It’s a safe bet that Vinícius Júnior, who plays week in and week out for Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu, doesn’t know about North Queensland Fury. Why would he? Indeed, it is likely that none of the Brazil side that landed in Townsville on Thursday are aware of Australian football’s history in the region. Nor, perhaps, the city itself, until recently.
Maybe in the spirit of cultural exchange, then, Raphinha will be posting #BringBackTheFury on his Instagram page by the time the Seleção departs the Sunshine State next week. Such a post would only feel slightly more surreal than the Barcelona attacker rubbing shoulders at Townsville airport with almost 80 junior rugby league sides from around Queensland, jetting in for the Gordon Tallis Cup.
Nor would it feel more incongruous than Carlo Ancelotti beginning his first full World Cup cycle as Brazil boss by staying a 10-minute walk from the Mad Cow Tavern on Flinders Street, preparing for games in Townsville and Brisbane against a Socceroos side led by Tony Popovic who, once upon a time, served as his guest as both AC Milan and Bayern Munich.
“We are good friends,” Ancelotti said. “Sometimes we have the possibility to meet to talk about football. We spent time together when I was in Milan, we spent time together in Brisbane two nights ago. It’s a pleasure to talk about football [with Popovic]. He’s doing a fantastic job here. A really passionate manager. I hope the best for him. I think the World Cup he had was a really good World Cup. The team showed strong quality, a compact team.”
Brazil touring Australia isn’t completely unheard of. They last played the Socceroos and Argentina here in 2017 and would have faced Argentina again at the MCG in 2022 had La Albiceleste not pulled out. But the Socceroos themselves have never played an A international in Townsville, a city in rugby league heartland with a population of just over 200,000 whose A-League representative collapsed in 2011.
So it is with a sense of bemusement that the region has welcomed the five-time world champions; hotels across the town are booked out and the occasion will be marked by a street party on Friday afternoon featuring Brazilian jiu-jitsu and capoeira demonstrations, a Brazilian band and line dancing.
A brand just as much as a football team these days, Brazil are in the Sunshine State because the Queensland government worked with promoters and the CBF, and forked out, to bring them to “the events capital of the north” as part of its major events strategy. The state’s minister for tourism, Andrew Powell, bombastically declared in the media release accompanying the Socceroos’ squad announcement that the “Crisafulli government went out and secured” the games to make sure we wouldn’t forget it.
Credit where it’s due. Even with Brazil’s arrival knocked down the local pecking order by the Brisbane Lions’ quest for a three-peat in Saturday’s AFL grand final, a day after the Dolphins meet Sydney Roosters in their first NRL preliminary final, there are few bigger fish to land than the Seleção.
A legacy of more World Cup titles than any other nation demands respect, as does the aura of a shirt worn by the likes of Pelé, Socrates, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and Neymar. Vinícius, Raphinha, Marquinhos et al are global superstars, and the cultural cachet of joga bonito still permeates. So too are the good vibes, good people and goodwill that accompany them; a Brazilian supporter with a prop World Cup trophy in hand was among those navigating the connection to Townsville from Brisbane airport on Thursday morning. These fixtures, followed by a game against India on 3 October, are going to prove lucrative for the South Americans, too. They’ll even be taking the field in Queensland as the official ‘home’ side.
Which brings us to football. And to start, if Brazil are after a genuine Australian football experience, they’ll get one at Lang Park in Brisbane next Tuesday, when they play on a surface just four days after from the Dolphins v Roosters preliminary final. But coming off another World Cup failure, Brazil have also landed at an inflection point. Or perhaps more accurately, the latest inflection point, as the nation conducts a new round of soul-searching over an increasingly diminishing place among football’s elite.
The two Queensland games mark Brazil’s first since their last-16 defeat to Norway at the World Cup, which represented their earliest elimination from the tournament since they crashed out to Argentina at Italia 90. By the time 2030 rolls around, it will have been 28 years since their 2002 triumph in Japan and South Korea, their longest drought since they first won the World Cup in 1958. Brazil are not the dominant global force they once were.
There are many theories as to why, too many to unpack here; one memorable hypothesis points at a rise in individualistic, prosperity gospel Pentecostalism at the expense of Catholicism in the team. But with games against the kind of European foes that keep knocking them out of the World Cup harder to come by with the introduction of the Uefa Nations League to the calendar, cash-spinning tours against supposed lesser foes —staged overseas at the expense of connection with their football-obsessed population — have also been floated as a possible contributor.
Whatever the cause, Ancelotti is tasked with righting that ship in the years ahead. And, remarkably, it’s a journey that begins in Townsville.
“It’s difficult to say it’s a friendly. For Brazil, it will never be a friendly game. It will be an important game. A new season, we have a goal to find new players, to find a new generation of players for the World Cup and Copa America. And we start in the game tomorrow.”
