Brazil’s football system is broken, says Pele’s daughter

Brazil’s football system is broken, with a lack of transparency and accountability in governance reflected in the national team’s performance, said Kely Nascimento, activist filmmaker and eldest daughter of former Brazilian grandmaster Pele. Reuters in an interview.

«Brazilian football is broken. Whether it’s corruption… it’s like a closed, very incestuous ecosystem where no one can see inside, and everyone knows why it doesn’t work, but no one can fix it,» Nascimento said.

She said the country’s wealth of talent continued to produce top players, but their struggles on the international stage were symptomatic of deeper structural problems. Brazil were eliminated from this year’s 2026 FIFA World Cup after a 1-2 defeat to Norway on Sunday, the first time since 1990 that the country has failed to reach the quarter-finals. The country won the last of its record five World Cups in 2002.

Nascimento said her late father had long raised concerns about the state of Brazilian football and compared the country’s decline to countries such as France, which she said seemed to have built more effective systems.

An encouraging development, she said, was the revival of traditional clubs through foreign investment, citing the revival of Botafogo under American businessman John Textor. Since acquiring a controlling stake in the Rio de Janeiro club in 2022, Textor has overseen a steady turnaround in the fortunes of the former Brazilian champion.

“There’s a lot of criticism about the way he’s handling it, but again, there’s good and bad in everything,” Nascimento said. «What he also brings is transparency… he has responsibility to a foreign body. To me that is positive, regardless of anything he is blamed for.»

Published on July 9, 2026