What happened to Brazil?: Rudraneil Sengupta writes on the football World Cup

That was where the game went to find its soul, its fountain of creativity; its artists and soldiers, gods, priests and troubadours. Barefoot and in nothing but tattered shorts, playing with a ball made from scraps of cloth tied together, or dazzling the world in cobalt blue and canary yellow, it was all the same.

“The ball is my best friend,” said Pele.

“I learned all about life with a ball at my feet,” said Ronaldinho.

This is a country where a newborn’s parents hang the shirt of the team they support on the door of their baby’s room. And where people, when they die, have their coffins draped in the flag of the team they supported in life.

Brazil still holds the record for more World Cups won — five — than any other country. Yet nearly 25 years have passed since the last one, in 2002; years in which the footballing world appears to have shrugged them off.

The muse has left them, the mystic is long gone. Young fans of the game don’t automatically associate beauty, artistry and sheer dominance with this country.

So when Norway — who last qualified for the World Cup in 1998, and was playing in the knockout round for only the third time in its history — dismissed Brazil from the ongoing tournament on July 6, it didn’t come as much of a shock to the world.

How did it come to this? That is a question that demands serious research. Economics, changes in social structure and urbanisation have erased informal playing spaces. Corruption and a lack of vision in the domestic league has led all the best talent to leave the country to play club football abroad. There’s plenty more; the list of factors is long. But there is one aspect of the Brazilian game that may hold the key to everything.

At the 1982 World Cup, Brazil, as it tended to do back then, sent in a team of wizards; the likes of Zico, Eder and Falcao, led by the chain-smoking, guitar-playing physician and football magician Socrates. The way they played captivated and thrilled even their opponents. This was football as most people had never seen it before.

Then they were beaten, in the quarterfinals, by a hard-edged, defensive and sleekly organised Italy. “No one understands this world anymore; Brazil eliminated,” read a newspaper headline in Barcelona.

Brazilian football would never be the same. The team’s focus shifted from creativity and artistry to pragmatism.

Socrates’s famous motto, “Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary”, was emphatically rejected. There was now a wall between playing to win and the traditional Brazilian idea of playing beautifully. The country went on to win the World Cup in 1994 (its first such win in 24 years) and again in 2002. But this was not the same mystic force. There was little difference between them and a good team from Europe. Soon, they stopped winning against those teams, starting a slow downward slide.

Meanwhile, the beauty in football didn’t disappear. It moved to other places. In Spain, inspired by Barcelona’s philosophy, lithe players combined creativity, artistry and control to shatter the most intimidating defences. Spain went on to win its first World Cup in 2010. In France, impoverished neighbourhoods turned out successive generations of daring, free-flowing artists, from Zinedine Zidane in the late-1990s to Michael Olise today. France has since won two World Cups, in 1998 and 2018, and is setting off fireworks at the ongoing edition.

I see, in their sense of joy and their phenomenal success, something that looks familiar. Perhaps Brazil will find its way back to the path described by Socrates, and rediscover what has always been in its DNA.

(Email Rudraneil Sengupta on rudraneil@ gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)