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| Dorival Junior is Brazil's latest manager, and it's his 26th different coaching job in 22 seasons. Why is that the norm in Brazil? Jack Thomas - WWFC/Wolves via Getty Images |
Dorival Junior, Brazil's latest men's national team coach, is taking on his 26th managerial job in the past 22 years. That's right: 22 seasons, 26 different gigs. And guess what? He's not really an outlier, either.
His Selecao predecessor, Fernando Diniz, who split the job with coaching club side Fluminense, had 17 in 13 seasons. Before him, Ramon Menezes had 11 in 10 years. Even the guy before him, Tite, who guided Brazil in two World Cups and was the national team's longest-serving manager in history (6 years and 3 months), had a whopping 17 different jobs in 25 years before being appointed. Those are pretty shocking numbers because they fly in the face of certain basic assumptions about coaches.
First and foremost, we assume that federations choose the best available coaches to lead their national teams -- especially when said national team is Brazil, the granddaddy of them all with five World Cup wins. You also assume that "best available" means somewhere between "good and great" especially in a country with a long and proud footballing tradition.
But then, you also assume that "good" coaches tend to stick around in their jobs because their employers want to do everything they can to keep them. Obviously, there's a hierarchy and we're accustomed to coaches moving on to bigger and better jobs. But once they reach the top, they tend to stay there, and even if they're sacked, they tend to resurface at a comparable level.
Except ... that's not how it works in Brazil. Coaches are constantly on the move, pinballing between clubs as if they are temp workers. Dorival's longest stint in charge of a club was less than two years, at Santos, between July 2015 and June 2017. He took over midseason, took the club up to seventh, finished third the following year and then was fired after four games in 2017. It was one of only two occasions in which he lasted more than a year.
This flies in the face of conventional footballing wisdom in Europe and in most of the world, where it is assumed that coaches need time to build teams, improve players and install philosophies. This has a major knock-on effect, too: on the main, Brazilian coaches are not highly regarded in the big European leagues, where most of the money and attention are found.
You can count on one hand the number of Brazilian coaches who have worked in Europe's Big Five leagues in the past two decades, and each of them come with asterisks.
Luiz Scolari had an unsuccessful stint at Chelsea in 2008-09, Vanderlei Luxemburgo lasted less than 12 months at Real Madrid in 2005, Ricardo Gomes had spells at Bordeaux and Monaco, Leonardo coached both Internazionale and AC Milan between 2009 and 2011, and Thiago Motta is flying high with Bologna in Serie A.
(Several of these cases probably ought to come with asterisks in terms of how they got their jobs. Scolari had to literally win the World Cup in 2002 with Brazil to get European teams interested -- first the Portuguese FA, and then Chelsea. Leonardo left coaching entirely after just two years and became a front office executive. Motta moved to Barcelona when he was 17, enjoyed a long and successful career in Spain, Italy and France, played for the Italian national team and earned his coaching licence in Europe.)
On the surface, this makes little sense because Brazil is a hotbed of football. Even those who know nothing about the sport are not going to dispute this. Of course, other countries can lay claim to comparable traditions and love for the game, but sheer size puts Brazil in a different dimension. With a population north of 200 million, Brazil has more people than Germany, Argentina, Italy and Uruguay combined, to cite just a few of its fellow multiple World Cup winners.
Unsurprisingly, Brazil produces a ridiculous amount of footballers, most of whom are exported abroad. This study found that of the 14,405 footballers playing outside their country of origin in 135 leagues around the world, 1,289 hail from Brazil. That's one in 11, more than any other country in the world.
One might assume, therefore, that a country that produces so much talent on the pitch, with so much tradition and know-how how behind them, would also excel at producing top coaches. Only one would be wrong.
So how can we explain this? Conversations with half a dozen journalists, executives, agents and coaches who have worked in Brazil seem to boil down to the fact that Brazil is just a different world not just relative to Europe, but to much of South America. Those conversations also yielded the following factors; not everyone agreed on how big a role they played, but all were cited by multiple respondents.
1. Structurally speaking, Brazilian clubs have a results-obsessed, short-term "hire-and-fire" mentality
This is what we've seen before with Dorival. Sometimes, clubs will sack coaches after just a few bad results. Sometimes, they'll hire them in short-term contracts, which bring their own problems because if the coach does poorly, he won't get extended and if he does well, a rival will swoop in.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that most Brazilian clubs have elected boards and presidents who need to follow popular sentiment. They get elected, and then go into reelection mode straight away, knowing that a couple of poor results will turn voters against you.
A law introduced in 2021 has made it easier for clubs to become for-profit entities and have private shareholders -- and, therefore, owners with skin in the game who could take a longer view and inject equity into the clubs. Today, the likes of Vasco Da Gama, Bragantino Botafogo, Atletico Mineiro and Cruzeiro are privately held. But they still represent the minority and, of course, simply being privately held doesn't mean you make good choices.
2. There's no real disincentive to firing coaches
Clubs may be "patient" with coaches because sacking them means either paying off their contracts or having to continue paying them while employing their replacements. In Brazil, that's less of an issue partly because decision-makers at clubs where fans elect boards aren't playing with their own money, but rather the club's, and partly because the hire-and-fire mentality is so entrenched that the guy you fired and are still paying probably won't be out of work for long since coach turnover is so high and he's likely to find another job.
What's more, there's not much of a stigma to bringing a coach back after you fired him -- in fact, some fans love it. Gremio boss Renato Gaucho is on his fourth spell at the club. He also had four stints at Fluminense (and one at their archival, Flamengo). Dorival had three spells at Flamengo and two each at Sao Paulo and Santos.
You get the picture.
3. Lack of job security means there's no real incentive for coaches to build, take risks and have a long-term view
Why take chances if you know that a couple of bad games will cost you your job? Why try to deviate from the norm? Why introduce new ideas if they need time to percolate or push youngsters, if they need minutes to grow?
A lot of Brazilian football tends to be risk-averse, not in terms of being defensive, but rather in most managers focusing on execution, rather than tactical creativity or innovation. There are exceptions to this, of course -- the aforementioned Fernando Diniz, is decidedly of the Pep Guardiola school -- but in general, most Brazilian coaches, rightly or wrongly, are viewed as man-managers rather than innovators.
4. The fact that Brazil is such a major exporter of talent makes it that much more difficult for coaches to build the sort of teams that European clubs admire
Clubs at the very top of the food chain in Europe tend not to lose their best players every year, which means coaches have the luxury of tweaking and refining their teams. Not so in Brazil, where title-winning sides regularly get raided by clubs in Europe and the Persian Gulf region.
If you're the coach of a team that has just lost his star center-forward and midfield general, how motivated are you going to be to stick around? Especially when another club comes knocking?
