The percentage of Brazilians who believe that Brazil will win the World Cup is 29%, the lowest rate in the Datafolha series, inaugurated in 1994. The record of pessimism was recorded in the previous survey, from July 2025, when 33% of those surveyed believed in the title. This trend is great news. More or less as Antonio Gramsci advocated, Canarinho em Copas can only mobilize the optimism of the will when tempered by the pessimism of the intellect.
Arriving as favorites was always terrible. For World Cups before 1994, the meters were not as accurate, but all the empirical evidence suggests that in 1950 and 1982, for example, our perception of favoritism was very high. In 2006, the record for the Datafolha series was recorded, 56%. We were runners-up in one of these Cups and didn’t even reach the semi-finals in the other two.
Only the keen will know, but what is considered the greatest team in history left Brazil discredited in 1970, shaken by the change of coach at the last minute and defeated, in the middle of Beira-Rio, by an Argentina that hadn’t even managed to qualify for the tournament.
It is not trivial to point out that Canarinho’s 29% does not constitute leadership. Those who win by plurality are the 35% who answer the question “in your opinion, who will win the 2026 World Cup?” with a wise “I don’t know.”
The fact that the other teams exceed the Brazilian team (34% to 29%) is not an index of crisis but rather an indicator of the maturity of Brazilian fans, who seem to be letting go of the idea that Brazil just needs to “play like Brazil” for the title to happen naturally. It is always healthy for fans to consider the opponent’s merits when evaluating their own team.
France’s jump, from 6% in the July 2025 survey to 17% in the latter, is not proof of some sudden rise. In the friendly match in March, the average Brazilian fan, not a fan, was able to observe the power of the French team. Volatility is an essential fan trait. Much more than in politics, opinion polls in football tend to record sudden changes.
The increase in the percentage of Brazilians who defend Neymar’s call-up when asked about it rose from 48%, in June 2025, to 53%. It is a shame that Datafolha did not use a question similar to what we call, in electoral research, spontaneous (in which the voter must remember the name of the candidate), as opposed to stimulated (in which the voter receives a list).
When asked a neutral question, such as “is there a player not called up by Ancelotti that you would take to the World Cup?”, my suspicion is that the result would be very different to that of 2002, when journalists couldn’t take to the streets with a microphone to talk about the team without hearing “we want Romário”.
For those who follow day-to-day life from the stands and from the networks, the demand for Neymar’s call-up appears as a lobby, in the strictest sense. Far from coming organically from the fans, the complaint seems manufactured by influencers, a sector of journalism and former players subjected to the click economy. On the networks, this complaint tends to be rejected by the majority.
In short, neither the increase in support for Neymar (stimulated, I insist, not spontaneous) means that he has returned to playing something that resembles high-level competitive football, nor does the decrease in our favoritism mean that the chances today are smaller. Canarinho’s best fuel in World Cups has always been to arrive discredited.
