Watching the Brazil national team lurch into a brave new era over the last week, it was impossible not to think of one of the million lovely little Portuguese phrases that stick in the mind like barnacles.
‘A turma do oba-oba’ refers to people who get overly animated at the first hint of good news. Excitable types and bandwagon-jumpers, essentially. A rough translation would be ‘the woop-woop gang’. And yes, feel free to steal that for your band/friendship group/local crime-fighting ring.
There was a bit of this on Saturday, the day after Brazil kicked off their World Cup qualifying campaign with a 5-1 victory over Bolivia. Not because it was an unexpected result — the Selecao have never lost a home qualifier and Bolivia usually carry about as much threat as a cuddly toy away from home — but because the tone and texture of it seemed to hint at a brighter future. They were fluent, fluid and fun. Mainly, they were just a bit different.
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An early illustration came after just three minutes, when Rodrygo — nominally the left winger — sprinted across to the other side of the pitch to get involved in a passing move. He wasn’t the only one: Richarlison, Neymar, Raphinha, Bruno Guimaraes, Casemiro and Danilo were all in close proximity. It was like Brazil had decided to play seven-a-side in one tiny portion of the pitch. Weird. Also kind of cool.
In other circumstances, one might have been tempted to ignore it. Football teams do momentarily end up in odd shapes sometimes.
This, though, was not just happenstance. It was precisely what Brazil’s new interim coach, Fernando Diniz, wants to see.
To understand why, we should take a detour, back to the mid-2010s, when Diniz — a journeyman midfielder as a player between 1993 and 2008 — was starting to make a name for himself as a coach. He was only managing small teams then, but the pluckiness of his tactics transcended his surroundings.
Diniz asked his goalkeeper to play as an auxiliary outfield player, participating in the play. He wanted his players to swap positions and demanded that they play out from the back, even if it was risky. Long balls were strictly verboten. Even against the bigger sides. Especially against the bigger sides.
All of this fascinated fans and journalists, who reached for the nearest available point of comparison. Diniz’s Guaratingueta side was nicknamed ‘Garcelona’ and much was made of the ‘tiki-taka’ football played by his Audax team during his spell there. For a time, Diniz was seen as a kind of budget Pep Guardiola, a homage to Catalonia on the bumpy regional pitches of Sao Paulo.
But as Diniz made his way up the Brazilian football pyramid, it became clear that there was a major point of difference between him and Guardiola. Yes, Diniz’s teams are courageous in possession, press with intensity and keep the ball on the deck. But they are also less wedded to structure, allowing players far more leeway to interpret the game as they see fit.
Diniz himself has been at pains to make this point. He described himself as “closer to Diego Simeone” in 2020, and while that may have been slightly impish, the Guardiola thing does seem to annoy him.
“People associate me with his way of playing because I like my team to have the ball, but that’s where the similarities end,” he said in a television interview last year. “Because his way of having the ball is almost the opposite of mine. His is what people call a positional game. The players stick to a determined space and [wait] until the ball arrives there.
“The way I see football at the moment is almost ‘apositional’. The players are able to migrate, changing positions. The pitch opens up and the game is freer. In certain sectors of the pitch, we come together. So one type of system is more fixed in terms of positions and the other is more free.”
A few things are worth highlighting here. One is the strangeness, at least a priori, of talking about Guardiola and Diniz as if they were on a level footing. The former, after all, has won multiple Champions Leagues and domestic titles in three different countries; the other only won his first semi-major trophy (the Rio de Janeiro state championship with Fluminense) five months ago. We’re not exactly comparing apples with apples here. To the uninitiated, it can all seem a bit… well, presumptuous.
To which Diniz might fairly claim that the comparisons have rather been foisted upon him. And that his success (or lack thereof) has been conditioned by his environment. The Brazilian football ecosystem is defined by short-termism, meaning it is hard to build a project, particularly one that requires so much buy-in. It is no country for young ideologues.
Indeed, it is testament to Diniz’s quality that he has reached the Brazil post even with his relatively modest CV. Management, luckily, isn’t only about trophies. It can also be about progress, memories and, yes, feelings.
It is no accident that players have adored him wherever he has coached. This is down to the interplay between his system and the importance he places on team dynamics. Diniz has a degree in psychology, sees interpersonal relationships as vital and often talks about unlocking the potential in each player.
(Photo: ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP via Getty Images)
“The human dimension is more important than tactics,” he said in 2015. “Although I am committed to collective football, I try to make it so the players are able to reproduce, in some way, the feeling that had when they first dreamed of being footballers. That’s what inspires me: letting each player be the Pele or the Maradona they have inside them.”
As he sees it, giving players the ability to drift around, swap roles and create overloads off the cuff — the ad hoc seven-a-side stuff that looks so funny when you press pause at the right instant — is both the best way to tug the opposition out of shape and the best way to ensure your players are engaged, excited and happy. Which, the theory goes, should make them play better than if they were just going through the motions in fixed positions.
“We have the flexibility to get more people around the ball, to create triangles and suck the opposition in,” said Guimaraes after the Bolivia game. “He allows us real freedom to play.” Casemiro, his fellow midfielder, was even more emphatic: “His conception of football is based on joy.”
If this all sounds extremely Brazilian, it’s worth noting how much of a departure it is from the recent football discourse in Brazil. The previous Selecao coach, Tite, was very much influenced by Guardiola’s positional approach. For well over a decade there has been a broad movement to ‘modernise’ the Brazilian game by looking to Europe.
Against that backdrop, Diniz can be seen as something of an iconoclast, even a throwback. He once described his style as “a return to the past,” adding: “Brazil doesn’t have to copy Europe. We have to create our best style here.”
Now, perhaps, you can see where the woop-woop gang comes in. Nostalgia is a powerful drug in football, especially when you’re talking about a country with such rich history. Diniz looks a lot like a 2023 take on the captivating associative play that made Brazil so beloved in the first place; of course people are going to be excited.
We must end, though, on a note of caution. Firstly because it was Bolivia. Secondly because Brazil followed that win up with a much less impressive performance against Peru on Tuesday — a timely reminder that these things take patience and time.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room. As things stand, Diniz will only manage Brazil until next summer, when Carlo Ancelotti is due to take charge before the Copa America.
How that is supposed to work on a practical level is anyone’s guess, but for now one thing is clear: if Brazil are able to produce the football Diniz sees in his head, he won’t be an easy man to jettison.
(Top photo: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images)
