Brazil’s players touched down in Townsville on Thursday, the day before a friendly against Australia, and in doing so opened the latest chapter of the Seleção’s rebuild under Carlo Ancelotti. The setting is about as far from the Santiago Bernabéu as the fixture list gets: a north Queensland city of just over 200,000 in rugby league heartland that has never staged a Socceroos A international, and whose A-League representative, North Queensland Fury, collapsed in 2011.
The scale of the mismatch between team and town was on full display at the airport, where the Brazil squad shared the terminal with almost 80 junior rugby league sides flying in from around Queensland for the Gordon Tallis Cup. It is a safe bet that Vinícius Júnior, who plays week in and week out for Real Madrid, has never heard of the Fury, and likely that none of his teammates knew much about the region’s football history either. Raphinha, the Barcelona attacker, would only be adding to the surreality if he left the Sunshine State next week having posted #BringBackTheFury on his Instagram page.
Ancelotti’s own base for the trip is a 10-minute walk from the Mad Cow Tavern on Flinders Street, an unlikely headquarters for a manager beginning his first full World Cup cycle as Brazil boss. The opponents are led by Tony Popovic, a coach who once spent time as Ancelotti’s guest during his spells at AC Milan and Bayern Munich, and the two remain close. “We are good friends,” Ancelotti said. “Sometimes we have the possibility to meet to talk about football. We spent time together when I was in Milan, we spent time together in Brisbane two nights ago. It’s a pleasure to talk about football with him. He’s doing a fantastic job here. A really passionate manager. I hope the best for him. I think the World Cup he had was a really good World Cup. The team showed strong quality, a compact team.” Australia’s squad announcement for these friendlies saw captain Maty Ryan left out.
The region has welcomed the five-time world champions with a sense of bemusement. Hotels across Townsville are booked out, and Friday afternoon will bring a street party featuring Brazilian jiu-jitsu and capoeira demonstrations, a Brazilian band and line dancing. Brazil are in Queensland because the state government worked with promoters and the CBF, and paid up, to bring them to what it calls the events capital of the north as part of its major events strategy. The state’s minister for tourism, Andrew Powell, declared in the media release accompanying the Socceroos’ squad announcement that the Crisafulli government had gone out and secured the games. Even so, Brazil’s arrival was knocked down the local pecking order by the Brisbane Lions’ pursuit of a three-peat in Saturday’s AFL grand final, a day after the Dolphins meet the Sydney Roosters in their first NRL preliminary final.
Touring Australia is not entirely new territory for Brazil. They last played the Socceroos and Argentina here in 2017, and would have faced Argentina again at the MCG in 2022 had La Albiceleste not withdrawn. The Seleção’s global pull remains considerable: the shirt has been worn by Pelé, Socrates, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and Neymar, and the cultural cachet of joga bonito still travels with it. A Brazilian supporter carrying a prop World Cup trophy was among those navigating the connection from Brisbane to Townsville on Thursday morning. The fixtures will also be lucrative for the visitors, who will take the field in Queensland as the official home side, before a game against India on 3 October.
On the pitch, the two Queensland matches are Brazil’s first since their last-16 defeat to Norway at the World Cup, their earliest elimination from the tournament since they went out to Argentina at Italia 90. By the time 2030 arrives it will have been 28 years since their 2002 triumph in Japan and South Korea, their longest drought since they first won the World Cup in 1958. Brazil, plainly, are no longer the dominant global force they once were, and this trip marks another inflection point in a long-running national argument about an increasingly diminished place among football’s elite. The Brisbane leg, at Lang Park next Tuesday, will at least offer a genuine Australian football experience: the surface will be only four days removed from the Dolphins’ preliminary final against the Roosters.
The explanations offered for the decline are numerous, too many to unpack. One memorable hypothesis points to a rise in individualistic, prosperity gospel Pentecostalism at the expense of Catholicism within the team. Another notes that games against the European opponents who keep knocking Brazil out of the World Cup have become harder to arrange since the introduction of the Uefa Nations League, while cash-spinning tours against supposed lesser foes, staged overseas at the expense of a connection with the country’s football-obsessed public, have themselves been floated as a possible contributor.
Whatever the cause, Ancelotti has been handed the task of righting the ship, and the journey starts in Townsville. He is not treating the occasion lightly. “It’s difficult to say it’s a friendly,” he said. “For Brazil, it will never be a friendly game. It will be an important game. A new season, we have a goal to find new players, to find a new generation of players for the World Cup and Copa America. And we start in the game tomorrow.”