“It’s the result of seven years’ hard work”: Marquinhos Xavier on Brazil’s FIFA Futsal World Cup triumph

Brazil edged rivals Argentina 2-1 in the final of the FIFA Futsal World Cup 2024™ to lift the trophy in Tashkent’s Humo Arena. This capped off a phenomenal campaign for Xavier’s side, who scored 40 goals and concede just seven times across their seven games. Read on for the full interview transcript of Xavier shedding light on his strategic thinking, his multidisciplinary staff and the environment underpinning his team’s historic showing at FIFA Futsal World Cup Uzbekistan 2024™.

You were on the road a lot in the 12 months leading up to the World Cup. Within those 12 months, you played many teams. Some provided a very competitive game, whereas other matches were more routine. What was the thinking behind this preparation?

Marquinhos Xavier: Ever since we started our preparation, I always had in mind that we had to try and get to know more about all types of national teams, including those just emerging on the world stage. In this special cycle, we decided to challenge ourselves against some emerging national teams around the world, and we tried to play against teams like Costa Rica, an opponent that we had played in friendlies here in Brazil, and that ended up being a team that we had faced in the group stage at the World Cup.

That showed the importance of trying to analyse all types of national teams because you do have the group stage, which is really important, and you have to be very well prepared and know your opponents in detail. Ever since the beginning of our preparation, we knew that we had to open the scope to focus on all teams and test the behaviour of those teams playing against our own side. During the cycle, we collect a lot of information. We gather information about all of the opponents, but nothing compares with actually playing against that opponent. You can see how they react to playing against you, against your own players. So, the preparation was great. We played against national teams that are not entirely mainstays yet and also against national teams that are world powers. That prepared us to face any team.

Could you share some of the criteria that you had for selecting the players that you took with you to FIFA Futsal World Cup Uzbekistan 2024™?

That’s an interesting question, indeed, because everyone wants to know what the head coach has in mind when selecting the players. We basically thought about selecting athletes who could play more than one role efficiently. It’s only natural that we have technical criteria in mind and that we understand that sometimes what the athlete is going through, the moment they’re going through for their club, is key for them to be selected for the national team. But when we select our players, we never know who will be there by the end of the competition. So, when you have very specific players for each position, and they cannot play well in other positions, then throughout the tournament, you may lose those players for one reason or another, and then you cannot replace them because you can only select 14 players.

I’ve always tried to find athletes that could play more than one position efficiently. Of course, they will not play that position instead of someone who usually plays in that position, but they can mitigate the impact of losing a player because they got a red card, for example. Being versatile and being able to adapt to different scenarios that may come up during the tournament is something that gives more confidence to the whole team.

So, that was the main criteria. Of course, we also have in mind technical skills, tactics, understanding of athletes, but mainly the ability to cooperate and play in different positions in the game.

What about the coaching staff? Was there a particular criterion for them?

Yes, definitely. The search is quite similar to that of the players. We spend a lot of time together as a coaching staff, and people need to be able to support one another in different positions as well. My coaching staff has been with me since 2017 when I took over as the head coach. They are highly skilled, professionally speaking, but they are also people who have significant soft skills and were able to create a good environment that alleviates the pressure that we feel as the Brazilian national team.

We are a multi-tasking coaching staff. We all interact with each other about our jobs and functions. I trained this coaching staff throughout the years so that the physiologist or the physios were able to identify things that I was not able to see at a certain point in time and give suggestions or criticise actions that I might take that are not positive for the group. One specifically important thing I’d like to mention is that head coaches are there, very close to the athletes during training.

It’s only natural that they distance themselves after training. The athletes go to the medical department, to the physio, they see the fitness coach and other members of the coaching staff, while the head coach is studying in the room or doing something else, taking notes or studying games, and they cannot see certain things because of that distance. When the coaching staff feels confident and can give insights that can help me a great deal.

We are a multidisciplinary team. They have a high level of confidence, and they feel that they can come in at any point if they feel it’s important to mention a topic or something that is not to do with their specific field of work, but they are all prepared to do so. This time together has helped us to keep this professional relationship at a very good level.

You mentioned the multidisciplinary team. On our platform, we call this “the team behind the team”. Could you discuss the responsibility you have of bringing all that different expertise together to improve performance?

That’s another great question because this is actually what I have been devoting most of my time to. In addition to the technical knowledge, I need to have and all the tactical understanding as well, I focus on the human side. We have to understand that there is a team that we need to care for behind the team, as you said. Since the beginning of our relationship, I’ve always tried to educate myself to care for the team that will care for the player. It’s like training the trainers. That’s something I do, and I think that that’s key for the success of any multidisciplinary team: train the trainers.

You have to be aware of the difficulties that certain members of your coaching staff might be facing in a specific area, like the physio or the doctor. They need to understand the need to have our athletes ready to play, and they have to tell you sometimes what the risks are for a specific athlete to play in a certain match or not. We’ve worked on that throughout this period of time in a very straightforward manner.

What I try to do is to keep a close relationship with them every day. For example, at the World Cup in Uzbekistan, we got together at the end of the day in an informal way. We just sat down together to hang out, have a drink and chat, mentioning any issues that came up during the day that could have been avoided or that we could have made better. 

This ability to manage and lead a team starts when you are able to step into the shoes of the other members and understand their needs. This is because, at the end of the day, the head coach is there to look at everything, the big picture, not only the athletes that are there in the match but also the team behind the team that might need some criticism, some suggestions, praise or words of comfort, because if their family is not there, it can also be impactful. We are sometimes together for long periods of time away from home, so we try to create a good environment as much as we can.

Before going on to the more tactical questions, we wanted to ask you a question more on the human level: how did it feel to win the FIFA Futsal World Cup?

I imagine people who have never achieved this or who long to achieve this could never explain the feeling. When we win, it feels like we can explain it. We’ll have a way of explaining or intellectualising it, but ultimately, that’s not really possible. That’s because this is a situation where your heart just overflows with joy because you look back and you see the entire process that you went through.

I usually say that the World Cup Brazil won in 2024 was the result of seven years’ hard work and not just that of a cycle. Perhaps the work that we perform in a cycle might not be enough for a national team to win the cup because we have, on average, five to six FIFA dates per year. There are very few training opportunities, and we work with the players for a very short time. Sometimes a player will come from a club that they’ve been with for three months, which has a completely different playing style. And in ten days, you have to change their behaviour. I don’t think that’s really possible. Changing a player’s behaviour needs time. That’s something which is a big challenge.

The magnitude of this achievement leaves you overflowing with emotions and leaves you speechless when it comes to explaining to people how important it is to have won the World Championship. After all, this is a title that proves your excellence or attests to your excellence to the entire world. It’s really difficult to explain what it is to be a FIFA world champion, at least in our reality. All I can say is that it is all about joy, and it is like reaching the pinnacle of my field of work. Also, looking at my peers, at my colleagues in the coaching staff, and seeing the smiles on their faces is something that really makes your life worthwhile. It really fills me with joy to be able to deliver work with that amount of excellence. But again, it’s the end of a seven-year period of work.

It’s also important to remember that we saw many challenges at the beginning of this cycle, changes in the commission and planning that were very difficult to go through until we reached that moment. It really was a full-circle moment for me, professionally.

In the past, Brazil were a team that would score many goals with the likes of Falcao. It was very successful, but they would also concede their fair share as well. In Uzbekistan, this changed. You still scored many goals but kept goals conceded to a minimum. Could you explain this shift?

This really adds to a feeling that we had, which was that we needed to ‘defend our space’ better, so to speak. That’s a slogan that we adopted throughout the campaign, even saying that your defence shows how competitive you are and it shows how strong you are to hold your space and what you stand for. We have always been a strong team offensively. You mentioned Falcao, and of course, we could list many other players, many other heroes during the Brazilian team’s campaign. We’ve always been known around the world for being very strong offensively but also for not paying that much attention to our defence.

Obviously, we had goal-scoring machines like Falcao, Tobias, and many others. But right now, we don’t really have those big machines. We need to pay more attention to our defence. That’s because other teams have also improved when it comes to their technical skills. I can say that we are really on par with any other national team in the world. What we’ve established is our offence shows who we are. It establishes our identity, whereas our defence shows our intentions are in that competition. I’ve always been a coach that’s very much concerned with the team’s defence, but I’ve never been defensive.

We want to have possession, and we want it so much that we go to the opponent’s half to seize it. I think we recovered possession more effectively than any other team in this competition. We did that so that we could mount good attacks. We did that really effectively. And if you allow me to give you an example, I was at this conference in Spain, and I heard from many guests’ questions about what I was going to talk about. When I said “defence”, they seemed startled and said, “A Brazilian coach talking about defence?”

And I said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about because that’s always been in my professional make-up.” Everything starts with a well-organised defence, which also organises your offence and adds all of these great qualities to your team. I’m very happy that Brazil is now being seen not only as a well-organised team defensively but also offensively as well. After all, we need to be able to play well regardless of the system we’re adopting.

Goalkeepers Guitta, Willian and Roncaglio all play key roles for your team. How did you determine which goalkeeper will start a game?

That’s another important question because it really speaks to the principles that we’ve established within our team, the most important of which was playing as a team.

We had three great goalies during this campaign, Roncaglio, Guitta and Willian. However, as time went by, with the path that we were on, I realised that whenever Willian was playing, the team would move more and move faster because Willian is a different type of keeper to Roncaglio or Guitta. We needed to be playing more collectively when it came to moving faster and finding our position. That really worked for us.

Having Willian in the team ‘forced’ us to move around more because we couldn’t bring in many others to help us play out under pressure, for example. But at the same time we had goalkeepers ready to take on responsibility when called upon. Guitta and Roncaglio are excellent at offering support and bringing them on also allows us to create a new dynamic, be compact in defence, and introduce a real element of surprise.

Many across the game noticed you and your team’s limited use of Ferrão as the pivot. Could you share some thoughts on this, especially in relation to Pito and how he played a more relevant role in the tournament, but then when it came to the round of 16 and semi-finals, he was less involved?

Ferrão faced many physical challenges during this World Cup. He suffered a serious injury, which kept him out for some time. He had to work on his fitness and on the speed of his game, and that really affected his performance. I told him that he was very brave in once again overcoming an injury not unlike the one he’d had before, without losing heart and continuing to work and train. But in the build-up to the competition, he suffered another injury right before we started our World Cup campaign.

At the time, there was even a risk that Ferrão would be cut from the team altogether and miss the World Cup. But then that’s when our human side came in. I didn’t think it was fair for a player with his record to be replaced because of injury after having fought so hard to be there. I worked on that with the team. I brought the team together and we agreed that we would work for him until the end. There would still have enough time for him to recover and play with us again.

It was an agreement, a pact, and not only with him, because we also lost Pito along the way, and then we lost Marcênio too. So, we lost three very important players to injuries at this time, which also strengthened our belief that players need to be able to play more than one role. For example, Diego had to play as a pivot several times and Marlon as well, showing that we were able to minimise the impact of losing these players.

We didn’t have Pito, Ferrão and Marcênio, but the team made up for that. He only played a few matches at the tournament because he was still recovering but having him around was very important for the team because he set an example and because of his leadership, and we kept that throughout the campaign. Fortunately, he made it through to the end and became a world champion with us.

In Uzbekistan, were there any teams that surprised you in how they played?

Yes, we had quite a few surprises in Uzbekistan. We saw teams that had been unknowns up until recently but managed to get to the semi-finals, like Ukraine. They were very strong opponents. They were very competitive, and they were experiencing geopolitical issues. They were going through a crisis, but they went there with this great will to win. That’s something they found in themselves.

But when we talk about surprises, I should say that head coaches should never be that surprised. We played against France, Spain and Ukraine. Some of them were better known than others, but others… people in Brazil still come to me and say, “Well, I’d never have guessed that Ukraine had such a good national team or that Iran or Morocco had such strong national teams.” That’s because people watch a lot of football and they end up focusing on nations where football is stronger. They see other countries as being weak or behind in football development. But in futsal, the reality can be completely different to that of football. We see countries that are not strong at football but are major forces in futsal. So that’s where the story starts and there were some very interesting surprises.

Brazil has always had spectacular pivots. What does the modern Brazilian pivot need to possess today?

To start with, I would like to go back to the social and cultural background of futsal in Brazil and around the world. We have always had a school that has trained great pivots here in Brazil. We could list ten great pivots, and we would still leave out some great ones because we have so many.

When I talk about a social and cultural impact it’s because when Spain won the World Cup in 2000 and 2004 with a style of play that did not use the pivot position that much. Here in Brazil –  incorrectly, in my opinion – we tried to copy that style. It was a style that did not put the emphasis on the role played by a pivot. We stopped training and creating great pivots in Brazil. Fortunately, though, we soon realised that having a pivot in play at all times was part of our futsal DNA.

The position has changed over time, like goalkeepers. The pivot is not unlike the goalkeeper in terms of development. These are the positions that have developed the most around the world in recent years. Goalkeepers have become important in bringing flow to the game, breathing fresh air into it. They also play with their feet, providing support to the team. Pivots also started to play an important defensive role because they are the first line of defence. Everything they do in that first line of defence can have either a positive or a negative impact on the defensive system.

The pivots of today know how to play with their back to goal, but without the ball, they can also press the other team and draw the opposition to the other side of the court to help the other lines of defence. It’s not that pivots are changing how they play, but they now possess other types of knowledge and they have developed their role.

As we’re talking about what makes a good pivot, I would also highlight the ability to make decisions based on individual or team play. Sometimes pivots need to be individualistic and solve problems. But there are also times when they need to play for the team, which means switching positions to open up space for another player or understand when they need to stop doing what they do most to benefit the team.

Do you have any key principles that you use when you’re coaching top players, such as those players in the Brazilian national team?

It’s not an easy task to lead a Brazilian national team with such high-level players, but I’ve always made myself available to all of them. I have a theory that the coach is there to serve the players and not the other way around. So, my role in our working environment has always been to support them. I’m there to help. I’m not there to teach them how to play futsal. I’m there to help them improve their performance and to get important information across.

I always make myself available to anyone who needs me and wants to improve their performance. Being in a national team is not an easy task, but it’s a very enjoyable one. In addition to being there, we also need to perform because there is a lot of pressure for us to do so. You need empathy to share information and create a positive working environment in which I can deliver information about the match itself and to players’ careers as a whole. Some of my players are students. They are studying physical education at university because they will have to stop playing one day, and they need to think about their careers after they retire.

I’m very happy to have been with a group of people who were willing to perform and improve. Although we went into the World Cup as five-time champions, the whole group was there to make history. They wanted to be there. They were there to absorb as much of my energy as they could because they wanted help to be world champions.

Now you are reigning world champions. Where do you see the competitive threat coming from when looking towards the next World Cup?

A lot of effort has gone into developing futsal around the world. Now we see countries from other continents competing against Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Argentina – the four world champions – at the same level. It’s a very welcome surprise. There will always be threats on our journey. We are six-time world champions now and people want to beat us. They want to overcome their limitations and not only beat Brazil but overcome their own difficulties, their own struggles as well.

We know that the journey we had at this World Cup won’t lead us to success in 2028. The journey won’t be the same. We’ll have to learn to leave our comfort zone and challenge ourselves in other areas and change things in our internal environment so that, once again, we can have that same winning feeling in 2028, just like we did in 2024. We will face many threats along the way but the biggest threat is to think that everything is okay and that we can just keep doing what we have always done.

I believe we have to keep on working really hard. That’s right. But we have to be aware of everything that is going on around the world. Futsal is really strong in the Gulf region now, as well as in central Asia and eastern Europe. Futsal is no longer the sole preserve of South America and Europe.

This whole ecosystem of world futsal will deliver lots of surprises, and I think that’s great. The more unpredictable our sport is, the more attention it will attract and the more investment it will generate, with more resources being invested in developing world futsal. I think that we need to give a bit more investment and support to teams in Africa and North and Central America. They struggle because they don’t have major competitions there, which stops them from developing as they should. I think that’s a task for all of us, not just FIFA and the member states, but for all of us futsal professionals. We have to leave our own countries and go around the world, helping other countries to develop.

I’m sure that audience numbers will go up and that futsal is now one of the major sports in the world. I hope it can keep on growing as it’s growing right now.­­­