From five-time champions to early exits: Brazil's long, painful decline

There is dying. And then there is dying like Brazil. Slowly, cruelly.  

A team can be knocked out with dignity, bows to a superior opponent, salutes the crowd, exits the stage on a high note even in defeat.

Brazil did not get in their latest mishap. They got Erling Haaland instead. Twice, in fact, on the way to a 2-1 funeral at MetLife Stadium. It was the latest confirmation of what the football world has suspected for years: the Seleção, five-time world champions, custodians of the Beautiful Game, are no longer the team everyone else has to fear. They are the team everyone else circles on the calendar as a chance to make history.

Twenty-four years! That is how long Brazil have now gone without lifting the trophy that once felt like a hereditary right, passed down like a family heirloom from Pelé to Ronaldo to nobody in particular. And with each cycle, the exits arrive earlier and somehow more expected. This wasn't a shock in the way 7-1 was a shock. This was something worse—the slow, dawning realization that Brazil are simply not that good anymore. And haven't been for a while.

For the first time in 36 years, Brazil won't play in the quarterfinals of the World Cup, suffering their earliest exit in nearly four decades despite always having stood among the tournament's final eight even during their most blundering campaigns since 2002. Think about that.

Brazil have survived scandal, humiliation, and 7-1 semifinal collapses on home soil, and still always found a way to at least reach the last eight. Not this time. Norway, a country that hadn't sniffed a World Cup since Bill Clinton's first term, did what generations of European royalty could not.

Overrated?

The numbers tell their own bleak comedy. Brazil haven't actually beaten European opposition at the World Cup since the 2002 final, and in that stretch their highest-profile knockout win was arguably Colombia, at a home tournament, in 2014 — a fixture remembered less for the football than for the sight of Neymar being stretchered off with a broken vertebra. These days, even Brazil's World Cup triumphs have a way of curdling into tragedy.

And then there was the Norway disaster itself, a match that saw Brazil manage just 36% possession against a side that has never exactly been mistaken for Barcelona in their pomp. Haaland did what he does best. He peeled away from his marker for the opener with the ease of a man swatting a fly, then needed only two touches to score his second, with no Brazilian defender anywhere in his postal code.

Bruno Guimarães missed a penalty. Endrick, thrown on as a Hail Mary, fluffed a glorious one-on-one. Neymar, 34 years old and held together by hope and physiotherapy, scored a stoppage-time consolation from the spot that changed nothing except the scoreline's dignity.

If the Norway fixture was the funeral, Neymar delivered the eulogy himself, and it belonged to him alone. Slumped in tears on the MetLife turf, the same pitch where he made his senior debut in 2010, Brazil's all-time leading scorer told Globo through the wreckage, "I tried, I tried. Now, it's over. I started here; I finished here."

Sixteen years, four World Cups, 80 international goals, and not a single one of the trophies he actually wanted. It is the most Brazilian ending imaginable,  genius, heartbreak, and a stadium in New Jersey standing in for Maracanã.

Deeper rot

The uncomfortable truth, though, is that this defeat was never really about one missing superstar or one bad night. It's about the vanishing well beneath the well. Where Brazil's 2002 side fielded a five-a-side team of eventual Ballon d'Or contenders {Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Cafu, and Roberto Carlos}, this squad's bench options for a crisis were a hobbled 34-year-old, a raw 19-year-old, and a scramble to reshuffle the entire spine of the team.

Lose right-back Wesley, and Brazil are reduced to summoning Danilo, a man closer to retirement than his prime. Lose Raphinha, and 19-year-old Rayan is asked to conjure magic against defenders twice his tournament experience. This isn't squad depth; it's a house of cards wearing yellow.

Let that sink in. The fabled talent factory, the nation of 213 million football-mad souls, is currently being out-produced by a country whose national sport used to be, essentially, waiting for winter.

The automatic superiority Brazil once wore like a second skin has evaporated, and nobody at Brazil football governing body CBF seems to have noticed the alarm going off.

For his part, Carlo Ancelotti, arguably the most decorated active football coach, refused to wave the white flag on his own tenure.

"Today we have to deal with the disappointment and, starting tomorrow, we can think about what the future might hold for this national team," he said, before insisting, "We're at the beginning of a cycle, not the end of a cycle."

Ancelotti sounds wise but slightly delusional. Brazil have said some version of "next cycle" every four years since 2002, and the cycle keeps ending in the same place: early, embarrassed, and, well, giving explanations.

What next?

Is there hope? Sure, there always is in a country that produces footballers the way the Amazon produces rain. But hope isn't a tactic, and talent alone hasn't been enough for a generation now. Brazil don't need another romantic cameo from a fading legend or another teenager thrown to the wolves. They need an actual conveyor belt again, not a leaky one held together by nostalgia and a five-star coaching CV.

Until then, the Seleção will keep boarding planes home a little earlier each cycle, dragging World Cup failure like a shadow that refuses to shorten, even under football’s brightest lights.