One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Can Carlo Ancelotti’s whole deal work for Neymar at an international tournament?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup.
Will Carlo Ancelotti break the Neymar emergency case?
Two years ago, I previewed Brazil’s chances at the 2024 Copa America via a quasi-eulogy for Neymar’s Brazil career. At the time, Neymar had blown out his ACL while playing in Saudi Arabia, and it seemed as though his time playing in Canary and Blue was definitively over.
Part of that preview was wondering how Brazil would fare in the first years of the post-Neymar era and if you’re wondering how they have done, the fact that Carlo Ancelotti was fielding press conference questions about whether or not he will call Neymar to the World Cup squad should answer that question, as does the fact that Neymar was in fact called up to Brazil’s preliminary roster today.
Brazil’s attempts at a post-Neymar era have been distinctly mediocre: A quarterfinal exit in the 2024 Copa America, and a stop-start qualifying campaign in which they lost away matches to Colombia, Paraguay, and Uruguay and suffered an unheard of home match against Argentina on their way to a distant fifth place in CONMEBOL
Brazil pulled their first panic lever in the summer of 2025, appointing European football’s great short-term star whisperer in Ancelotti.
For the past quarter of a century, Carlo Ancelotti has been the answer for a European club looking for a manager to maximize the potential of a pre-assembled group of stars. At various times since the end of his extended stint at AC Milan, all of Chelsea, PSG, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich have pressed the big red Ancellotti button, to varying degrees of success.
Frequently, Carlo’s teams played simple, effective soccer. He puts star players in a position to succeed, rather than masterminding a strategy to increase marginal advantages in every single game over the course of a long season. This is perhaps why Ancelotti’s tenures frequently featured just one league championship, rather than extended dynasties.
It is also why he has always seemed like a natural fit for international coaching. What Carlo might lack in hardcore tactical philosophy, he has always made up for in player relationships and game management. This is what most defined his last great run at Real Madrid.
Los Blancos were reportedly out of ideas when Ancelotti volunteered to take over in the summer of 2021. Almost immediately, he seemed to unlock new levels in Karim Benzema and Vinícius Júnior, crafting a side that seemed to never be quite capable of losing.
From 2021 through 2025, Real Madrid were played off the pitch for entire halves in big games, yet a combination of Ancelotti’s tactics and some sort of ephemeral magic he cast over the team meant that they never panicked, never conceded too much, and always found themselves in the position to score the key goal at the key time. That was good enough for two Champions League titles and two La Liga championships.
And so Carlo comes to Brazil, a World Cup team in desperate need of some Ancelotti Champions League magic. Here, for example is a recent beer ad which is pretty much all about how no one really thinks Brazil can win the World Cup, but also everyone desperately wants to believe that they will:
The final message of the ad — which literally ends with Carlo Ancelotti — is “we’re Brazil, we’re allowed to believe in magic at the World Cup, because this is the kind of thing that happens to us.” And it’s certainly also the kind of thing that has happened Carlo.
The question will be if Carlo, who has always been at his best when given a monumental star to empower, believes that players like Vinicius and Raphinha1If he can get healthy and various role players named Igor are those stars.
Neymar casts such a long shadow over Brazilian soccer, and Ancelotti’s decision to bring him to training camp seems telling. And though he has not played extensively for Santos over the past month, if he is able to get healthy he is more than talented enough to make a difference at one more World Cup.
There has never been a better manager at picking up a wayward diamond and helping it shine than Carlo Ancelotti. The defining question for Brazil at this World Cup is who Ancelotti thinks that star should be, and if the story of Neymar for the national team perhaps has one more chapter to be written.
