on another club’s bench.
Then, in January 2026, the move that will be remembered alongside the Gabigol night when this era is written about properly: Lucas Paquetá, home. West Ham accepted £36.5 million and Paquetá flew back to Rio after seven years in Europe. Milan, Lyon, West Ham, home. The fee made him the most expensive incoming signing in South American history. The move made the squad the deepest Brazilian club squad of my professional lifetime.
The academy beneath all of this — the Ninho do Urubu, the Vulture’s Nest, in Vargem Grande west of Rio — is what makes Flamengo structurally different from almost every other club in the Americas. Vinícius Júnior left for Real Madrid in 2018, sold for a then-record under-eighteen fee. Reinier followed. Lucas Paquetá’s first professional contract was signed there in 2016 before the Milan move three years later. João Gomes is at Wolverhampton. Lázaro. The departures from Vargem Grande to European football are, by any honest accounting, the single most productive talent pipeline in South American club football this decade. Better than Boca’s, better than River’s, better than the Argentine academies that I, growing up in Boedo, used to think were untouchable. La fábrica nunca para.
The manager carousel
And yet — this is the part that resists any clean narrative — Flamengo cannot keep a manager. Since Jorge Jesus left for Benfica in the summer of 2020, the dugout at the Gávea has seen Domènec Torrent, Rogério Ceni, Renato Gaúcho, Paulo Sousa, Dorival Júnior, Vítor Pereira, Jorge Sampaoli, Tite — yes, that Tite, the former Brazil coach — Filipe Luís, and now Leonardo Jardim. Ten head coaches in five and a half years. Written down cold, that looks like the trophy cabinet of a club in crisis. It is the trophy cabinet of the most successful South American club of its generation.
The Filipe Luís story is the one to dwell on. The former Atlético Madrid and Chelsea fullback took the job at the end of September 2024, after Tite was sacked. He won four major trophies in 2025, including the Brasileirão and the Copa Libertadores. He extended his contract on the twenty-ninth of December 2025, until the end of 2027.
Sixty-five days later, on the third of March 2026, after an 8-0 win over Madureira in the Carioca semi-final, the club announced he was no longer head coach. The reason, according to the reporting that emerged afterwards, was that the president had discovered Luís had engaged in secret negotiations with BlueCo — the holding company that owns Chelsea and Strasbourg — during the very contract renewal he had just signed. The conversation in which he was sacked reportedly lasted under a minute.
Leonardo Jardim, fifty-one, with previous stops in Greece, France, the Middle East, and Brazil, was appointed within days. He inherited a squad that had just won everything there was to win, and a directorship that had publicly demonstrated no manager — not even one with four titles in a calendar year — would be allowed to put his own future ahead of the club’s. El club es el club. The hierarchy was unambiguous.
You can call this dysfunction. The Brazilian press sometimes does. The more honest reading is that the Flamengo of this era has built something rarer than continuity at the head-coach position — they have built a system there. The squad is so deep, the academy so productive, the recruitment so coherent, that the head coach has been demoted from author to interpreter. He is not the project. The project is the project. This is structurally closer to how Real Madrid and Bayern Munich have operated for the last twenty years than to the Brazilian or Argentine norm. And by any measure of trophies-per-coaching-month, it is working.
Brazil, money, and the rest of the league
The wider context is structural. Brazilian football has, in this decade, financially decoupled from the rest of CONMEBOL. The 2021 SAF law — sociedade anônima do futebol — let Brazilian clubs convert into private companies and absorb investor capital. Botafogo’s John Textor era is the most visible product, and their 2024 Libertadores was the financial revolution showing up in silverware. Flamengo did not need the SAF route. As an associative club they run an annual revenue larger than every other club in the Americas not based in Brazil. The Brasileirão champion banks roughly ten million dollars in prize money; the Argentine champion something nearer half a million. The 2024 São Paulo state champion alone earned more than the Liga Profesional Argentina winner. The gap is not a gap. It is an ocean.
What makes Flamengo more than a beneficiary of that gap is that they spend the money intelligently. They paid £36.5m for Paquetá because Paquetá at twenty-eight will perform on the pitch and generate marketing revenue across the Lusophone world. They retained Arrascaeta into his thirties because his intelligence is irreplaceable. They sold Vinícius, Reinier, and Paquetá-the-first-time at the right moment, banking the European fees to underwrite the next cycle. La pelota, también, es una cuestión de balance contable. Galeano would have hated me writing that. Galeano was right about almost everything but he was sometimes wrong about money.
The Maracanã and the cultural weight
I want to end where every Flamengo article should end, which is at the Maracanã.
The stadium opened in 1950 and hosted the World Cup final that year — the one Uruguay won 2-1, the Maracanazo, the day Brazilian football still talks about as a national wound that never properly healed. Flamengo’s spiritual home ever since. They share it with Fluminense; the Fla-Flu derby is the most-attended local rivalry in world football by sheer human volume.
Flamengo’s support is, by some surveys, the largest fanbase of any football club in the world — north of forty million Brazilian supporters, plus the diaspora across Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, the rest of the Lusophone world. Presidents of Brazil have, for decades, declared themselves Flamengo before declaring themselves anything else. The red and black is not just a kit. Uma identidade, one Brazilian friend told me, mais funda que política partidária — deeper than party politics.
Galeano wrote that football is, above all, a question of geography. Flamengo’s geography is the south zone of Rio, the favelas climbing the hills above the Maracanã. The geography of their support is harder to map. Every neighbourhood in every Brazilian city has a Flamengo bar. Every taxi driver in Manaus has a position on the manager carousel. The cultural weight is the material condition the club operates within, and any tactical analysis that ignores it explains only half of what is happening on the pitch.
This, in the end, is what the modern Brazilian giant looks like. A trophy machine that has won three of the last seven Libertadores. A squad deep enough to absorb a £36.5m homecoming. An academy that produces a Vinícius or a Lucas every couple of years. A board willing to sack a manager sixty-five days after extending his contract because the institution, not the manager, is the project. And the Maracanã — o Maracanã, with the definite article — shaking the way it shook in November 2019, in 2022, in 2025.
I am from Boedo. I will go to my grave a cuervo. But you cannot watch what Flamengo have built this decade and pretend South American club football’s centre of gravity has not, structurally and probably permanently, shifted north of the equator. La pelota se ha movido.
What is not open, anymore, is who the dominant force is. They are red and black, founded in 1895 by men who wanted somewhere to row, and on a good night at the Maracanã, watching them win the second pass after the turnover, you understand exactly why Champions League scouts no longer treat the Brasileirão as a curiosity and have started treating it as a primary market.
Mengão. Mengão. Mengão. The chant carries across the Atlantic now. We can hear it in Boedo. We just pretend, sometimes, that we cannot.
— Carlos Mendez, Boedo