The Daily, Wednesday 12th July 2023

Brazil will be hiring Carlo Ancelotti... in a year's time.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with a national team appointing a foreign head coach. It’s comfortably within the rules of the international game, and if it helps to fill a gap that you can’t fill with someone notable from your own country, then… why not? But international teams are not all created equally. Some are substantially more powerful than others and have very different expectations. So why does the most powerful team of all now look like it will be appointing one from next year?

There is no ‘humiliation’ to be found in the ongoing pursuit of Carlo Ancelotti by the Brazilian football association, the CBF, but there is a feeling that something cannot be working properly in a football culture that has made professional football an export business like no other if they’re unable to find a single Brazilian who’s capable of managing their men’s national team. Brazil has made a virtue out of football recruitment’s increasingly internationalist perspective over the decades, but now they’re the ones doing the importing.

It barely even needs to be mentioned that the Brazil men’s team are still in need significant remedial work, having lost two of their three matches—to Morocco and Senegal—since yet another underwhelming World Cup finals at the end of last year. But there does come a point at which this all starts to look structural. It’s now been more than two decades since Brazil last won the World Cup, and they’ve not got past the quarter-finals since, other than on home soil in 2014. And even then they only made the semi-finals before, well, you know.

That’s the tournament that really counts. Brazil have won the Copa America three times in the last twenty years, but the World Cup is the competition which defines them as a nation like no other, and not only have they failed to get past its quarter-finals since last winning it in 2002 other than when they hosted it themselves in 2014, but they’ve failed to knock a single European team out in the group stages since then, either. And while it’s all very well to start complaining about European domination of the club game, but there are few would disagree with the assessment that Brazil is in receipt of incredible natural resources when it comes to football, and that they’ve repeatedly fumbled these gifts. The Brazilian club game seems to have finally, finally grasped that they should be growing their domestic game to try and compete with big European leagues rather than just acting as part of the supply chain providing cheap labour to foreign clubs.

But Brazil’s national team have been underachieving for two decades and now, on top of everything else, their noisy neighbours to the south with one-fifth the population have won their first World Cup in more than thirty years. Reform has long been needed within the Brazilian game, but is hiring a foreign coach a sign that Brazilian football is finally ready to make the radical changes required to put themselves back on their pedestal, or is it more a symptom of a country whose football culture is starting to feel like something of an irrelevance, for all that it manages to export?

Why should a nation of 215m people which has won the World Cup five times need a head coach from the outside? The most likely explanation is that there is practically nothing in the culture of Brazilian football management which seems likely to bring through the sort of coach that a sophisticated modern team playing at the elite level needs. Consider, for example, Atletico Mineiro, who just happen to be alphabetically the first of the “G-12” list of clubs that have long dominated the Brazilian club game. They’ve changed head coach 48 times in the last twenty years.

These figures are repeated across all of the biggest Brazilian clubs. Between them, the G-12 Brazilian clubs have made 476 head coach changes (including interims) since the summer of 2003. Now, it is fair to say that a lot of those coaches have been interim hires (big shout out to Milton Cruz, who’s been the interim head coach of Sao Paolo ten times in the last twenty years and twelve in total), but this hire ‘em and fire ‘em culture hardly seems conducive to a stable environment in which younger coaches can effectively learn the tools of their trade. By way of contrast with Europe, the lowest number of head coach changes among the G-12 clubs in Brazil over the last twenty years has been Palmeiras, with 29. Even Chelsea, by a country mile the most trigger-happy of the biggest English clubs, have only made 21 changes over that time.

There is nothing about this sort of hire ‘em and fire ‘em culture that seems likely to bring through a generation of successful head coaches, and particularly not in the international game, which percolates slowly and requires time to stand much chance of delivering results. Even the Brazil national team has had eleven since they last won the World Cup. England have only had seven over the same timespan, and two of those—Stuart Pearce and Sam Allardyce—only had a single game in charge.

Is Don Carlo—and football affords no greater an honour to a manager or head coach than to give them a Mafia-related nickname—the right man to get the Brazilian men’s team back on course? Well, there have been few more successful at the absolute apex of the global club game in the 21st century, but the year’s gap will leave everybody straining at the leash somewhat, while the infrastructural issues that any Brazil head coach has to overcome, not least within the CBF itself, may remain as formidable as ever.

Ancelotti is a brilliant manager. Everybody knows that. And after more than a quarter of a century in the club game, perhaps he’s ready for this very different sort of challenge. But for the next year, the Brazil head coach will be Fernando Diniz, who will be doubling this job up with managing Fluminense, though how long that might last is just about anybody’s guess. After all, he’s already been in the job there for more than a year, only the fourth in the last twenty years to have lasted that long in the position, and by all accounts things have not been great behind the scenes, either.

And the challenges of international football are very different to those required by the club game. There are certainly no guarantees that the arrival of Ancelotti will translate to success at the 2026 World Cup. But it does seem all nicely teed up to give him the best chance. The 2024 Copa America is being held in the USA, just as the World Cup will be two years later. What better a way to prepare for the 2026 World Cup than by having a competitive-looking tournament two years prior followed by a run of qualifying matches from which you always get through?

Brazilian club football has been in the process of reforming for some time. Some of its greatest clubs are hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, and a steady flow of players towards Europe for big transfer fees hasn’t been able to stem this financial incontinence. We shall see whether these reforms are treated as an opportunity to give the Brazilian club game the same level of gloss and professionalism that are applied in Europe or whether an inward flow of investment ends up just being treated as “more money” by those who already run the game there.

We shall also see what effect these changes may or may not have on the CBF and the national team. What might change, if Brazilian players found that it was no longer necessarily financially advantageous for them to head north-west at the earliest available opportunity? Might Saudi Arabia’s decision to flex its financial muscle this summer have an impact upon the dollar signs that have been starting to appear in the eyes of Brazilian club owners these last couple of years?

And what of that initial question? Is it okay for Brazil to appoint an Italian to coach their men’s national team, or is it an admission of some sort of failure? This conversation was held in England more than two decades ago, and it was never really successfully answered, one way or another. There seems to be an uneasy detente on the matter. In that most English of ways, we avoid talking about it, unless it’s absolute necessary.

Neither Sven Goran Eriksson nor Fabio Capello were successful enough to justify any perceived ‘trade-off’ in hiring them, but Sandrina Wiegmann already has, and before a ball has been kicked in this summer’s Women’s World Cup. But others would counter that there’s no ‘trade-off’ to be made, here. It’s allowed by the rules, and there doesn’t seem to be any will to change it. There are benefits to developing countries, who may not have the infrastructure in place to bring through masses of their own coaches. A good, experienced coach will bring good habits and best practice with him. It can be an opportunity to reset the culture of the game in a country. And if it helps to gives developing countries a leg up, then… good.

There is nothing in the rules to say that Carlo Ancelotti can’t be the head coach of the Brazil men’s team, and given the number of national associations who’ve already availed themselves of one it seems vanishingly unlikely that this will ever change; after all, it would be those very associations who would would have to vote to restrict it. In sport, teams are constantly pushing against the boundaries of what is and isn’t permissible under the rules as written down. Everything is open to interpretation; the only question is where that line is drawn. But the question of whether he can do it within the rules seems settled for the foreseeable future. 

And it is also worth remembering that this isn’t just ‘any’ foreign coach. This is Don Carlo Motherf*cking Ancelotti, a man who may not be getting any younger—none of us are—but who has managed to remain relevant as one of the absolute gold standards for coaching at the very top end of European football for more than two decades. And who also managed Everton, for some reason. He may just be the greatest of all-time. The appeal should be extremely obvious. 

But it seems difficult to avoid the fact that hiring any coach from abroad is a sign of the decline of something within the Brazilian game, especially when coupled with two decades of World Cup underachievement. If it is commonly assented that a majority of people would, all other things being equal, prefer their national team’s manager or head coach to be from that country, then a failure to bring through good enough coaches to lead that team should be a cause for concern. And in addition to this, if the quality isn’t high enough at the highest level, what does that say about the standard of coaching right the way down through the rest of the game in that country?

It may well be that Argentina winning the 2022 World Cup has resulted in a feeling that now actually is the time for quick fixes for Brazil, and that philosophical debates over whether their men’s head coach should be Brazilian can wait. And it may well be that it will work. Ancelotti plus Brazil in a World Cup being held in the Americas and with Argentina surely this time having lost Messi… it’s not difficult to see how the CBF have persuaded themselves. But the decision to hire him may also say something profound about coaching in Brazil at the moment, and this should not be overlooked, if the game there is to be substantially reformed.