Opinion – Tostão: Brazilian football school

In today’s globalized world, where all teams and selections use known and similar tactical schemes and strategies, is there still a Brazilian football school or one for each country or even for each continent?

After winning the World Cups in 1958, 1962 and 1970, the world was fascinated by the Brazilian way of playing, with great skill, fantasy, improvisation and special effects. It was football art. It is necessary to emphasize that the 1970 National Team was the beginning of scientific football in Brazil. The team united individual talent with tactical organization.

Despite the great changes that have taken place in football over the last 50 years, there is still, in the collective unconscious of many Brazilians, a nostalgic, outdated discourse, which many people like, that Brazil needs to go back to its origins, play like in the past. The world moves forward. The past is important to understand the present and to dream about the future.

Evidently, strategies, tactical discipline and sports science, which are fundamental, cannot nullify inventiveness, improvisation and daring. There is, in Brazil, a sometimes pseudo-scientific, statistical discourse, as if everything that happened in football was planned. In the Qatar Cup, the great characters were the stars, as expected. These superstars are deeply technical. This is more than scientific.

The big teams, more and more, alternate the way of playing during the matches. Brazil has had difficulty creating these variations. In the World Cup, the team was held hostage by fast, dribbling wingers, the “unbalanced extremes”, as if they were privileges of the Brazilian team. All the great teams and national teams also had great wingers.

The school of Brazilian football, because of the division that existed, for decades, in the midfield, between the defensive midfielders and the attacking midfielders, failed to produce great midfielders. The passing of the ball from the defense to the attack started to be done by the supporting laterals. Great players emerged in that position, such as Nílton Santos, Carlos Alberto Torres, Júnior, Roberto Carlos, Cafu, Daniel Alves, Marcelo and many others.

The Europeans, on the contrary, used the full-backs much more as markers and, with that, formed many more talented midfielders, who play from one intermediary to the other, than Brazil. This is still evident. The Brazilian national team does not have a single player in that position who is among the best in the world.

Brazil continues to form a large number of excellent players, but since 2007, it has not had a winner of the best in the world award. The only one who would have a chance is Neymar, who, for various reasons, did not win the award.

The Cup was not won by the team that had the best wingers, as predicted by former coach Arsène Wenger, a FIFA observer during the World Cup. Nor was it won by the team with the best midfielders or the best defenders or the best forwards. It was won by the team that better alternated lineups and strategies, according to the moment and the opponent, and, mainly, because they had Messi.

The so-called Brazilian football school, which I don’t know if it still exists, is confused, schizophrenic, for not knowing what it wants, divided between the soul and the body, between the individual and the collective, between the past and the present, between the planned and the unforeseen. It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other.