For the past twenty-four years, Brazilians have been hoping for a hexa. In the weeks before the tournament, street murals proliferate, cortisol levels soar, and crowds blur into a xanthous wash. The national flag, long monopolized in public life by Bolsonaro devotees,1 is suddenly available for use by the left, and the colors are eagerly reclaimed: draped across car hoods, smeared across faces, or hung by the hundreds from house to house. Brahma, Brazil’s most popular beer brand, promises free lagers to the entire population if the seleção wins. Yet all is not well.
The long wait for the elusive sixth title at the World Cup has successfully destroyed the faith of many of Brazil’s most stalwart football nationalists. Like a therapist probing a wound, I search nearby psyches for a root cause, an in-depth study which takes all of three minutes.
The year is 2014. The place is Mineirão stadium. The inciting incident is a certain godforsaken semifinal. Neymar Jr., then soccer’s golden boy and the nation’s paladin, watches the match from his parents’ couch in São Paulo, nursing a vertebra fractured by a Colombian player’s leaping knee in the previous game, a tense quarterfinal which also took out—via an unfortunate accumulation of yellow cards—renowned defender Thiago Silva.
Under the implacable gaze of nearly 62,000 hostile fans in yellow, German forward Thomas Müller wrests free from his defender to redirect a well-placed corner kick in the eleventh minute. The Brazilian side is dealt eleven more minutes of mercifully normal soccer before Brazilian keeper Júlio César fumbles a hard shot by Miroslav Klose, who slams the rebound home. Humiliation may be nigh, but the scoresheet is still short of apocalyptic. None of the players, nor any of the millions suffering contemporaneously, can possibly know they have stomached less than a third of what’s still to come.
Then Toni Kroos scores two goals within sixty-nine seconds, the camera cuts to a sobbing child, and fans suddenly realize they are living through the worst moment in national sporting history. “The Brazilian team has eternally lost control of this game,” declares the announcer at some point after the third or fourth goal, both of which my partner—one of the psyches currently under examination—has banned me from describing here, in addition to all those that follow. “There’s nothing interesting about that YouTube video you are watching,” he complains seriously. After a fifth strike ripples the Brazilian net, the announcer lets out a very short “gooal,” three vowels at most. After the sixth, even Müller reduces his celebrations to an unadorned handshake with striker André Schürrle, who scores not only the sixth goal but also the seventh, which is when, reportedly, Neymar turns off his parents’ TV and starts to play poker. By the next morning, a deathly silence has settled over the entire country.
The astronomically long half-life of this particular game is difficult for most foreigners to comprehend. “O buraco é mais embaixo,” my friends tell me. “The hole is deeper than you think.” The Brazilian national team’s current mascot, an irate yellow avian with a face like an Angry Bird, was created in anticipation of the 2018 World Cup and styled as to reflect Brazilians’ anger over the shameful loss to Germany. (A valiant attempt to rekindle faith in the seleção, the popular mascot has since been nicknamed the “Pissed Off Little Canary” by fans.) When I arrived in Brazil in 2022, nearly two World Cups later, the first Portuguese idiom I learned was a phrase used to describe life’s daily struggle: “Every day, another seven-to-one.” Certain Brazilians believe themselves destined to lose, as divine punishment for the goals sustained in that semifinal, seven World Cups in a row. Others point to Germany’s group stage elimination in the two following World Cups as a sign of, if not a lingering curse, perhaps a short-lived hex in the other direction.
Even in 2026, the collective wound opened by the 2014 semifinal remains raw. The woman who sells me tapioca pudding at the farmers’ market tells me watching Brazil still makes her too nervous. My own partner, who played constant soccer as a teenager and dreamed, like most young Brazilian men, of becoming a star for the national team, quit the sport that very day and took up capoeira—which, years later, is how we met. “In a way, we have Germany to thank for our relationship,” I tell him before Brazil’s opening match, naively trying to reframe the situation. He responds by telling me he’s cheering for Morocco.
When Curação loses a group stage game to Germany by a score of 7–1, decked out in a suspiciously familiar blue kit with yellow trim, the Brazilian internet explodes. “Germany saw the colors and were triggered!” reads meme after meme. “I heard the announcer from my room and got nauseous!” But if faith remains out of reach, it’s not for lack of trying, with each subsequent World Cup and corresponding failure begetting new, tentative attempts to hope again. Brahma launched its current World Cup ad campaign around the slogan: You’re now allowed to believe. Perhaps providence is still available while watching the seleção, if only to those a few beers in.
Brazil’s third game takes place on one of the most sanctified days of the year, the festival of São João. It’s a Wednesday, and I watch the pissed off little canaries take on Scotland at a friend’s house on a Landless Workers’ Movement settlement, packed with twelve other soccer fanatics into a living room at one hundred decibels. This particular settlement is populated by families who are either Indigenous to southern Bahia or descended from those enslaved here, and all of them have successfully reclaimed a plot of productive land from what was once fallow pasture. Despite the fact that a majority of residents are Evangelical, everyone also celebrates the feast days of the Catholic saints, many of which are national holidays in Brazil. This evening, we’re eating cooked peanuts and roasted corn, and people believe St. John has blessed the game. “It’s no accident they’re playing today,” they tell me. “Brazil is going to win.” (In addition to auspicious circumstances, Scotland is no particular challenge.) Fireworks and bang snaps have been sounding all afternoon—in memory of the saint or in support of the seleção, it’s hard to tell.
The twenty-eight families living on this settlement have survived, over the past decades, armed militias, seasons of famine, and seven successful police evictions—after each of which they resolutely returned—to remain on their modest plots. The settlement is thirty-six years old, old enough to have seen Brazil win the World Cup twice, and within a few minutes of the starting whistle, those over 40 begin to wax poetic about past seleções, about Romário, about Ronaldo and Ronaldinho.
As an American living in Brazil, I win smiles for not cheering for the US, but after a week of tournament soccer, part of me has begun to envy what appears to be a much less torturous experience of rooting for the red, white, and blue. Their fans, where they can be said to exist, seem simply surprised their players can now string together a series of passes, whereas the entire Brazilian population—revolutionary and reactionary elements alike—will be satisfied with nothing less than repossession of the sport’s most famous trophy. Soccer unites Brazil where politics do not, if only superficially, and this unified gaze, alongside the cumulative weight of past sporting success, forces its players to endure a national longing so intense it constantly threatens, like a pressure cooker hissing away in the other room, to explode.
For now, however, the team is still blessed. After a rocky start against Morocco (a 1–1 draw), the canaries have started to look more and more comfortable on the pitch. Vini Jr., currently a striker for Real Madrid and broadly considered one of the best players in the world, is the undisputed protagonist of this year’s seleção. With a blistering curl into the upper ninety, Vini singlehandedly saved Brazil from an early loss against Morocco and was directly involved in assisting or finishing all three goals against Haiti. Today, he has scored twice in the first half, capitalizing off a Scottish defender’s turnover in the box and then heading home a long cross from Bruno Guimarães.
But if the sun rises on one end of the field, it certainly sets on the other. Neymar Jr., Brazil’s top goal-scorer of all time, moved back to a Brazilian club team last year after stints at Barcelona and PSG and has long been dogged with injuries. Since the 2018 World Cup, he has been known as cai-cai, or “falls and falls,” owing to his penchant for rolling around on the field. (The opposite type of player, one who battles for the ball instead of diving for the call, is said to play with raça—fighting like a purebred dog rather than a mutt—the demand for which is the most frequent directive I hear shouted at the TV.) Neymar subs in at the seventy-sixth minute to much fanfare and little consequence.
Brazil is up two goals, but the cheering doesn’t relent, and after Matheus Cunha knocks the ball into the net off an elegant pass from Guimarães, the room literally detonates with screaming: the women for longer than the men, the adults far louder than the kids. Years later, when the clapping subsides, we grab more roasted corn from the embers in the yard and pass around the bowl of peanuts. As soon as the game ends—but not a minute before—someone will skewer dripping steaks from a salted dish in the kitchen and rotate them slowly over the coals. For the price of a World Cup ticket, you can fly to Brazil and back nine times.
After sturdier showings against Haiti and Scotland, my partner’s heart appears to have healed. Brazil’s first knockout match lands on yet another sanctified day, the festival of São Pedro, and people believe St. Peter has blessed the Round of 32. It’s a Monday afternoon but few are working as my partner rushes me over to his mother’s house on his motorcycle, trying to make the national anthem. We pass a packed square decorated with palm fronds and plastic flags, dominos forgotten on the table, and dozens clustered around one luminescent TV, joining my partner’s mother, sister, and cousin in the living room just in time to catch the last few bars.
Japan opens with a tightly organized side, so perfectly controlled, in fact, that I can tell someone’s fledgling faith is about to be tested. Despite a peppering of shots from Vini Jr. and Brazil’s near-constant possession, Japan pounces on one sloppy turnover in the twenty-eighth minute and, in a scalding counterattack, midfielder Kaishū Sano threads the ball into the lower left corner from well outside the box.
Although the initial exhale is excruciating, the minutes that follow an opponent’s goal are some of the most creative. I listen hard as the insults roll off the tongues around me, some frenetic, others resigned, all of their idiomatic qualities diminished in translation: “the Brazilians are playing like Nutella!”; “They need to eat more beef stew”; “They have soft bodies!” But as the little canaries press, making attempt after valiant attempt, concluding the first half empty-handed and passing into the second, the resolve in the living room trembles but doesn’t fall.
Somewhere in the fifty-second minute, as the ball is passed calmly around Brazil’s back four, fireworks erupt down the street. In confusion, I look to my partner, who seems to have understood something that I have not—courtesy of Bahia’s inconsistent internet services, our broadcast is delayed. He’s on his feet, ecstatic: “It’s a goal for Brazil!”
The next three minutes are euphoric. The fireworks intensify, accompanied by screaming from various distances, and we are utterly transfixed as the ball passes out of bounds, Guimarães takes an unexceptional corner kick, and Brazil loses possession around midfield then regains it. Then Gabriel Magalhães sends a visionary ball into the box, and we know what’s coming as Casemiro executes a textbook header, hammering the ball into the back of the net, our cheers blending into the fireworks that still haven’t stopped.
The game tied up, Brazil just needs one more. A homemade sign reading RAÇA dangles from the stands. Vini nutmegs one defender, cuts past another, hits the post. Minutes later, he does it again, cleaning defender after defender and demolishing Japan’s back line. I reflect on the clever dribble, more than the illuminated pass or the bending shot, being the most valuable currency in Brazilian soccer. The game enters stoppage time, but only three minutes go by before suddenly, as in a lucid dream, we hear fireworks again.
Over the following halcyon days, the level of vitriol expressed toward Brazil’s current crop of players drops considerably among those around me. The pissed off little canaries are suddenly considered a legitimate contender for the title, with Norwegian striker Erling Haaland admitting in an interview that his chances of beating Brazil are “very slim.” People have even begun to hope again, lowering their defenses for long enough to voice tentative predictions of quarterfinal, semifinal, even final success.
As Brazil takes the field against Norway, my partner and I are driving out of the rainforest, where we have spent the weekend, to rush up the coast to our friends’ living room. We reach the main highway with relief, where crowds are gathered every few hundred yards, watching in and outside of fluorescently lit bars in the gathering dark. I peer at each blurred screen as we pass, but it has started to rain and neither of us can make out the score. The region is silent, however, which I interpret as 0–0.
When we finally settle ourselves in the only available spots of the crowded living room, cross-legged on the floor next to the young children of our friends, the mood, while not yet dire, is certainly not ideal. Guimarães has missed a penalty, Haaland is threatening in the box, and there’s no saint around to bless the game.
When Haaland clears his defender by about three feet to head in a cross, Brazil seems to collapse, like a fractured gemstone, under the weight of its own precious history. There is little of the resilience displayed elsewhere by Cape Verde or Argentina, nor any of the confidence of Brazil’s own previous game against Japan. Despite creating another couple of golden opportunities, Brazil is unable to finish them. Haaland scores again in the eighty-ninth minute for good measure, sliding in a low ball from outside the box. “That’s it,” says the announcer. “It’s over.” In a final touch of grace—or disappointment, depending on your point of view—for Brazil’s retiring legend, Neymar converts on a last-minute penalty. When the whistle sounds shortly thereafter, he falls to his knees, sobbing dramatically.
As national discourse shifts gears from strained belief to resigned post-mortem and Brazil’s flag reverts once more to an exclusive symbol of the far right, strange theories have emerged to account for Brazil’s early exit. Did Vini Jr. refuse to take that initial missed penalty in order to make millions on a bet? Did Brazil lose yet another World Cup because the traditionally Catholic nation has become too Evangelical?
“Pray like a gringo, play like a gringo,” reads a viral tweet from the Research Institute for the Study of Hispanic-Catholic Civilization and Pan-Iberian geopolitics, an esoteric Catholic think-tank. Like a growing portion of the general population (nearly 27 percent as of 2022), twenty-three of twenty-six players on the Brazilian squad identify as Evangelical, many of them belonging to neo-Pentecostal branches that owe their origins to CIA-supported US missionaries in the 1970s. Some of the players use faith healing to recover from injuries, reject the help of team-offered sports psychologists in favor of their own pastors, and, according to frustrated fans, chalk up their errors on the pitch to the will of God instead of expressing an appropriate amount of public guilt. Brazil was better when its players behaved like Catholics, claims the Research Institute, whose take has since been vocally supported by other embittered pundits: “Evangelical Protestant sterilisation has flattened their ball, ruined their samba and obliterated their swag.”
Or perhaps it’s all simply part of the curse. This World Cup loss marks the third since the 2014 semifinal against Germany. At least there’s only four more to go.
Since 2018, the Brazilian flag—along with the yellow jersey of the national team—has become so strongly associated with ex-President Jair Bolsonaro and his far-right Social Liberal Party that in 2022 a judge ruled the flag could no longer be displayed by the government during electoral campaigns, having itself become election propaganda. Leftists attempting to rehabilitate the colors often feel compelled to wear their Brazilian soccer jersey under a Landless Workers’ Movement baseball hat or covered with dozens of Lula stickers to distinguish themselves from bolsonaristas. ↩
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