Ken Early: Why have Protestants historically been so bad at winning the World Cup?

Brazil’s exit from the World Cup always sets off a firestorm of anguished debate and hysterical finger-pointing. As the team gets worse and the exits more embarrassing, the arguments about why just keep getting better.

This year saw the best yet: what if Brazil are bad now because of ... Protestantism?

Some context: in 1970, when Brazil’s greatest team won the country’s third World Cup, the country was 91 per cent Catholic and 5 per cent Protestant. According to the most recent census, Brazil is now 57 per cent Catholic and 27 per cent Protestant, but the rise of Evangelical Christianity is much more pronounced among top footballers: 76 per cent of the 2026 World Cup squad were confirmed Evangelicals.

Meanwhile, it’s a fact that the World Cup has usually been won by Catholic-majority countries. Of 22 tournaments between 1930 and 2022, 17 were won by the Catholics with another four for Germany, which has a foot in both camps. England is the only majority-Protestant country to win it.

Six World Cups have now gone by without Brazil winning at least one: the first time that has ever happened.

And so for days a debate has raged: has the Brazilian national team fallen into ruin because the sexy, happy-go-lucky Catholicism of days gone by has been displaced by the gimlet-eyed, money-obsessed Protestantism that is eternally at war with joy?

There’s obviously a big political dimension to the discourse. In Brazil, many non-Evangelicals fear and distrust the rise of Pentecostalism for all the usual reasons you might be sceptical of rich TV evangelists. And the Evangelicals tend to vote Right (they were the core of the Bolsonaro coalition), so even the communists find themselves in a sudden alliance of convenience with the Vatican.

Meanwhile, Catholicism has recently enjoyed a “moment” on the American right, with vice-president JD Vance the highest-profile recent convert. (We fondly imagine how the staunch Scots-Irish ancestors he loves to invoke would have reacted to seeing him embrace the whore of Rome.)

So American culture-war accounts who know little of football plunged eagerly into the fray. “The rise of Pentecostalism in Brazil is directly correlated with the collapse of its soccer program,” declared one, leaving you to wonder what Brazil’s “soccer program” might look like.

The argument has developed in some confusing directions. Brazil’s Evangelical players are simultaneously accused of worshipping individualism and forgetting the all-important team ethic, and of submitting to a dour Protestant aesthetic that is inimical to fantasy and flair. This immediately sounds like a contradiction, while the ecstatic Pentecostalism popular in Brazil is a lot more showbiz than the modest Lutheranism of, let’s say, Norway.

Counterexamples to the theory that Protestantism militates against flair are obvious and numerous. The Evangelical Neymar, notwithstanding his sad condition at this World Cup, is the most exciting Brazilian player of the last 20 years. The Evangelical Roberto Firmino, who played with what everyone would recognise as the joga bonito spirit, loved a capoeira goal celebration.

Still, the question does linger as to why Protestants have historically been so bad at winning the World Cup.

The simplest explanation is that the majority-Protestant countries tend to be on the smaller side (England, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands compared to Brazil, France, Italy, Argentina). The one really big majority-Protestant country, the USA, has been a non-factor. And the historically-Protestant countries tend to be more northerly, with worse weather for football.

But this is a very boring answer. It’s much more interesting to spin wild theories based on essentialist speculations. Might there be something in “the Protestant gaze” that makes you worse at football?

Consider the Netherlands. They could have evened things up a bit for Luther and Calvin’s boys if they hadn’t lost all three of the finals they’ve reached.

The Amsterdam-born Johan Cruyff – himself an agnostic – was football’s Einstein, a revolutionary who rethought the principles of the game from the ground up.

In Latin countries, Cruyff’s 1970s team was known as “Naranja Mecánica” – the clockwork orange. An organic entity, become a machine.

Catholicism says we must live with the eternal mysteries. Protestantism began as a rejection of the church’s claims of magic and mystery. Martin Luther was the archetypal “do your own research” guy.

To analyse, to seek evidence, to split the mysterious wholeness into parts that can be examined separately and reassembled, perhaps in different combinations – this is the Protestant way.

We should notice that there is nothing unusual about Brazilian complaints that their players no longer play with joy. People all around the world have lately been complaining that their players no longer play with joy. Many have blamed the rise of data analytics (a trend led by the late-arriving Americans).

And here, according to the football data scientist Dr Hadi Sotudeh, is a list of the five teams at the World Cup who brought the most analysts on their staff: England (8), Norway (6), Morocco (6), Germany (4), Netherlands (4). Are we noticing anything?

According to Dr Sotudeh, Brazil only had one analyst, but that analyst’s fingerprints were all over the crime scene of their exit.

In the stadium nobody could understand why Bruno Guimarães had stepped up to take (and miss) Brazil’s first-half penalty, and not Vinicius jnr – and not because Bruno is Evangelical while Vini jnr is Catholic.

Romário raged afterwards that if he had been in Vini jnr’s place, he would have grabbed the ball out of Bruno’s hands. “Brother, you have to have that attitude. Vini jnr is the protagonist, he’s the best we have in the national team. Take the damn ball, take the penalty and it’s solved.”

But Vini had respected the coach, Carlo Ancelotti, and Ancelotti, though Catholic, had put his faith in statistical analysis that claimed Brazil’s best penalty takers were, in order, Neymar, Igor Thiago, Raphinha, Gabriel Martinelli, and Bruno Guimarães, with Vini jnr not a recommended option.

Maybe it really is time for football to shrug off the long arm of Luther.

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