Why Brazilian players are far more successful than Brazilian managers

Dorival Junior, Brazil‘s latest men’s national team coach, is taking on his 26th managerial job in the past 22 years. That’s right: 22 seasons, 26 different gigs. And guess what? He’s not really an outlier, either.

His Selecao predecessor, Fernando Diniz, who split the job with coaching club side Fluminense, had 17 in 13 seasons. Before him, Ramon Menezes had 11 in 10 years. Even the guy before him, Tite, who guided Brazil in two World Cups and was the national team’s longest-serving manager in history (6 years and 3 months), had a whopping 17 different jobs in 25 years before being appointed. Those are pretty shocking numbers because they fly in the face of certain basic assumptions about coaches.

First and foremost, we assume that federations choose the best available coaches to lead their national teams — especially when said national team is Brazil, the granddaddy of them all with five World Cup wins. You also assume that “best available” means somewhere between “good and great” especially in a country with a long and proud footballing tradition.

But then, you also assume that “good” coaches tend to stick around in their jobs because their employers want to do everything they can to keep them. Obviously, there’s a hierarchy and we’re accustomed to coaches moving on to bigger and better jobs. But once they reach the top, they tend to stay there, and even if they’re sacked, they tend to resurface at a comparable level.

Except … that’s not how it works in Brazil. Coaches are constantly on the move, pinballing between clubs as if they are temp workers. Dorival’s longest stint in charge of a club was less than two years, at Santos, between July 2015 and June 2017. He took over midseason, took the club up to seventh, finished third the following year and then was fired after four games in 2017. It was one of only two occasions in which he lasted more than a year.

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This flies in the face of conventional footballing wisdom in Europe and in most of the world, where it is assumed that coaches need time to build teams, improve players and install philosophies. This has a major knock-on effect, too: on the main, Brazilian coaches are not highly regarded in the big European leagues, where most of the money and attention are found.

You can count on one hand the number of Brazilian coaches who have worked in Europe’s Big Five leagues in the past two decades, and each of them come with asterisks.

Luiz Scolari had an unsuccessful stint at Chelsea in 2008-09, Vanderlei Luxemburgo lasted less than 12 months at Real Madrid in 2005, Ricardo Gomes had spells at Bordeaux and Monaco, Leonardo coached both Internazionale and AC Milan between 2009 and 2011, and Thiago Motta is flying high with Bologna in Serie A.

(Several of these cases probably ought to come with asterisks in terms of how they got their jobs. Scolari had to literally win the World Cup in 2002 with Brazil to get European teams interested — first the Portuguese FA, and then Chelsea. Leonardo left coaching entirely after just two years and became a front office executive. Motta moved to Barcelona when he was 17, enjoyed a long and successful career in Spain, Italy and France, played for the Italian national team and earned his coaching licence in Europe.)

On the surface, this makes little sense because Brazil is a hotbed of football. Even those who know nothing about the sport are not going to dispute this. Of course, other countries can lay claim to comparable traditions and love for the game, but sheer size puts Brazil in a different dimension. With a population north of 200 million, Brazil has more people than Germany, Argentina, Italy and Uruguay combined, to cite just a few of its fellow multiple World Cup winners.

Unsurprisingly, Brazil produces a ridiculous amount of footballers, most of whom are exported abroad. This study found that of the 14,405 footballers playing outside their country of origin in 135 leagues around the world, 1,289 hail from Brazil. That’s one in 11, more than any other country in the world.

One might assume, therefore, that a country that produces so much talent on the pitch, with so much tradition and know-how how behind them, would also excel at producing top coaches. Only one would be wrong.

So how can we explain this? Conversations with half a dozen journalists, executives, agents and coaches who have worked in Brazil seem to boil down to the fact that Brazil is just a different world not just relative to Europe, but to much of South America. Those conversations also yielded the following factors; not everyone agreed on how big a role they played, but all were cited by multiple respondents.

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1. Structurally speaking, Brazilian clubs have a results-obsessed, short-term “hire-and-fire” mentality

This is what we’ve seen before with Dorival. Sometimes, clubs will sack coaches after just a few bad results. Sometimes, they’ll hire them in short-term contracts, which bring their own problems because if the coach does poorly, he won’t get extended and if he does well, a rival will swoop in.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that most Brazilian clubs have elected boards and presidents who need to follow popular sentiment. They get elected, and then go into reelection mode straight away, knowing that a couple of poor results will turn voters against you.

A law introduced in 2021 has made it easier for clubs to become for-profit entities and have private shareholders — and, therefore, owners with skin in the game who could take a longer view and inject equity into the clubs. Today, the likes of Vasco Da Gama, Bragantino Botafogo, Atletico Mineiro and Cruzeiro are privately held. But they still represent the minority and, of course, simply being privately held doesn’t mean you make good choices.

2. There’s no real disincentive to firing coaches

Clubs may be “patient” with coaches because sacking them means either paying off their contracts or having to continue paying them while employing their replacements. In Brazil, that’s less of an issue partly because decision-makers at clubs where fans elect boards aren’t playing with their own money, but rather the club’s, and partly because the hire-and-fire mentality is so entrenched that the guy you fired and are still paying probably won’t be out of work for long since coach turnover is so high and he’s likely to find another job.

What’s more, there’s not much of a stigma to bringing a coach back after you fired him — in fact, some fans love it. Gremio boss Renato Gaucho is on his fourth spell at the club. He also had four stints at Fluminense (and one at their archival, Flamengo). Dorival had three spells at Flamengo and two each at Sao Paulo and Santos.

You get the picture.

3. Lack of job security means there’s no real incentive for coaches to build, take risks and have a long-term view

Why take chances if you know that a couple of bad games will cost you your job? Why try to deviate from the norm? Why introduce new ideas if they need time to percolate or push youngsters, if they need minutes to grow?

A lot of Brazilian football tends to be risk-averse, not in terms of being defensive, but rather in most managers focusing on execution, rather than tactical creativity or innovation. There are exceptions to this, of course — the aforementioned Fernando Diniz, is decidedly of the Pep Guardiola school — but in general, most Brazilian coaches, rightly or wrongly, are viewed as man-managers rather than innovators.

4. The fact that Brazil is such a major exporter of talent makes it that much more difficult for coaches to build the sort of teams that European clubs admire

Clubs at the very top of the food chain in Europe tend not to lose their best players every year, which means coaches have the luxury of tweaking and refining their teams. Not so in Brazil, where title-winning sides regularly get raided by clubs in Europe and the Persian Gulf region.

If you’re the coach of a team that has just lost his star center-forward and midfield general, how motivated are you going to be to stick around? Especially when another club comes knocking?

5. Brazil has a totally different footballing hierarchy

You’ve heard of the “Big Six” in England? Well, Brazil has a Big 12. Twelve clubs who have won 62 of the 68 Brazilian championships (and all bar one since 1987). They only come from four areas of the country (Porto Alegre, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte) but they are the most popular clubs with the most fans and resources and dominate conversation and media attention.

This has two knock-on effects. First, expectations are high all around, and while there is a fair amount of turnover year after year at the top of the Brazilian league — certainly more than in Europe — inevitably, most clubs will be sorely disappointed most years, which puts further pressure on coaches. Second, if you get sacked from your Big 12 club, odds are there will be multiple other Big 12 clubs who are looking for a manager.

6. Leaving Brazil generally means taking a big step back in terms of prestige

It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Champions League-caliber clubs aren’t going to hire Brazilian managers right now (unless another one wins the World Cup) because European football is seen as too different. And so the only jobs a coach of a big Brazilian club is likely to get in a Big Five league are at mid-table clubs or lower.

In other words, it means swapping a situation where you might not have much job security, but you do get to play huge games for storied clubs in a big football-loving country in front of 60,000-strong crowds, to fighting to avoid relegation in front of paltry crowds at Burnley, Darmstadt, Salernitana or Alaves.

And sure, if you avoid relegation and get your small European club up the table, you might get on the radar of bigger clubs and work your way up the food chain. But it could take you a decade and would be a big gamble for you and your family. All things being equal, you might also take a financial hit as well, since the Big 12 clubs in Brazil tend to pay competitive wages.

So why do it?

In a similar vein, when Brazilian coaches do leave Brazil, they might go to the Gulf or to manage teams in Asia. Scolari, who left Atletico Mineiro on Tuesday — it was his 31st stint as a manager in a 42-year career — has worked in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, Uzbekistan and China. In those cases, it will help the bank balance, but probably won’t do much to impress Champions League-caliber clubs.

7. Coaching licences

It may seem like a stupid bureaucratic hurdle, but most European leagues do not recognize most Brazilian coaching badges. You can get exemptions, but to do that, you need to attain a certain level of success, which again takes you back to that chicken-and-egg situation and makes it nearly impossible for, say, a young Brazilian coach to back himself and try climbing up the coaching pyramid in Europe.

Some Brazilian coaches do those by taking their coaching courses abroad (in Argentina, for example) or, if they were playing in Europe, in whatever country they ended their careers in. But it’s yet another barrier standing in the way.

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8. The language barrier

It seems simple, but most Brazilian coaches do not speak English or Spanish. Brazil is an enormous country where, a bit like the United States, there’s no real pressure or necessity to learn a foreign language. Going against conventional wisdom and appointing a coach from Brazil is hard enough. Having to do so via a translator? Again, that’s an extra hurdle.

Incidentally, Portugal would seem to be an obvious landing spot for Brazilian coaches (as it often is for players), yet there have only been a handful in recent years, possibly because Portugal itself produces so many coaches.

9. Race

It’s an uncomfortable subject, but people such as Juventude coach Roger Machado have cited racism and prejudice on several occasions. The number of managers who identify as people of color in the European game is proportionately inferior to the number number of players who identify as people of color.

In Brazil, that disproportion is even more extreme. Put a different way, while Brazil may produce a ton of talented footballers, a significant chunk of them will be people of color who have a far more difficult time getting top jobs in the game.

10. European exceptionalism is a thing, more so than Brazil

There are 96 clubs in Europe’s Big Five leagues and just eight non-European managers. Of those, three — Motta, Chelsea’s Mauricio Pochettino and Hoffenheim’s Pellegrino Matarazzo — spent virtually their entire playing careers in Europe and never left. Another two, Tottenham’s Ange Postecoglou and Javier Aguirre, had successful stints as national team managers in World Cups (and presumably got on the radar that way).

Atletico Madrid’s Diego Simeone and Cadiz’s Mauricio Pellegrino both played in Europe for many years, and then proved themselves as managers in Argentina before returning to Europe. That leaves Betis’ Manuel Pellegrini as the only coach who never played in Europe and never coached a national team but has gotten a job in Europe’s Big Five.

What this suggests is that while European clubs may be big on scouting for player talent all over the world, they’re not generally keen on seeking out coaching talent beyond their patch. Or maybe they just don’t believe it’s there.