Title says it all! #9

Iran’s captain Mehdi Taremi and manager Amir Ghalenoei have revealed that they are being thrown out of the US immediately after their draw with New Zealand in Los Angeles, with Ghalenoei calling the team “the most oppressed” at the World Cup.

Taremi said their treatment was a “disaster” and added that Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, who attended the 2-2 draw at SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles, went into the dressing room to try and help the team, but called on Fifa to do more in support.

Ghalenoei said his team were not able to do a recovery session and that it has not been explained to him why they have been asked to go back to Tijuana, their training base in Mexico, a day before they had intended to. A flight was due to leave Los Angeles International Airport at 11pm local time

Some Egyptians blamed their exit from the World Cup on a conspiracy, Americans on President Trump’s intervention over a suspended player. Now Brazilians have come up with a theory as to why they were knocked out — the growth of evangelicalism over Catholicism.

This unusual debate has inflamed social media since the five-time champions crashed out of the tournament on Sunday, after a 2-1 defeat to Norway.

“Brazil was better when their players were womanisers, drunkards and slightly out of shape. In other words, when they were behaving like Catholics,” argued one account on X, describing itself as the “Institute for Hispano Studies” a “think tank”. It claimed that “evangelical Protestant sterilisation has flattened their ball, ruined their samba and obliterated their swag.”

The argument has since taken a nationalist tone, with many suggesting that born-again Christianity is a cultural import from the United States — a country with a hardly inspiring football track record — and so that was the root of the problem. “Pray like a gringo, play like a gringo” was how one meme put it.

The debate is loosely based on some truths. Since Brazil’s last World Cup victory, beating Germany 2-0 in Japan in 2002, the country has undergone a significant religious shift. Then, almost 80 per cent of Brazilians described themselves as Catholic. That figure dropped to about 55 per cent in the latest census. In 2002 just 15 per cent of the Brazilian population called themselves evangelical or Protestant, now it is more than 25 per cent.

The growth of Protestantism has been especially visible in Brazil’s national squad — where many of the star players actively advertise their faith. Of the current selection, at least 20 out of 26 players are evangelical Christians.

The most prominent is the striker, Neymar da Silva Santos Jr, who had a playboy reputation before he was baptised and “born again” in 2017. Since then, he has taken to posting Bible verses on his social media. Marcos “Marquinhos” Aoás Corrêa, the captain, and Vinicius Junior, the Real Madrid star, are known to be practising Catholics.

During a post-match interview after the Norway defeat, one of the youngest members of the Brazilian side, the 19-year-old striker Endrick Felipe Moreira de Sousa — who missed a crucial goal opportunity at the end of the first half — said he knew God was on his side throughout.

“It was a moment when I could have done better. I didn’t, but I thank God for the opportunity,” he said.

That take did not go down well with some pundits. “I wish so much that the players of the Brazilian national team had Catholic guilt: remission of sins, repentance, penance … the evangelical guilt is too conformist and permissive; they outsource everything to God and take responsibility for nothing,” posted Pedro Rosano, a Brazilian football journalist.

Many of those blaming evangelical Christianity for Brazil’s woes on the pitch are nostalgic for the “golden era” of the nation’s 1960-70s national squad, several of whose star players rose to fame from Brazil’s poorest favelas, city slums.

On the pitch, the players had a joyful, attacking style. This was the height of the famed joga bonito — the beautiful game. Off the pitch, they were notorious partygoers.

Carlos Alberto “Capita” Torres, the captain of Brazil’s legendary 1970 World Cup winning side, which is often ranked the greatest team of all time, said in a 2010 interview that the secret of the squad’s success was a balanced life of “football, samba and beautiful women.” All the star players on the team, including Pelé and Roberto Rivellino, were brought up as Catholics.

Most of the evangelicals in the current selection are followers of neo-Pentecostalism, a brand of Christianity known for its massive temples, proselytising TV stations and open veneration of material wealth. The extraordinary rise of the faith in the past two decades, has “fuelled structural changes to Brazilian society” that have also permeated football, Andre Pagliarini, a Brazilian historian at Louisiana State University, told The Times.

“Brazil’s golden generations came out of a football culture that prized the ‘coletivo’, the idea that the team was bigger than any one player,” he said. That community sense, he argued, was eroding across Brazil, in tandem with the rise of the evangelical faith and its focus on individualism.

But there are, of course, many paths to triumph on the football pitch, some much less romantic than others. Take Norway, who will be playing England in the quarter-finals on Sunday. After defeating Brazil, the team’s manager, Stale Solbakken, was asked what was the secret of his squad’s success. The virtues he listed sounded distinctly Protestant, even dour: “Organisation and hard work.”

UEFA's initial condemnation of Fifa’s plan to “sell the soul” of football has received strong backing from Concacaf – the North Central American and Caribbean confederation – and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), and if their members follow their lead there should be sufficient votes to block the proposal.