For football writer Tim Vickery, however, the bigger story is what Brazil's growing economic power is doing to the rest of South America — and increasingly, to the player markets beyond it.
“The Copa Libertadores, our Champions League, doesn't really make much sense anymore," Vickery tells Football Presse. "I mean, there's a strong possibility this year that all four semi-finalists will be Brazilian.
“You know, the last seven years it's been won by Brazilian sides. Five of those times it's been both Brazilian sides in the final. But it's not a triumph just of Brazilian football. They're doing what big Western European leagues do to Brazil. They're doing the same thing to Argentina.”
Vickery believes Brazil's growing financial strength is allowing its clubs to operate as another destination for the best players produced elsewhere in South America.
“And loads of good players from Argentina are coming here now. Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, they're all coming. They're all coming in. And this weakens those leagues when the other South American leagues are much weaker than they were 10, 15 years ago.
“Because as well as selling to Europe, they're also selling to Major League Soccer and to Brazil and Saudi. So more places are emerging to sell their best talent to. And Colombia, which should be very strong, the league is just dreadful because everyone is sold. Everyone is sold.”
That has left Brazil occupying a position that Vickery compares directly with England's place in European football.
“So the Brazilian league is becoming in some ways the Premier League of South America. It's not the Premier League of South America because it's not run as a league by the clubs.”
The comparison also has limits. Brazilian football does not yet have the infrastructure or global commercial reach of the Premier League, and Vickery believes the domestic game has work to do if it wants to turn its economic power into a genuinely global product.
“Things such as that were very, very important in the growth of the Premier League — improving the standard of pitches — hasn't happened at all. The pitches are poor, bad in Brazil.”
He also points to the growing use of artificial surfaces, which he says has created another source of tension with players.
“Some of them have synthetic pitches now, which is a business model. It's just cheaper to maintain and easier to have concerts. And a lot of the players are very angry about it.
“So the pitches aren't good.”
There is also a difference in the way the product is presented. European football's global growth was helped by its ability to attract neutral viewers, whereas Brazilian football remains heavily centred on supporters of the teams involved.
“Where European football attracted a global audience, by producing a spectacle that would capture the neutral, Brazilian football is still very much aimed at the fanatic.
“So some of the games can be very ugly. Not all, it is getting better, but some of them can be very — there's lots and lots of time wasting and so on. So it's not a spectacle that's going to capture the neutral.
“So it's different from the Premier League in some respects, but in terms of its economic power, and its economic power relative to the other South American leagues, it is the Premier League.”
But the expansion of Brazil's recruitment market is no longer confined to its neighbours. The interview raised the emergence of an African pipeline into Brazilian football, with Palmeiras having announced three African signings and São Paulo now scouting in Africa. The wider influx is already visible: Brazilian Série A had reached 172 foreign players used in 2026 by August, while recent reporting identified players from Ghana, Angola, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and the Republic of Congo among those in the league.
For Vickery, the thinking behind the African strategy is straightforward: Brazil can become another development stage before those players eventually move to Europe.
“Well, that's the idea, yes. Okay.
“Yeah, that's the idea. You bring them across. You fatten the calf and then you sell it, you sell it to Europe.
“We will see if this works. I don't know, I don't know if it's going to work, but that's the latest idea that they're following.”
The idea would effectively give Brazilian clubs a new role in the global transfer market: identifying talent in Africa, developing it inside a stronger South American league and then selling it onwards to Europe.
It also reveals just how far Brazil's football economy has changed. The country is no longer simply the great exporter of South American talent; its clubs are increasingly becoming buyers, developers and intermediaries in their own right.
Yet that feeds into a bigger question about Brazilian football itself. The country remains one of the world's great producers of players, but Vickery believes the market is increasingly influencing what Brazilian clubs try to produce.
“One of the things they're thinking of is we're producing players to sell. What can we sell?”
That has already affected the profiles being prioritised, with Vickery arguing that Brazil has become particularly focused on a certain type of attacking player while failing to produce enough central midfielders.
“What has worked best in terms of getting money recently is these strikers in wide spaces. So the clubs are looking to produce the strikers in wide spaces.
“And they haven't been producing, I don't think, the central midfielders, because there's still this separation, you know, they're still suffering from that separation of two who defend and two who attack.”
The result is a Brazilian league that is simultaneously becoming more powerful and more dependent on the international player market. The CBF's decision to reduce the matchday foreign-player limit reflects the concern that the influx could come at the expense of opportunities for younger Brazilian players.
But Vickery's argument is that the transformation is bigger than the number of foreign players on a team sheet. Brazil is becoming the dominant economic force in South American club football, drawing talent from Argentina, Colombia and its neighbours while now looking towards Africa as well.
And the next stage could take Brazil beyond South America altogether.
“I do think that before long we will have something that is Pan-American. We will, because the Brazilian clubs are outgrowing South America.
“And so some kind of competition involving the Mexicans and the clubs from Major League Soccer — there is potential there for the Americas to be a rival to European club football.”
Tim Vickery's book "Mundials: A South American History of the World Cup" is from Pitch Publishing - which is available here.
