Taking a 7-1

When I first moved to Brazil, I was overwhelmed by its vastness and diversity. Brazil is physically larger than the 48 states, and includes German-speaking communities in the south, uncontacted indigenous peoples in the Amazon, the largest Japanese population outside of Japan and the largest African-descended population outside of Africa. The imagined community of the nation seemed even more tenuous than in the U.S.—how could all two hundred million-plus Brazilians share a unified sense of what it means to be Brazilian? Early on, I asked my girlfriend’s brother what, if anything, he thought united Brazilians, and he said there wasn’t much. Just football.

He’s not wrong: once I went to see a Corinthians vs. Palmeiras football game at the Corinthians stadium in São Paulo, and it felt like nothing so much as a mass religious experience. Tens of thousands of people were gathered together, all dressed the same, singing in unison for the entire ninety minutes. The game was a chance to lose the individual in the collective, to feel connected to a higher power. We united ourselves with the players, feeling their successes as our personal victories and their losses as personal defeats. Multiply this to the whole population of Brazil, and that’s how I imagined this year’s World Cup might be, if people believed.

But a push headline I read early in the World Cup’s group stage better captured the national mood. “They did it again,” declared the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo after Germany beat Curação 7-1 last month. Even rendered in text, I could hear the brittle note of pain.

“Again” because Germany infamously beat Brazil 7-1 in the 2014 World Cup. That game was played at home in Brazil, and the humiliation of the loss was nothing short of a national trauma. The event is so totemic that it’s become a common phrase in Brazilian Portuguese: you can “take a 7-1” from a rotten day or your boss or particularly bad traffic. Brazil, which has won more World Cup titles than any other country, is still known as “the country of football”—but since that match, Brazilians realized they could no longer rely on the sport as a pillar of joy and national unity.

This is the shadow that has been cast over Brazil’s national team for the past twelve years. No one was ready to be hurt so badly again. The default attitude became one of scorn and pessimism; according to one poll released this May, only 15 percent of Brazilians were excited for the World Cup. Even throughout the group-stage matches, in which Brazil came out top of their group, people remained unenthused. The team, everyone agreed, was dull, weak, uninspired. “Brazilian football is in a period of decadence,” I overheard one park security guard say to another after they tied Morocco 1-1 during the group stage.

But all this dismissiveness is merely a defense mechanism. “What if we stop being the ‘country of football’?” my Brazilian girlfriend asked forlornly after the Morocco game. She normally doesn’t care at all about football. People wanted to see Brazilian football rebuild its stature, even if it was too painful to express it. The streets of São Paulo were empty during each game, and the city eerily calm. With each goal the city would explode with car horns and yelling and fireworks. “How good to be Brazilian!” said my friend Felipe after Brazil’s third goal against Scotland, the last game before the knockout round. (Earlier that night he had professed his disinterest in the World Cup.)

A few days later, at 2 p.m., Brazil played Japan in the first knockout game. Everyone got off early from work, and the sidewalks streamed with canary yellow. When Japan went up one in the first half, the crowd in the bar was silent and ashen-faced. When they equalized, everyone rose to their feet and forgot about their chairs for the rest of the game. A bald man who was clearly on drugs joined our group, muttering incantations to himself. When Martinelli scored the winning goal in the sixth minute of injury time, the bald man wrapped his arms around Felipe and another guy, and beckoned me in too.

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Then came Brazil’s round-of-16 game against lower-ranked Norway. I watched it in my friend Oseias’s apartment in far-north São Paulo, a neighborhood of narrow alleys and buildings that rise in jumbled stacks. Our faces lit by the bright screen in his dark room, we let our hopes rise a little; we were already talking about an England-Brazil quarter final. It made the next ninety minutes all the more dismal.

In the eighth minute of a twelve-minute injury time, as Casemiro was fouled in the box, the GloboTV announcer allowed himself to dream one last time. “It’s a penalty! There’s a penalty for Brazil!” he cried. “Is it possible Brazil still has hope in this game?”

A few minutes later, it was clear that they did not. The team truly was dull, weak and uninspired—and had just delivered Brazil’s worst World Cup performance in 36 years. “It’s unbelievable,” the announcer said flatly, “but Brazil’s worst nightmare has come to pass. The disaster is confirmed.” We switched the TV off.

What exactly is the disaster, if it’s anything more than hyperbole? “Brazil has this inferiority complex, of not reaching the outside world,” said the actress Fernanda Torres in an interview last year, reflecting on the international success of the Brazilian movie I’m Still Here. “When someone breaks through the barrier and brings something of ours to the outside, you think, ‘Look how much richness we have!’”

On the world stage, there’s not much in domestic politics for Brazilians to take pride in, given the country’s inequality, endemic violence and corruption. Even the brief feeling of political superiority over the U.S.—when Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes locked up Bolsonaro for an attempted coup—was undercut this year by revelations that Moraes was one of many justices and politicians implicated in massive financial fraud.

It’s in Brazilian culture, in sport and Carnival and music, that people feel the best in the country is on display to the rest of the world. When Pharrell and Kanye were filmed bopping their heads to a Brazilian song at a Louis Vuitton show in 2021, the clip went viral. When the American BookTok influencer Courtney Henning Novak raved about Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in a 2024 video, it was featured repeatedly on the national news. People held parties just to celebrate I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent making it to the 2025 and 2026 Oscars.

The disaster of this World Cup, then, is one fewer place for Brazilians to see the best in themselves. It’s deeper than winning or losing; it’s about the nature of the national character. “If they were to come on and play that beautiful football we’re used to … we would say, ‘These guys represent me,’” the sports journalist Milly Lacombe observed, in an interview that went viral after the loss to Norway. Brazilian football had once shown the indomitable spirit of young men who had risen from favelas to defeat the best players of Europe. They had the power to cast off any inferiority complex. But it’s been decades, Lacombe argued, since they’ve played the “street football,” bold and mischievous and intuitive, that made them great in the Eighties. Now they play “timidly, cowardly.”

At Oseias’s place after the game, we went out into his alley to find a guy burning a Brazilian flag. Angry young men ripped their way through the streets on motorcycles without mufflers, gunning them as loud as possible. Two girls on a motorcycle passed us singing the chorus of a pagode hit by the band Grupo Revelação: “Now that you’ve lost, cry, cry.”

Though the girls didn’t sing more, the lyrics continue:

I told you that life is a garden,
And every flower needs emotion.
I told you that my love
was strong, but you let it fall.

I told you so, I told you so.
It was so graceless, so bad.
You pulled so many stunts you drove me crazy.
And now that you lost me,
Cry, cry.

Cry because it really hurts.
Cry the pain of longing.
Cry and ask for help from heaven.
Cry and swear you don’t deserve it.
How bitter the gall of loneliness.
It wasn’t worth it, no, no.

Photo credit: Daniel Esler