The Joy and Sadness of Supporting Brazil

1990 was the first World Cup I remember watching, and I had never seen Brazil play a single match before it. What I had was my dad's stories about 1982: a team so good it apparently didn't need to win, and didn't. I took it as a nice piece of family folklore. I did not clock it as a warning label.

By the time the tournament started I'd already watched enough replays of 1986 to become a committed Maradona admirer, but that was about the player, not the team. Brazil was mine from the start. Then the World Cup itself kicked off and Careca started scoring goals that looked too clean to be real, which only confirmed it. So when Brazil drew Argentina in the Round of 16, I had a real conflict on my hands: loving what Maradona could do while needing Brazil to beat him. Brazil resolved it for me by losing. Maradona drifted forward from midfield, found Claudio Caniggia, who rounded the keeper and finished in the 81st minute. 1-0. I must have replayed that sequence a hundred times since, always arriving at the same useless thought: if Taffarel comes two steps further off his line, if the tackle five yards earlier actually holds, none of the rest of it happens. It never does, obviously. That was my first real disappointment as a sports fan, and the lesson wasn't about beauty. It was that the scoreboard doesn't care how you got there. The tournament ground on to a forgettable final that West Germany won over Argentina, and a few months later my family moved to England, where Brazil slipped out of my thinking entirely and I became a Liverpool supporter instead.

Brazil didn't stay forgotten for long. Liverpool drew Genoa in a UEFA Cup quarterfinal, and a Brazilian named Branco hit a free kick so good it's stuck with me longer than most of what else happened that season. One goal was enough to bring Brazil back into view.

By 1994 I'd learned to go into tournaments expecting the worst, and the quarterfinal against the Netherlands did its best to confirm it. Brazil went up 2-0 through Romário and Bebeto, then watched the Dutch pull it back to 2-2. Then Branco turned up again, hit another free kick from thirty yards, and made it 3-2. Romário carried the rest of the tournament, and Brazil won it all. I hadn't actually planned for that outcome.

We'd moved again by 1998, this time to Canada, and by then I'd spent two years watching Ronaldo, though really it was one season that did it. At Barcelona in 1996 and 97, he scored 47 goals in 49 games, and one of them, a coast-to-coast solo run at Compostela where he beat four defenders inside the box before finishing, was replayed on Spanish television so often in the two days afterward that people started keeping an actual count (160, according to that count). He was 21 that year and became the youngest Ballon d'Or winner the award had ever seen. Watching him then, it was easy to believe you weren't watching a promising player. You were watching the ceiling itself. Zlatan Ibrahimović later said it best: "He was football." My dad and I watched the 1998 final together at the SkyDome in Toronto, full of an optimism 1990 should already have cured me of. France won 3-0. Zidane scored twice with his head, and Petit added a third in stoppage time. It hurt in a specific way, because something had clearly gone wrong with Ronaldo hours before kickoff. He was left off the team sheet, then mysteriously reinstated, and nobody in that stadium knew whether we were watching him or a shaken version of him wearing his number. Two years on, Inter's medical staff confirmed what that night in Paris had only hinted at: his knee gave out for real, the patellar tendon tearing not once but twice, and he spent close to three years rebuilding a body that had briefly belonged to the best player alive. I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit imagining 1998 with the Compostela version of Ronaldo on the pitch instead of whatever wounded version we actually got. It changes nothing. It's also exactly the shape of what following this team does to you: you don't just lose, you get handed a full alternate history to run through your head afterward, for free, forever.

It's tribal identity borrowing a jersey it has no real claim to, and it's proof that the ugliest thing about fandom was never losing.

2002 gave me a win without any qualifiers attached. 2006 gave me high expectations and a quarterfinal exit to a France team that simply played better on the day. Since then it's been one disappointment after another, most recently yesterday, when Norway eliminated Brazil in the Round of 16. Neymar scored a late penalty that changed nothing, then announced his retirement from the national team.

By last night I already knew the routine. I watched Norway's second goal, Haaland from distance, more times than I'm willing to admit, not really to relive it but to search for the version where it doesn't go in: a defender half a step closer, a body shape angled a few degrees differently, someone closing him down a beat sooner. That is the actual ritual after a loss like this, more than the sadness itself. You don't just feel bad for an evening and move on. You reconstruct the ninety minutes frame by frame, hunting for the ten seconds where the whole outcome could have tipped the other way, fully aware that it changes nothing and doing it anyway, because the alternative is just accepting that it happened the way it happened. It's a strange kind of grief, mourning a team that was never mine to grieve for in the first place, and it turns out that's a mild version of something that gets far stranger back in my motherland.

Nowhere is football tribalism stranger, or sadder, than in Bangladesh, a country with no team in this tournament and no path to ever having one, where entire streets are strung with Brazilian and Argentine flags, some reportedly seventy feet long, block competing against block for whose colors own the skyline. There's real history behind it. Maradona's Hand of God against England read, in a country that had lived under empire, as something closer to a reckoning than a goal, and that part deserves respect. What doesn't is a twelve-year-old boy who was electrocuted in 2018 hanging a flag from a power line, for a team that isn't his country's, in a rivalry that was never his to inherit. That's the part I can't get past. None of it is actually about Brazil or Argentina. It's tribal identity borrowing a jersey it has no real claim to, and it's proof that the ugliest thing about fandom was never losing. It's mistaking a team you support for a country you belong to.

I understand the love completely. I've just never once needed the ownership that seems to come bundled with it. I still miss the glory days, even the ones I only know through my dad's telling. I still watch this tournament as a neutral, still enjoy watching Messi without any sense of contradiction, and I've never had to dislike Argentina to justify supporting Brazil, a stance that seems to genuinely confuse fans who treat this rivalry like a matter of national loyalty. I have none here. I'm not Brazilian, and I have no allegiance beyond memory. But decades in, I still find myself hoping the samba style returns one day, not because I need Brazil to win again, but because I'd like to see that kind of football again while I can still appreciate it. That's the whole point of watching as a neutral: no blood in the game, just the hope that somebody, anybody, plays something beautiful before the final whistle.