Carlo Ancelotti’s roster for the 2026 World Cup could have been just another sporting event in the saturated world football calendar. However, in Brazil, no call-up is ever completely sporting. And certainly not that of Neymar. After months of physical uncertainties, media debates and speculation around his place in the group, the return of the Brazilian star in the yellow jersey immediately goes beyond the simple framework of the field. Because in Brazil, the Seleção is not only a national team, but is a true emotional mirror of the country, a symbol of popular power, sometimes even a political tool. For decades, each generation of players has embodied a certain idea of Brazil, from Pelé to Romário, from Ronaldo to Neymar, including the inevitable Socrates. And when the country’s most famous footballer makes his return a few weeks before a World Cup organized in a context of growing political tensions, this return inevitably becomes a national subject. Especially since this time, the story revolves around a man from outside Brazil with Carlo Ancelotti. The Italian coach, a globally respected figure with a reputation for consensus, arrives in a fractured country where football remains one of the last spaces capable of uniting, or dividing, millions of people at the same time. By summoning Neymar, the former coach of AC Milan and Real Madrid is not only signing a technical decision. Despite himself, he reopens a much broader conversation about Brazil’s identity, the political weight of its sporting icons and the way in which the Seleção continues to be used as a national story.
Because the timing is not trivial. Less than six months before the 2026 presidential election, Brazil is preparing to experience a new campaign under high tension between the camp of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and that of Bolsonarism, now led in particular by Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president today ineligible. In this climate of extreme polarization, football is once again becoming a major symbolic territory. However, Neymar is not a neutral figure in this cultural battle. His public support for Jair Bolsonaro during previous presidential campaigns transformed him, for part of the country, into the sporting incarnation of conservative and nationalist Brazil. Conversely, Lula’s return to power was accompanied by an implicit desire to regain possession of a Seleção that many on the left felt was politically confiscated by Bolsonarism during the years 2018-2022. It is into this gray zone that Ancelotti is entering today. The Italian appears almost as an external arbiter responsible for reconciling an institution that has become highly sensitive. His status as a foreigner, his image as an apolitical sage and his immense sporting credibility offer him a unique position as a man supposed to bring football back to the center of the game. But in a country where the Seleção has historically served as much to produce national unity as to create the political narrative, is neutrality really possible? Behind the simple question of Neymar’s return perhaps there is already another much deeper question with the objective of knowing who is today seeking to emotionally recover the Seleção to tell the story of the Brazil of tomorrow.
Neymar at the World Cup, still used?
This is not the first time that the Brazilian government has tried to enter the Seleçção locker room. Since the military dictatorship and the triumphant recovery of the 1970 World Cup by the regime of General Medici, Brazilian football has lived in permanent proximity to politics. Brazil’s victory in Mexico was then transformed into a national propaganda tool, to the point of becoming a textbook case in numerous academic works devoted to the relationship between sport and power. In the junta’s official narrative, Pelé and the Seleção symbolized a strong, united and victorious Brazil at the very moment when the country was going through a period of intense political repression. This idea of football capable of producing an illusion of national unity has never really disappeared. It runs through the entire contemporary history of the country. Each World Cup draws a moment where Brazil tells itself about itself. Every big star becomes a political figure in spite of herself. And each coach ends up understanding that the Seleção belongs neither entirely to the federation, nor entirely to the people, but to a much larger emotional zone where patriotism, popular culture, social frustrations and political ambitions mix. This is precisely what Carlo Ancelotti is discovering today. According to several Brazilian media, the Italian was struck by the level of passion surrounding each of his decisions, particularly around the Neymar case. UOL even explains that Ancelotti gradually discovers that the Seleção is in Brazil “a national heritage» going far beyond sport. Calling up Neymar is no longer simply a matter of choosing a striker for a tournament. This means reintroducing into the symbolic heart of the country one of the most polarizing figures in contemporary Brazil.
Because Neymar has become much more than a football player. Since his support for Jair Bolsonaro during the 2022 presidential campaign, just before the World Cup in Qatar, number 10 has crystallized a deep cultural divide. His image gradually merged with that of a conservative, patriotic and anti-Lula Brazil, particularly on social networks where Bolsonarism made the player a popular icon. The Bolsonaros have never hidden this proximity by using the legendary yellow jersey as a real costume for their political meetings. To the point that some Brazilians preferred to wear the secondary blue tunic. In the middle of the 2022 electoral campaign, Jair Bolsonaro declared that “Neymar is an example for Brazilian youth” and greeted him “values that many want to destroy in Brazil”. His son Flávio Bolsonaro regularly continues to use the imagination of football and the Seleção in his political communication, seeking to oppose a popular and patriotic Brazil to what he describes as the cultural elites close to Lulism. Conversely, Lula’s return to power was accompanied by a more discreet but real attempt to symbolically reinvest the Seleção. Lula knows perfectly well what football represents in the Brazilian collective imagination. He himself likes to remind people that he is “a man of the people who speaks football like any Brazilian”. In recent weeks, the president has even publicly spoken about his discussions with Ancelotti around Neymar, claiming that the Italian technician would have asked his opinion on a possible call-up of the player for the World Cup. Lula then recounted with irony having responded that “No one should be summoned just because of their name”. A seemingly innocuous but highly political statement in a country where Neymar remains associated with the Bolsonaro era.
Behind this sentence, Lula also sends a cultural message to a part of Brazil which now rejects the Santos star as much for political as for sporting reasons. This tension now goes beyond Brazil’s borders and is part of a 2026 World Cup which is already shaping up to be the most politicized in the modern history of football. The tournament will be played mainly in the United States in an atmosphere dominated by the return of Donald Trump to the center of American and global politics. As a powerful symbol, Neymar, a figure associated with Brazilian Bolsonarism, will evolve in the country of Trump, a claimed ideological ally of Jair Bolsonaro, while Javier Milei is also increasing rapprochements with the international populist right. In the background, the World Cup then becomes much more than a global sporting event. It is transformed into a gigantic geopolitical theater where the great figures of football carry competing political narratives despite themselves. In this configuration, Carlo Ancelotti appears almost like an anomaly. European, outside local divisions, respected everywhere, he despite himself becomes a symbolic mediator in the middle of a cultural battle which completely exceeds him. His immense challenge will perhaps not only be to win Brazil again. Above all, it will be to succeed in protecting the Seleção from a country which projects onto it its political anxieties, its social divisions and its dreams of national power. Because in Brazil more than elsewhere, football is never completely separated from power. And because as the elections approach, each image of Neymar in the yellow jersey already resembles a political message that everyone tries to interpret in their own way.
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