| Babil Tezcür and Andrés Martinez
This week, Carlo Ancelotti announced his final selection for the seleção that will represent Brazil at this summer’s World Cup. Intriguingly, the famous Italian coach brought in to restore Brazil to what it considers its rightful place at the pinnacle of global football chose seven players from clubs in Brazil’s domestic league – including the aging and inconsistent but still talismanic Neymar – and 19 players from clubs in leagues outside Brazil. Of these, eight play in the English Premier League, two each in Spain's La Liga, Italy's Serie A, France's Ligue 1, the Saudi Pro League, and the Russian Premier League, with one in the Turkish Süper Lig.
Ancelotti’s call-up of seven players from the domestic league represents a reversal, or speed bump, in long-term globalizing trends, as more and more of the world’s best players congregate in a handful of Europe’s wealthiest leagues. At the last men’s World Cup, in Qatar, only three of Brazil’s 26 players were selected from domestic league clubs.
In advance of this summer’s World Cup, we did some analysis of World Cup rosters over time to illustrate the globalization of the game. In the case of Brazil, for instance, the iconic Pelé-led scratch du ouro that so astonished the world at the 1970 World Cup was composed entirely of players in the domestic league. That was of course partly why the rest of the world was astonished; in those days fans tuned into the World Cup to watch players and styles of play they’d never watched before. Today, by contrast, we tune in to watch players we are familiar with already, because we watch them play year-round for the likes of Arsenal, Real Madrid, or Bayern Munich.
Since 1970, Chart A below shows the gradual upwards progression in the number of “international” players (those playing in leagues outside Brazil, that is) representing Brazil at each World Cup. There have been other dips along the way, such as for this World Cup. For the successful 2002 World Cup, coach Luiz Felipe Scolari decided to buck the globalizing trend and rely more on domestic league players than four years earlier.
The long-term gravitational pull of ever richer European leagues is irresistible, but some of the oscillations along the way reflect the state of Brazil’s economy, and the strength of its currency, along with regulatory moves in Europe restricting or encouraging the import of foreign talent. Today, for instance, while Brazil’s domestic league cannot keep up with the spending of its major European peers, economic conditions are sufficiently stable to allow big clubs like Flamengo to retain some of the country’s more accomplished players, four of whom will be at the World Cup. It’s also true that Ancelotti, a foreign manager, might have felt some pressure not to be too dismissive of the nation’s domestic league.
With fits and starts, the mass emigration of Brazilian talent to Europe started in the 1980s. It was a time when serial financial crises across Latin America coincided with loosening restrictions on player mobility. Particularly after the 1982 World Cup, many of Brazil’s national team players decided to move abroad, especially to Italy and Portugal. In the 1980s, Italy decided to open their borders to foreign players, and allow up to three foreign players per team starting in the 1985-1986 season. Along with Portugal, Italy also offered Brazilian players a greater cultural and climactic affinity than did Northern Europe.
Still, some of the biggest stars to cross the Atlantic then found it hard to adapt. Sócrates, the talented midfielder star of the 1982 World Cup, moved back to Brazil from Fiorentina after one season. So, he is counted as a domestic league player for both 1982 and 1986 World Cups though he had an Italian sojourn in between them. The same is true of his fellow genius in that generation’s midfield, Zico, who spent two seasons in Italy between the ’82 and ’86 World Cups.
The globalization of Brazilian football heavily accelerated in the 1990s. More members of the Brazilian national team began playing abroad rather than domestically. The Bosman ruling in 1995 was a key turning point. Although it was a case arising in European courts that directly affected EU citizens, removing foreign caps on players from within the EU, Bosman’s practical effect was to accelerate the big leagues’ globalization, and not just for European Union talent.
Enormous broadcasting deals for Europe’s major leagues also helped them widen the gap with leagues elsewhere and solidify their status as the center of the footballing world.
Of course, the preferred European destinations for Brazil’s star players have shifted over time, as Chart B below shows.
If at one point earlier Spain supplanted Italy as the most prestigious league in the world, the 2010s saw the English Premier League overtake it to become the dominant spender in the world’s top sport. For Brazil’s 2026 squad, Ancelotti called up eight players from the English Premier League, and only two each from Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga.
Within Brazil, as is the case in many other countries, the increasing reliance on players who play year-round outside the country is the source of some consternation, and sparks plenty of sporting and cultural debates, especially at times when the national team’s results are disappointing. Many fans and commentators like to argue that the “Brazilian style” of football has declined as more players have moved to Europe and are developed to be appealing to European clubs and their styles of play. Brazilian fans also struggle to form strong emotional connections with players who head off to Europe while still teenagers, as opposed to previous generations of stars who might cross the Atlantic only once they were established stars in the domestic league.
More pragmatic fans view these claims as an overreaction, as it is not possible to play like Garrincha or Sócrates in today’s football. Modern football has evolved too much, and yesteryear’s idiosyncratic, free-flowing style is difficult to replicate in today’s more systematized game. But that doesn’t mean fans can’t yearn for what’s been lost or shared with the rest of the world. Nostalgia, after all, is a universal ingredient of all sports fandom.
