Carlo Ancelotti to take charge of Brazil national football team

The most titled football team in the world next year will be headed by one of the most titled coaches. The Brazilian team, which has suffered two decades of failure after failure in the world championships, will be coached by Carlo Ancelotti, who now heads Real Madrid. For a specialist, this is a completely new challenge: until now he has worked, albeit extremely successfully, only with clubs.

The President of the Brazilian Football Federation (CBF), Ednaldo Rodriguez, announced that Carlo Ancelotti will become the head coach of the Brazilian national team in 2024. Ancelotti’s official appointment to this position will take place immediately after the expiration of his contract with Real Madrid: he expires through the season. Thus, the debut of the Italian in the status of coach of the most titled team, which has won the gold of the world championships five times, will take place next summer at Copa America, which will be hosted by the United States. Before him, the Brazilians will be led by Fernando Diniz as interim coach.

Ednaldo Rodriguez believes that the “cute” style he prefers is similar to the style favored by Carlo Ancelotti.

However, speaking about the Italian, Rodriguez added that along with professionalism, “modesty” also belongs to his positive qualities.

For Brazil, this personnel decision can be considered significant. Formally, in the history of the Brazilian national team there were foreigners who were trusted to coach it. But there are only four of them, and the last – the Argentine Filpo Nunez – left his post in 1966. Since then, for more than half a century, Brazilians have relied exclusively on local personnel and, it seems, were not even particularly interested in foreign, much less European.

To spit on the tradition of CBF was forced by need. Having won the fifth World Cup in 2002, the Brazilian national team then invariably failed at them and could not create a team even close in level to the one that made a splash with a beautiful and effective game in the Japanese-Korean tournament. In the five world championships that came to this segment, the Brazilians never reached the final and only once participated in the semi-final stage. A relative breakthrough happened at the 2014 home championship. But in any case, in the memory of local fans, he will forever remain a terrible nightmare because of the defeat just in the semi-final with a score of 1: 7 from the Germans, followed by another defeat: in the match for the bronze of the Brazilians – 3: 0 – the Dutch won.

In the previous two World Cups, the Brazilian team stumbled in the quarterfinals. In 2018, the Belgians beat her out in Russia, and in 2022, the Croats beat her out in Qatar. In both cases, it was not about some kind of thunderous sensation: the Brazilians were listed no higher than their rivals.

After the Qatari championship, they parted ways with coach Tite, appointing instead of him – again, in the status of interim – Ramon Menezes, and then CBF firmly decided to look for a top mentor for the national team, not paying attention to his nationality. The fact that Carlo Ancelotti turned out to be a priority option for her became clear back in the spring. And the reasons for the choice are quite clear.

The fact is that 64-year-old Ancelotti also may be considered the record holder for the most prestigious club titles among coaches. He led his teams to victory in the Champions League four times.

Twice he took the trophy with Milan, twice with Real Madrid, including in 2022. And this list of valuable prizes obtained by Ancelotti as a mentor is by no means exhausted.

In addition, in favor of his candidacy, the fact that Carlo Ancelotti, who ended up in the Madrid club in 2021, now has three important players for the current version of the Brazilian national team at Real Madrid – forwards Vinicius and Rodrigo and central defender Eder Militan. And everyone has a great relationship with Ancelotti. And Vinicius, who claims to be the leader in the national team, generally called him “the best coach in the world.”

At the same time, the contract with CBF still looks like a serious and difficult challenge for Carlo Ancelotti.

His coaching career started back in the mid-1990s. But so far he has worked exclusively with clubs, albeit mostly great ones. In addition to Real Madrid and Milan, he has Juventus on his track record, Chelsea, PSG, Bayern, Napoli, Everton. Moreover, Ancelotti failed extremely rarely, as a rule, performing the tasks assigned to him. However, he fulfilled them with the help of club owners and managers who bought great players on the market for a lot of money. At the new place of work, he will have to rely on the already formed backbone of the national team, which can hardly be radically strengthened and which still does not look equal, for example, to the one that marched to the champion title in 2002.

Alexey Dospekhov