Carlo Ancelotti has won everything club football has to offer. Five Champions Leagues. League titles in five different countries. There is genuinely nowhere left to go at club level. So Brazil makes complete sense — it's the one thing his CV doesn't have.
He is Brazil's first foreign manager in six decades, taking charge of a squad that got humiliated 4-1 by Argentina before his arrival and hasn't looked convincingly like a World Cup contender in years. His job is to fix that by 2026, on home soil in the United States — the same country where he stood on the sidelines as Arrigo Sacchi's assistant in 1994, watching Brazil beat Italy in the final. He got a runner-up medal that day. He'd rather not repeat the experience.
Why Ancelotti fits Brazil better than any other outsider
The connection isn't manufactured. Ancelotti managed Kaká, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Cafu, David Luiz, Ramires, Thiago Silva, Marcelo, Casemiro, Militão, Rodrygo, and Vinicius Junior across his career. Wherever he's worked — Milan, Chelsea, PSG, Madrid — Brazilians followed. He didn't inherit this relationship when he took the job. He built it over three decades.
Vinicius finished second in the Ballon d'Or on the back of what he did at Real Madrid under Ancelotti. That same form never quite transferred to the national team — which is part of what Brazil are buying here. The hope is that his presence replicates what happens at club level.
One of his first calls was recalling Casemiro from international exile. That tells you everything about how Ancelotti thinks: experience over sentiment, trust over novelty. The squad has 11 players in their thirties. This isn't a rebuild. It's a final push.
The gaps that could cost them
The problem is that squad loyalty only goes so far when the personnel isn't there.
Brazil don't have a Cafu or a Marcelo — the kind of attacking full-backs who made their style work for decades. That's not a complaint about the current players, it's just the reality: those positions are thin. There's no obvious No.9 to replace Ronaldo's kind of presence either. And Rodrygo, one of the players Ancelotti knows best, is out injured.
Neymar is back. That's the headline. Nearly three years without an international cap, a serious ACL injury that wiped out most of 2024, and he's in the squad. His inclusion almost certainly became easier once Rodrygo and Estêvão Willian were ruled out — the flanks needed bodies. Ancelotti is not a manager who picks sentiment over substance, so the expectation is that Neymar gives him something in training that justifies the call. Whether that's still true at a World Cup, at 33, after that injury, is the question Brazil's odds are essentially built around right now.
Ancelotti signed a deal running to 2030, past his 70th birthday. There'll be another World Cup after this one if it doesn't go to plan. But the window with this generation — Vinicius, Rodrygo when fit, Endrick just breaking through — is now. The 1994 final was the last time Brazil were in one. They've been waiting 32 years for another shot at lifting it on American soil.
