Tentative to centralize opinions and facts regarding post-Mineiraço. Brazil has been hyped as top 2 favorites for World Cup 2018. As everybody knows, odds always favors Brazil due to historical impact, however, should it be taken as a good opinion? Remember Brazil was pure favorite one day prior to World Cup 2014 first match and we all saw what happened. Top 5 for now by Oddschecker (Odd indexer) as of April 2nd 2017 Germany - 6/1 (best odd: 4/1 by 1 house; worst odd: 11/2 by 4 houses) Brazil - 8/1 (best odd: 6/1 by 1 house; worst odd: 11/2 by 1 house) Spain - 10/1 Argentina - 10/1 (with a best odd of 5/1 surpassing Brazil in 1 house) France - 11/1 Reference https://m.oddschecker.com/m/football/world-cup/winner What's your opinion?
I think Brazil in theory is clear among the favorites but the team have been hyped a lot based on games against relative weak teams (bar Argentina). Brazil will also barely be tested against non-SA teams before the World Cup, so who knows how Brazil will perform against them. My guess is that Brazil reach the quarter-finals at least, perhaps the semis, but won't win the title.
In just about every World Cup there is about 6 out of 32 teams with a legitimate chances to win it. Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Italy, and nowadays you can include Spain and France. Brazil will be favorite regardless. I don't know how those SA teams are weak either. What did beating all those non SA team in friendlies done for us the last couple of years.
You probably chose a terrible term for some truly respected football forces nowadays. Chile, Uruguay, Colombia all should be considered clone quality to a point of direct comparison with top 10 squads in Europe nowadays. Argentina out of question. Remember these "underdogs" will always play a world cup match investing total potential until their resistance collapse, just like Turkey back in 2002, which will make them way harder than what they are already are. They do struggle a lot when missing key players, but who doesn't?
If Brazil was struggling to beat those teams, it would of been "our past Brazil teams did this and that, this generations sucks. Now, that we are steamrolling them they are weak. So, what do you want Brazil to do?
'Relative'' weak teams, Argentina aside, the others are quarter-finals material at best, like say Belgium. they can do better than that if the ties in the playoffs favor them but there are a few teams like Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Germany, France, Italy and probably Portugal who are better than them, in theory. Maybe that was too harsh on them but the fact is Brazil hasn't been tested against top teams yet (bar Argentina), although I think Brazil will do well against them (if Brazil will win the title in the end or not tis a different matter).
And that's now down to a year and 2 months!! And even I right now wouldn't try to predict Tite's final 23 in May of next year!!
Just like Bolivian altitude wasn't ever mentioned as a factor for qualifyings pre WCQ 1994 (but everybody nowadays mention this as a de facto 'omg conmebol so harder than the rest to qualify')
The qualifying process was different pre 94. We could of went to a qualifiers and not have to play a Argentina for example.
The problem for brazil is that the European style is very different than the south american style. We will need to beat atleast 2 of the top European sides in elimination to win the cup. That would need exp against European sides which unfortunately we dont have. I dont expert trip past semi final considering the above.