11 July 2026 · By Ruben Jongkind and Michel Hordijk

We Watched Brazil Play Norway With 33% Ball Possession

Brazil, a footballing nation built entirely on the ball, on skill, on rhythm. And there they were, chasing the game like the smaller side.

Something is off. And it's worth asking what, exactly.

We think a lot about what "value" really means for a footballing nation. Certainly it is not just trophies. There's cultural and social value: the pride a country feels, recognising itself in its national team. And there's sportive and financial value: results, tournaments, financial revenue. Both matter. But the order matters more than people think.

Brazil isn't one of the great footballing nations because of how many titles it has won. It's the way of playing from Pelé and Garrincha, through Éder, Falcão and Sócrates, to Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Romário and Neymar. For the older generation it's 1982 they still talk about. For others, it's 1994 or 2002. That's what Brazil means in football's collective memory.

But football has become a truly global game, and the competition for results is much tougher now in a way it never used to be. So nations reach for the short-term fix: bring in a top coach. Ancelotti has won almost everything there is to win. But what if that does not work? What then? We believe the coach is just one factor in the whole ecosystem, and not the most important one.

Here's the part fewer people want to talk about, and it is not only visible but the research backs it up too. Academic tracking of Brazil's biggest youth competition, the Copa São Paulo de Futebol Júnior, shows the teams that go furthest are more skewed towards early-born players than the ones that get knocked out early. Coaches at the top academies lean into picking physically mature, early-born kids to win now. In the youngest categories, Under-11 and Under-13, that skew is at its most extreme: players born in the first quarter of the year are up to 5.4 times more likely to be picked into an academy pool than those born in the last quarter. Clubs like to say this is about technical development, but the actual sorting happens on physical metrics like body mass, height, jump performance and repeated sprint ability. And it doesn't stop at youth level. The average age in Série A is 26, in Série B it's 28 — which tells you how hard it still is for a young Brazilian to force his way into regular senior football at home. It's a big part of why so many Brazilian teenagers leave for Europe early: there simply isn't room for them yet in their own league. And last but not least, Brazil's squad at the World Cup has an average age of almost 30 years, being one of the oldest participants.

Put that together and it's hard to call Brazilian football, for all its history, a player-centred system right now. If that doesn't change, Brazil will keep running into nations that do understand these biological realities and build around them — Norway being the clearest example of exactly that.

Now look at the other side of that result.

We've been closely involved with Norwegian football since 2012, when we brought a nine-year-old called Andreas Sjelderup over to practise with us at Ajax. That same kid set up two goals against Brazil 14 years later. In the years after 2012, we were invited back to Norway and to La Manga (one of the centres where the Norwegian league and federation spent parts of the winter to work on alignment) more than once, to present our philosophy of talent development and discuss national strategy as a whole.

What struck us was that Norway was actually building a national strategy with a real vision on scouting and talent development, shaped around the Norwegian context, not copied from a bigger footballing nation. Grassroots football was one of the pillars they took seriously. Bodø/Glimt's rise is not luck. It's the result of that thinking, playing out.

Solbakken isn't a famous name. Ancelotti is. But Solbakken stayed loyal to Norway's footballing vision, bringing on two dribblers in the second half, and it won them the game. Fame didn't decide that match. Alignment did.

We're seeing a version of the same story in the Netherlands.

After the Netherlands' exit, we got a lot of messages from all over the world: a message from a friend in the US — "man, what happened with the Netherlands?" A Swiss football friend wrote something similar an hour later. A Greek contact told us he sat in a barber's chair in Ioannina listening to a full chorus of complaints about how Oranje played against Morocco.

Reading and hearing all of that, on top of the international media, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the reputation of Holland as a footballing nation has taken a real hit. People like Zlatan and Henry have said, in their own way, that this style of play has nothing to do with what the Netherlands stands for. We hope they're right. The Dutch have always been known for dominant, attacking, adventurous football. In 1974, 1998, and the Euros of 2000 and 2008, they showed the world that version at its most extreme. But there have also been plenty of tournaments where Oranje looked far less sparkling than the sides of Michels, Hiddink, Rijkaard and van Basten. So it would be wrong to say their identity was sold in one match against Morocco. This has been building for longer than that.

And it starts, as it so often does, in the academies. Too many youth coaches are still far too focused on team tactics with one objective: Saturday's result. Even with very young players there are video sessions on the next opponent, a week of tactical drilling, and often the "weaker" kids are benched automatically. It doesn't happen everywhere, and not to the same degree everywhere, but across the board, the match on Saturday is made far too important. Some colleagues don't love hearing us say this. That doesn't change our mind. It's about the players — all of them — and every child who plays because they enjoy it deserves an environment built around technique, creativity and the freedom to make mistakes, not performance pressure at age nine. The good thing is that these biological and psychological truths will give you results in the long run. However, it is extremely hard to change football culture. And that is because we as adults are often more in the way of our children than really helping them: is football about the coach, the technical director, the CEO, the journalist and the parent?

Which brings us back to the national team, where the same pattern is showing up at the very top. When the Netherlands only has 20% ball possession in the second half, and even less in extra time, we are not talking about a tactical issue, but about a structural challenge. It is the federation's task to create and safeguard a vision on football based on the nation's identity and history, and to appoint the coach who adheres to that.

If we're serious about a lasting fix, it starts with youth development again — a national plan built on five pillars:

• Identity
• Grassroots
• Elite football
• Talent identification
• Talent development

The lesson from Brazil and from Norway is the same one for the Netherlands. A federation's job was never to win Saturday's match. It's to protect a vision long enough for it to actually pay off, fifteen years down the line.

Sometimes something has to happen before something happens. This might be that moment — for more than one country.

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