Dorival Junior is the new coach of the Brazilian national football team.

The Brazilian national team, which is going through a crisis, will be brought out of it not by the famous Carlo Ancelotti, who, having ignored the Brazilian invitation, extended his contract with Real, but by a much less famous coach. Fernando Diniz, who was fired at the end of last year after a series of failures in qualifying for the world championship, was replaced by Dorival Junior. This specialist has not yet been known outside his native country, but he has achieved quite significant success in domestic competitions.

The Sao Paulo club announced on its account on the social network X that its coach Dorival Junior has left his post to lead the Brazilian national team. The coach himself called this event “the embodiment of a personal dream.”

His appointment is a consequence of the unexpected crisis in which the Brazilian team found itself. Immediately after the World Cup in Qatar at the end of 2022, which ended for her at the quarter-final stage with a defeat from the Croats, she parted ways with head coach Tite. After him, Ramon Menezes held the post for some time, and then it went to Fernand Diniz. It was under Diniz that the five-time world champions unexpectedly found themselves in a rather deep crisis. Last fall, as part of the qualifying tournament for the next world championship, which will be hosted by the USA, Canada and Mexico in 2026, the Brazilians played a draw with the outsiders of the South American zone, the Venezuelans, and then suffered three defeats in a row – from the Uruguayans, Colombians and Argentines.

Their tournament position after the third loss in a row cannot be called catastrophic for only one reason. The future World Cup will feature 48 teams instead of 32.

And the expansion of the championship format increased the South American quota. Six out of ten teams will qualify directly for the championship, and the seventh will have a chance to qualify through intercontinental play-offs. The Brazilians are now just sixth. True, the distance between them and the Paraguayans and Chileans in seventh and eighth places is tiny – two points.

At the same time, it was assumed that a master with an excellent reputation and a big name would lead the Brazilian team out of its crisis and prepare it for the World Cup. In the summer, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) announced that it had reached an agreement to be led by Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti after the end of the season. However, the deal eventually fell through. Before the New Year, CBF President Ednaldo Rodriguez, who negotiated the invitation of Ancelotti, first lost his position due to election irregularities. And after this, the coach himself extended his contract with Real until 2026.

Meanwhile, despite this, the CBF fired a few days ago Fernanda Diniz, who worked for the national team as an interim coach and at the same time continued to lead Fluminense (with whom he lost to Manchester City in the final of the Club World Cup in Saudi Arabia in December) ). And his replacement was a specialist whose name, unlike the name of Carlo Ancelotti, was still hardly well known outside his native country.

The fact is that the entire coaching career of 61-year-old Dorival Junior, which began in 2002, took place exclusively in Brazil.

During this time, he had the opportunity to coach about two dozen local teams of various levels. Among them were Brazilian giants – such as Cruzeiro, Athletico Mineiro, Athletico Paranaense, Internacional, Santos, Vasco da Gama, Fluminense, Palmeiras, Flamengo. Moreover, Dorival Junior’s career reached its peak quite recently.

In 2022, he managed to win the Copa Libertadores, the most prestigious club tournament in South America, with Flamengo. This success aroused interest in him from Sao Paulo, which is considered a rich team by Brazilian standards. With her, Dorival Junior immediately took the Brazilian Cup, despite the fact that his new club had never won it before. And recent achievements forced Brazilian analysts to carefully analyze the coach’s very interesting gaming system.

Formally, there is an all too obvious bias towards attack. Dorival Junior almost always uses a 4-2-3-1 formation, and the full-backs are no less often present in the opposing half of the field than in their own.

But the trick is that, at least with Flamengo and Sao Paulo, he achieved a very rapid transformation in case of need to defend – due to aggressive play in the supporting zone and restructuring of the flank players. How effective Dorival Junior’s schemes are for the national team can be assessed in March. At the beginning of spring, the Brazilians will have two friendly matches in a row with the European giants – the British and the Spanish.

Alexey Dospehov