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“Our flag will never be red!” rightwing Brazilians took to chanting during the heyday of the left-bashing former president Jair Bolsonaro.
But their football shirts soon might be, amid incendiary reports that the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) is considering introducing a crimson jersey for the national team ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
Those claims have sparked predictable outrage among hardcore rightwingers who consider red the anti-patriotic colour of Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his Workers’ party (PT) and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).
“Our team’s shirt will never be red – and neither will our country!” thundered Romeu Zema, a conservative governor hoping to claim the mantle of Bolsonaro, who faces jail for allegedly masterminding a failed rightwing coup after losing the 2022 election. In a social media video, Zema hurled a mock-up of the red shirt on to the ground in theatrical disgust.
Bolsonaro’s politician son, Flávio Bolsonaro, said the supposed plans needed “vehemently repudiating”, insisting: “Our flag isn’t red – and it never will be.”
But Bolsonaristas are not the only ones up in arms about the reported attempt to swap Brazil’s blue away shirt – in use since the country won the first of its five World Cup, in 1958 – for a red one.
Football purists of all political stripes have clobbered the “leaked” plans since they surfaced on Monday in a viral report by the football website Footy Headlines.
The idea has proved so controversial that the CBF was forced to deny it on Tuesday insisting online images of the red jersey were not official and that it remained committed to yellow and blue shirts. The kit for next year’s World Cup had yet to be designed in partnership with Brazil’s official kit supplier Nike, the CBF claimed.
Walter Casagrande, a Lula-voting former player and commentator who is associated with Brazil’s left and pro-democracy movement, called the scheme “idiocy”.
Sports writer Paulo Vinícius Coelho said the move showed “a complete lack of sense” and was almost certainly commercially driven.
Galvão Bueno, Brazil’s most famous TV commentator, called the idea “a crime” and a “gigantic insult” to the glorious history of a national team which has won more World Cups than any other country.
Some leftwing Brazilians were more receptive to the idea of a crimson kit. Over the past decade the country’s iconic yellow jersey has become a symbol of the far right and is regularly worn at pro-Bolsonaro rallies. Many progressives now refuse to wear it.
In a pro-red shirt manifesto, columnist Milly Lacombe declared that she would wear the jersey with pride and rejected the outbreak of “collective hysteria” over the mooted shirt. “Red is a strong colour that stands for revolution, change, transformation, blood, struggle, life, death, rebirth,” she wrote.
Juca Kfouri, a left-leaning football writer who is among those who shun the yellow shirt, also rejected the “bad taste” change, arguing that a red shirt would further fuel the toxic politics swirling around the national team’s attire and divide supporters.
“Red doesn’t have anything to do with Brazil,” Kfouri said, although he noted that Brazil took its name from a redwood tree called pau-brasil (brazilwood in English) and, in the early 19th century, had red in its first flag.
Kfouri suspected the red shirt story was “a trial balloon” devised to see how the money-making ruse went down with fans. “Just like politicians sometimes leak a policy, wait to see how the social networks react and, depending on that reaction, give up or move ahead,” he said.
For the CBF, the hoo-ha was also a helpful diversion as it sought to shift attention away from its apparent failure to recruit the Real Madrid manager, Carlo Ancelotti, as Brazil’s next manager and a compromising exposé in a Brazilian magazine. “It distracts from the things that really matter,” Kfouri said.
