Brazil’s World Cup unravelled in the round of 16 as Erling Haaland’s brace fired Norway to a 2-1 victory, condemning the Seleção to their earliest elimination since 1990. Carlo Ancelotti’s side, having scraped past Japan with a stoppage-time winner in the previous round, ceded control deliberately: a tactical plan, later reported by The Athletic, saw Brazil hold just 34 percent possession because the Italian coach judged Norway too difficult to press high and feared leaving space for Haaland. The gamble backfired. Bruno Guimarães, who had converted seven of his last eight penalties, missed from the spot, and the five-time champions were left chasing a contest that slipped from their grasp long before the final whistle.

The fallout was immediate and incendiary. Romário, the 1994 World Cup winner, used his personal YouTube channel to demand Ancelotti’s dismissal, calling the defeat a “fiasco” and a “shame” caused by the coach. He said he would have torn up the contract in the dressing room and told Ancelotti to take the matter to court. The former striker singled out the substitution that removed Guimarães for Éderson, questioning its logic, and drew a pointed contrast with the treatment of previous Brazilian coaches. “We had Dunga, he lost and left. We had Felipão, he won the Cup and stayed. We had Tite, he lost, stayed and lost again. Now we have this damned Ancelotti, who lost and will keep losing,” Romário fumed, accusing the media of shielding a foreigner from the criticism a homegrown manager would face.

Not all Brazilian greats share that fury. Cafu, while acknowledging “a great disappointment”, urged the federation to rebuild around Ancelotti, calling him the right man to restore the Seleção’s winning habit. Kaká warned that interrupting the project would wreck the integration of young talents such as Estêvão and Endrick. Ronaldo Nazário went further, arguing that blaming the coach for a match decided by Haaland’s genius would be an emotional error, and that Brazil needed Ancelotti’s European mentality to modernise. Yet the discontent runs deeper than one defeat. Kely Nascimento, Pelé’s eldest daughter, told Reuters that Brazilian football is “broken”, describing a closed, incestuous ecosystem where a lack of transparency and accountability is directly reflected on the pitch. She pointed to the resurgence of Botafogo under American investor John Textor as a rare example of outside scrutiny forcing change.

The Brazilian Football Confederation has publicly renewed its faith in Ancelotti, whose contract runs until 2030. That decision, taken before the tournament, now looks like a bet on long-term stability over short-term emotion. Brazil have not lifted the World Cup since 2002, and a last-16 exit—however painful—has not, for now, altered the institutional calculus. The coach stays, but the debate over whether a foreign technician can truly fix a system that Pelé himself regarded as dysfunctional has only just begun.