By: COLIN REESE
Does Brazilian football really need an overhaul?
Yes and no.
Brazil continues to have an abundance of world-class players at every position, but many former and current players, journalists, pundits, and the like have all gone on record lamenting the problems with the running of the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (CBF) and the problem with young Brazilian players in Europe being made less creative and dynamic by their European coaches.
Domestically, the CBF needs to listen to the advice of all of the great Brazilian soccer minds, coaches, players, and ex-players that have specific ideas of what they want changed and how to do it, and these ideas need to be put into action.
Abroad, European teams want to get Brazilians while they are young, but they often want to take the Brazilian characteristics out of the players. Europeans want Brazilians because of their skill on the ball, but they want Brazilians to adapt to the European way of playing.
The problem with this approach is that many of the very best and most successful European players like Zinedine Zidane played like Brazilians – or even better. The elements that have made Brazilian players the most highly sought after are what European teams are paying for, so they need to be careful to not ruin their Brazilian players.
Since Brazilian players develop fantastic technical skill on their own outside of any organization as young children, there’s no real problem with Brazil’s development of players, minus the absence of a better striker on the 2014 World Cup team.
The reason for this particular absence was because the striker phenom, Pato, was supposed to be the striker on the 2010 and the 2014 Brazil World Cup squads. In theory, Brazil had been grooming Pato to be the Number 9 since he was a teenager. Injuries and some inconsistent club form because of the injuries have derailed this plan until now, but Pato is only 24 going on 25 years old.
If Brazil’s World Cup squad had used a stronger and more creative attack consisting of Lucas, Oscar, Neymar, and Pato, the attack might have been much effective and exciting, which likely would have pressured Germany too much in the back to allow Germany to score seven goals in a World Cup semifinal.
There might have never been the 7-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup semifinal, and the subsequent crisis might have never been.
Hulk and Fred in particular were like dead weight for the Seleção in the World Cup, and the failure to include better options on the roster or to drop Hulk and Fred when they were underperforming were major problems.
From a purely soccer standpoint, there is no shortage of technical, creative, and athletic Brazilian players at every position, and the non-structured manner in which many Brazilians learn to play is in fact the reason that they are so good.
Therefore, any changes to Brazil’s academies and youth development need to be done in such a way as to not eliminate the unique way in which Brazilian kids learn how to play soccer with such skill and creativity with the ball.
There are problems with the management of the CBF, but these problems don’t affect the early development of world-class Brazilian players that learn to play by playing pick-up soccer, juggling, and just practicing with the ball.
It’s important to remember that Brazil did just reach the semifinals with an impressive group of world-class players, so many of the arguments about Brazilian football being in a state of complete crisis are just mass hysteria and exaggeration.
The two big takeaways from Brazil’s performance in the 2014 World Cup are: 1.) the Seleção needed to give Neymar and Oscar better attacking partners; and 2.) Brazil needed to recollect themselves after conceding an early first goal to Thomas Müller of Germany in the semifinal game.
Brazilian football isn’t going to drop out of elite status because of one embarrassing goleada, and Brazil did use a tactically sound 4-2-3-1 formation where there was a defensive midfielder, a box-to-box midfielder, a playmaker, two wide attacking midfielders that looked to cut inside, and a striker. Plus, the Brazilian defense featured four defenders that almost anyone would consider world-class.
In the wake of the 2014 World Cup, Neymar and many others have said that Brazil needs to catch up with Germany in how they train and prepare, but the thing that Brazil has that no one else has is still there: a bottomless pit of world-class players with a unique and creative way of mastering control over a soccer ball.
The Seleção needs to continue to use creative and technical players at every position, and it needs to combine the somewhat recently improved caliber of its center backs and defensive midfielders with the types of outside backs, creative midfielders, and attackers that can score, keep possession, and display creativity like no other national team.
Going forward, Dunga needs to make sure that he uses players that look to quickly pass and combine with one another, so that Brazil can exploit its greatest asset: creative and highly technical players.
One thing to keep repeating is that Brazil did in fact reach the semifinals, which it lost terribly without two of its best players: Neymar and Thiago Silva, the most important attacker and the most important defender.
Brazil is a soccer crazed country of over 200 million people that consistently produces the best players, so maybe, just maybe, all this talk of jogo bonito being dead is just the overreaction of a country with unrealistically high expectations of its players and huge overreactions to its losses – even really embarrassing losses.
Hulk and Fred didn’t work out, so it’s time to give their spots to different players that can help Neymar and Oscar to put the opposition on its heels.
Dunga needs to take stock of the talent pool and use the best players at each position in the 4-2-3-1 formation, or perhaps the Brazilian 4-2-2-2 formation.
Brazilian football is still alive and well, and Neymar is its king.