It was the end of the world for Brazil. “That’s football,” shrugged Carlo Ancelotti. Few have the temperament to treat heartbreak with such equanimity. Brazil may have imagined their World Cup would end at the MetLife Stadium and so it did: but in the last 16, not the final, with defeat to Norway, not a win over France or Spain. There will be a conspicuous absence from the quarter-finals: for the first time since 1990, there is no Brazil.
The serial Champions League winner will not be a World Cup winner: not now, anyway, though Ancelotti has a contract that goes through to 2030, when he will be in his seventies, when they will be in their longest drought without winning the World Cup. They had never gone six tournaments without triumphing before. They have now.
