PMLF

Former player Michel Bastos on Croatia after their defeat today: We were beaten by this team?

Argentina

In some alternate universe, this is going to be a Brazil vs Argentina semis.

Whoever wins will have deserved it and won’t devalue the tournament, unless there is some massive robbery by the referee or something, but that kind of very biased refereeing is not likely to happen.

He is certainly not good enough for this level of games, fans of several big teams here hate him.

And they still lost 1-6 to Brazil in the final stage (it wasn’t semis, the four teams played against each other)…

Once Caldas in Libertadores 2004, they beat Santos, São Paulo and Boca to win the title, then lost to Porto on penalties in the Intercontinental Cup. The way they were so often defending and defending was nerve-wrecking.

At least England is in good company with Brazil, The Netherlands and Portugal.

English Baggio

France 3-1 now, as I assume Mbappé will score too.

France 1-0!

There are far more peaking players in Brazil nowadays than a few years ago as the likes of Flamengo and Palmeiras can pay much higher wages, so their squads are fairly stable. But no doubt there is always a risk of Brazil-based players moving during the WC cycle and thus the squad might need to change over time, which would harm results. But my point is not so much thinking we could win with a Brazil-based squad, I suspect the quarterfinals is more or less (luck, etc aside) the normal 'best' we could do, which is not too different from current results. Since we are going to lose anyway, at least we would have a team that feel Brazilian. As for the manager, Tite made mistakes like the ones you mentioned, but foreign managers made mistakes too. We have also had many foreign (European and Argentine ones) managers in Brazilian football in recent years and they didn't do much better in general than local managers, so I have doubts that just hiring a foreigner would improve things. We had Paulo Sousa from Portugal as Flamengo manager and he benched Pedro because he didn't know how to play Gabigol and Pedro together...Then Dorival Júnior (Brazilian) came and made them play together. Obviously a really top one like Guardiola could do very well, but that kind of manager is out of reach. So we would probably end up with some manager from abroad who is not really any better than what we already have here (someone like Paulo Sousa mentioned above). if I were to choose the new manager of Brazil, I would choose Fernando Diniz from Fluminense.

Morocco in this World Cup (from Twitter):

It will be lovely if Morocco do a Greece and win the World Cup.

Germany, Belgium and Spain were eliminated early despite having squads capable of doing a lot better and despite having European managers (obviously), so I am not convinced a foreign manager would necessarily make much difference.

No, but it should!

They are considering the possibility of a foreign manager but unless they hire someone like Guardiola, Abel Ferreira or Jorge Jesus, they won’t find anyone people here would respect. And I also would prefer a more Brazil-based squad, it’s not like having most of the squad being based abroad (as has been the case since 2006) helped us much anyway. So if you are going to lose, at least let’s value the players based in Brazil instead of foreign league players.

Spanish language press full of claims that his brother said he may have been murdered.

RIP

From Globo Esporte:

Shame we can’t have Argentina vs Uruguay with a Brazilian referee in a WC final.

Argentina

Argentina

Argentina 1-0!

Those won't be fixed or improved much any time soon, I think.