Ancelotti Keeps Neymar in Brazil Squad and Bets on a Mid-Group Return

BRAZIL · SPORT

Brazil has decided to wait. Rather than replace an injured Neymar before the World Cup, Carlo Ancelotti is holding his squad together and gambling that his most famous player can be fit in time to matter.

“The 26 chosen are these”

Speaking at the Granja Comary training base in Teresópolis on May 30, Ancelotti made the call explicit: Neymar stays. The Italian framed the forward’s place among the 26 as a technical decision and said he would not summon a replacement, even with the player unable to train fully. “He will remain with us during this recovery period,” Ancelotti said. “Maybe not for the first game, but we believe he can recover for the second.”

Pressed on the uncertainty, Ancelotti reached for an Italian saying to bat away the hypotheticals: if his grandmother had wheels, she would be a car, so the word “if” does not exist. It was a coach refusing to litigate a decision he had already made, and signaling he would judge Neymar on evidence, not speculation.

A diagnosis that did not match

The decision sits on top of a quiet disagreement over what is actually wrong with Neymar. He picked up the problem in a Santos match in mid-May. His club initially described it as swelling, an edema in the right calf, and believed he could report for national-team duty normally after the squad was named on May 18.

When Neymar arrived at Granja Comary and underwent fresh imaging on the night of May 27, the picture changed. Team doctor Rodrigo Lasmar told reporters the next day that an MRI had found a Grade 2 muscle tear, “not just an edema,” with an expected layoff of two to three weeks. Santos, for its part, stated that every exam had been shared with the federation by May 18 and that its plan was aligned with the national team’s. The gap between “swelling” and “tear” is the quiet tension running under an otherwise upbeat camp.

The math of the gamble

The calendar is the real story. Brazil open against Morocco on June 13. A two-to-three-week recovery from late May points to a return around the Haiti game on June 19, the second group match, exactly the window Ancelotti named. Contact training would need to begin only days before the opener, leaving Neymar to reach the tournament after roughly a month without a competitive minute.

There is a hard edge to the patience. Under tournament rules, an injured player can still be swapped out shortly before a team’s first match, and reports indicate that if Neymar shows insufficient progress by around June 12, a late cut from the final list remains on the table. So the “no replacement” stance is less a guarantee than a bet that buys time, with an exit clause if the recovery stalls.

What the Neymar call means for Brazil

For Ancelotti, carrying a not-yet-fit Neymar is a calculated trade: a roster spot now in exchange for the chance of his quality later, particularly in the knockout rounds. The coach has been blunt all year that he wants players at full physical level, which makes the decision to wait on Neymar a notable exception, and a measure of how much upside he still sees.

Brazil sit in Group C alongside Morocco, Haiti and Scotland, chasing a sixth world title and a first since 2002. Whether Neymar features at all, and in what shape, is now the running subplot of their tournament, with the first answer due the moment he steps into a training session on the eve of the opener.