The Portuguese Sports played its last match of the year on August 9, being eliminated from Serie C of the Brazilian Championship. For Paraná Clube it was even worse: it ended its 2025 calendar in February with the end of the state championship. This is the reality of hundreds of soccer clubs in Brazil. The game is its core activity and without it it is not possible to raise or maintain a whole management and cast structure.
At the other end, clubs that compete for major national competitions face a game marathon, with no comparison anywhere in the world. In the main European leagues, the teams with the largest number of games in the season do not make 60 matches in Brazil, this is the average, and some teams exceed 80 games. Excessive amount affects the quality of the show, as athletes cannot recover satisfactorily and there are more risk of injury. In addition, it is harder to keep stadiums full, as the fan has to make up at least four matches a month at their stadium.
The CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) hits these two assumptions in the presentation of the new calendar for the next four years. The volume of games of the larger clubs has to do mainly with state tournaments, which do not exist in other countries, and end up “squeezing” national competitions within later months. Among other measures announced, it was defined that local championships will be restricted to 11 dates (around 30% less than the current Paulistan, for example), ending in early March.
To attack the reduced calendar problem of smaller clubs, CBF has decided to expand the size of the C and D series by almost 50%to allow more clubs to access national divisions. In addition, and also to compensate for the reduction of state, the Brazil Cup will have more teams and will be reactivated the regional tournaments, currently restricted to the Northeast.
But some points still deserve attention. There are today state tournaments that pay financial quotas very attractive to participating clubs, sometimes even higher than national competitions, whose operating costs are naturally higher, given the needs of large travels.
Even increasing the amount of clubs in 33% in these tournaments, there will still be more than 700 teams from outside the national scene. Not to mention the challenge of women’s football, whose Brazilian championship lasts less than six months and most teams play around half of men.
The change of the 2003 Brazilian Championship to the format of running points was an important advance in giving greater predictability and extending the calendar by the end of the year to the pyramid’s top clubs. During this period, the permanence of the state and the growth of the continental and world tournaments led to a pressing need for a new review in the model, which should also attack the absence problem of annual calendar for smaller clubs.
Almost 25 years later a new step is taken to give greater rationality to the football business, but important issues of economic feasibility remain.
