World Cup 2026 - Brazil’s Shame

The NIRS Project in Football: 11 vs. 11 and the Living Third Body of the Match

Brazil did not feel shame because it lost.

Losing is part of the game.

Brazil felt shame because it did not recognize itself on the field.

The 2–1 defeat to Norway in the Round of 16 of the 2026 World Cup was reported as an early elimination for the national team, the worst campaign since 1990, and another chapter in Brazil’s title drought since 2002. But the Brazilian wound was deeper than the score.

The problem was not simply leaving the World Cup.

It was leaving without futebol-arte.

Without collective body.

Without the Jiwasa of Brazilianness.

The shame came because the country saw a spreadsheet game.

It saw possession.

Zones.

Transitions.

Heat maps.

Control.

Probability.

Space occupation.

“Rational” decision-making.

But it did not see Brazil.

It did not see TMJ — tamo junto, “we are together.”

It did not see the third body.

It did not see the Latin agent.

It did not see the collective field that, when alive, turns eleven players into more than eleven players.

The question of this blog-project is:

Are we measuring individuals, teams, or the living body of the match?

Windows for Feeling the Primal Causes

Before explaining this through neuroscience, we must open windows so the reader can feel it.

Because the primal cause of Brazilian shame is not only tactical.

It is in the body.

It is in time.

It is in childhood.

It is in the monetization of attention.

It is in the premature sale of youth.

It is in the rupture between player, territory, and population.

It is in the disappearance of Jiwasa.

Window 1 - The shame did not come from the score

Brazil did not feel shame because it lost.

The shame came because the country looked at the field and did not find a mirror.

The crowd wanted to see Brazil.

It saw execution.

It wanted to feel TMJ.

It saw individual performance.

It wanted futebol-arte.

It saw administered football.

It wanted a collective body.

It saw isolated athletes inside a globalized rationality.

The primal cause begins here:

when a people gathers to belong, but the body that should represent them no longer returns belonging.

The Brazilian national team has always been more than a team. It has been a national ritual. In many historical moments, a Brazil match functioned as a vast collective encounter: homes, bars, streets, families, children, workers, elders, and peripheries entering the same emotional time.

When this body meets futebol-arte, something is discharged.

When it meets only a spreadsheet, the load returns as shame.

Window 2 - Childhood left the street before the player reached the field

Brazilian football was not born first inside the training center.

It was born on the ground.

On the street.

On the court.

In the várzea.

On the crooked field.

With the bad ball.

In the dribble, because space was small.

In creativity, because resources were scarce.

In presence, because everyone was watching.

This childhood formed the body before it formed the athlete.

It formed perception before statistics.

It formed cunning before heat maps.

It formed improvisation before models.

Today, many young players arrive at the academy already crossed by another calendar.

The calendar of the feed.

The notification.

The short video.

The scout.

The agent.

The comparison.

The personal brand.

The promise of being sold.

The boy learns to perform before he learns to belong.

He appears before he matures.

He is seen before he is formed.

The point is not to say that social media explains everything.

The deeper thesis is this:

before, territory formed the calendar of the body; now, the algorithm disputes that calendar.

And when the intimate calendar is captured, Jiwasa weakens even before the player becomes professional.

Window 3 - The player is sold before carrying Brazil inside his body

When an athlete leaves too early, the country does not lose only a player.

It loses maturation time.

It loses coexistence with the crowd.

It loses derbies.

It loses public mistakes.

It loses booing.

It loses comeback.

It loses symbolic street.

It loses the cycle in which the player stops being a promise and begins to carry a people.

FIFA already treats international transfers of minors as a protection issue, with specific procedures for underage players. But the Brazilian wound does not end at 18. It shifts into the interval between 18 and 24, when the athlete can already be sold, managed, sponsored, converted into an asset, and exported to mature in another territory.

The proposal of 24 years old should not be framed as imprisonment.

It should be framed as care.

Before exporting the player, Brazil must be formed inside him.

The age of 24 should not be presented as a rigid biological claim. It is mainly a political, cultural, and sporting threshold: a minimum time for Brazil to be consolidated inside the athlete.

From 18 to 24, the player should have the chance to mature before the population that produced his difference.

Window 4 - Betting platforms hijack the risk that once belonged to the crowd

The crowd has always lived with risk.

But it was a shared risk.

The missed goal hurt everyone.

The scored goal exploded in everyone.

Defeat was collective mourning.

Victory was public celebration.

With betting platforms, risk changes place.

It leaves belonging and enters the individual account.

The fan no longer asks only:

“Will Brazil win?”

He begins to ask:

“Will my bet hit?”

The game stops being an encounter.

It becomes an operation.

The player stops being a symbolic representative.

He becomes a variable.

The primal cause here is deep:

when betting replaces the crowd, TMJ breaks.

Betting cannot replace belonging.

Financial risk cannot replace Jiwasa.

The market cannot hijack the emotional body of the game.

Window 5 - The spreadsheet captures the trace, but does not feel the living

Data is necessary.

But data is not the game.

The spreadsheet sees passes.

Possession.

Speed.

Distance.

xG.

Heat maps.

Pressure.

Oxygenation.

Heart rate.

Movement.

But by itself, it does not see the moment when eleven become one.

It does not see when the stadium enters the nervous system of the team.

It does not see when the dribble is not a choice, but collective memory.

It does not see when a player passes because he felt, not because he calculated.

The problem is not measurement.

The problem is measurement without listening.

Capta without Jiwasa becomes the Excel of the living.

The primal cause:

Brazil began to confuse trace with presence.

Capta is captured trace.

Jiwasa is emergent presence.

A science of Brazilian football needs both.

Window 6 - The crowd was summoned, but the third body did not appear

When the national team plays, millions of bodies stop.

Homes stop.

Bars stop.

Streets change rhythm.

Families gather.

Children wear the shirt.

Even people who do not follow football feel something.

Because a Brazil match is a national ritual.

It is an attempt to form a larger body.

Latin populations carry deep allostatic loads: historical, colonial, economic, racial, political, and territorial.

These loads do not disappear through discourse alone.

They need body.

They need song.

They need dance.

They need play.

They need celebration.

They need encounter.

They need art.

In our language, this is Human Quorum Sensing.

Not as a simple biological metaphor.

But as a Body-Territory hypothesis:

many bodies perceiving together that they are not alone.

A distributed intelligence that emerges when bodies regulate each other.

A Jiwasa.

A third body.

When the national team plays without futebol-arte, this ritual fails.

The population gathers to discharge historical tension.

But receives execution without soul.

It gathers to metabolize social shame.

But receives globalized performance.

It gathers to feel Brazil.

But finds a team that seems closer to the market than to the people.

This is collective allostatic frustration.

The social body was called to belong.

But it found nowhere to land.

Window 7 - The coach may get the metric right and miss the body

A coach can see everything and still feel nothing.

He may get the zone right.

The transition right.

The map right.

The statistical substitution right.

And still miss the game.

Because there is a layer that does not appear ready-made in the report:

the emotional rhythm of the team.

Invisible confidence.

Growing courage.

Paralyzing shame.

The crowd pushing.

The bench sensing before the model.

The player who is present, but not whole.

When the coach does not perceive the third body, he can replace a piece and kill a living circulation.

He can correct the structure and destroy Jiwasa.

He can follow the plan and kill the art.

The primal cause:

Brazilian football did not die from lack of information, but from lack of listening to the living.

Window 8 - Shame must become intergenerational responsibility

Norway became a symbol because it thought about the future.

Brazil became a wound because it sells the future.

It sells oil.

It sells territory.

It sells attention.

It sells youth.

It sells players.

It sells shirts.

It sells risk.

It even sells the emotion of the crowd.

If Brazil is one of the great exporters of footballing bodies, it must ask:

who restores the territory that produces these bodies?

That is why the response cannot be only complaint.

It must become proposal.

Protect the academy.

Protect futsal.

Protect the street.

Protect young athletes from betting platforms.

Create a Sovereign Fund for Brazilian Football.

Incentivize qualified permanence until the age of 24.

Measure the game with science, but without killing the art.

Form players who can play in the world without forgetting the people they carry.

The final primal cause:

Brazil did not only lose a World Cup. Brazil realized it has been selling its futures before maturing them.

So Why NIRS?

Because perhaps the Brazilian body already knows what science has not yet learned to measure.

The fan knows when the team is together.

Knows when the player is alone.

Knows when the stadium entered the game.

Knows when the bench feels.

Knows when the coach lost the field.

Knows when a goal is born not only from a play, but from coupling.

The NIRS Project in football is born to investigate this:

not only the athlete’s brain,

not only the team as a tactical system,

but the living third body of the match.

The adversarial Jiwasa.

The between.

The 11 vs. 11 that, when alive, becomes much more than 22.

NIRS/fNIRS technology allows the observation of changes in cerebral and muscular oxygenation in a non-invasive way during tasks and exercise. But the point of this project is not to transform football into brain data.

It is the opposite.

It is to use brain, muscle, movement, sound, stadium, and lived experience to study what happens between bodies.

The Adversarial Third Body

So far, social neuroscience has studied a great deal of cooperative coupling.

The article by Leiva-Cisterna, Barraza, Rodríguez, and Dumas is important because it suggests that synchrony between brains should not be treated only as a correlational coincidence: in the study, sensory multi-brain stimulation increased interbrain synchrony, especially around 16 Hz, and facilitated sustained behavioral coupling in dyads.

But football demands a further step.

Football is not only cooperation.

It is adversarial cooperation.

One team cooperates against another team.

Eleven bodies couple among themselves.

Eleven opposing bodies try to disorganize that coupling.

The stadium modulates both.

The bench interferes.

The coach reorganizes the field.

The physical trainer senses fatigue, tension, and drops in readiness.

The crowd pushes, pressures, frightens, sustains, or breaks.

So the question changes:

Is the third body of the match only the sum of the players?

No.

The living match is an adversarial Jiwasa.

A larger body that emerges between two teams, benches, coaches, physical trainers, crowd, field, time, score, memory, and pressure.

This is the third body the spreadsheet forgets.

The NIRS Project in Football: 30 Body-Territories

This blog proposes an fNIRS experiment in a football match.

Not to reduce the game to the brain.

But to begin measuring the between.

The proposal:

11 starting players from Team A;
11 starting players from Team B;
2 substitutes from Team A’s bench;
2 substitutes from Team B’s bench;
Team A’s coach;
Team B’s coach;
Team A’s physical trainer;
Team B’s physical trainer.

Total: 30 body-territories.

The question:

Are we measuring individuals, teams, or the living body of the match?

The hypothesis:

if we measure only individuals, we will see performance.

If we measure teams, we will see coordination.

If we measure adversarial Jiwasa, we may begin to see the match as a living third body.

fNIRS would allow the monitoring of cortical hemodynamic responses during the match, especially in regions related to attention, decision-making, control, social perception, cognitive effort, and adaptation.

But fNIRS alone is not enough.

The project would need to integrate:

fNIRS in 30 participants;
GPS and positional tracking;
tactical video;
stadium audio;
heart rate;
HRV/RMSSD;
EMG in specific samples;
GSR for activation;
eye-tracking in simulated training contexts;
critical event analysis;
post-match phenomenological reports;
reading of the bench, coach, and physical trainer;
Capta from market, media, networks, and crowd.

The goal would not be to produce a bigger spreadsheet.

It would be to create a science capable of asking:

where did the game create body?

where did the game lose body?

where did the team become eleven individuals?

where did the stadium enter the nervous system?

where did the coach feel too late?

where did the bench already know before the spreadsheet?

The next step for Brazilian football could be not only to measure cooperation in the laboratory, but to investigate Jiwasa in the living game.

Experimental Windows

The match would be analyzed through windows.

Window 1 - Pre-match

Before the ball rolls, the game has already begun.

Anthem.

Warm-up.

Gaze.

Tunnel.

Camera.

Crowd.

Fear.

Vanity.

Concentration.

Market.

Sponsorship.

Memory.

Here, fNIRS would ask:

do the bodies enter coupled or dispersed?

Is the team in Jiwasa?

Or is each player inside his own brand?

Window 2 - The first 10 minutes

The beginning reveals the field.

Is there courage?

Is there hesitation?

Is there listening?

Is there proximity?

Is there living compactness?

Does the team recognize itself?

Or does it execute movements without belonging?

In futebol-arte, the first minutes are not only study.

They are an affirmation of presence.

Window 3 - Offensive transition

Here we see collective APUS.

The body of the team positions itself to attack.

The ball changes feet.

Space opens.

The opponent tilts.

The pass calls the run.

The dribble calls the cover.

The question:

does the team feel together or calculate separately?

The spreadsheet sees progression.

Jiwasa sees whether world-creation is happening.

Window 4 - Defensive transition

Here character appears.

The ball is lost.

Who comes back?

Who hesitates?

Who protects?

Who complains?

Who abandons?

Who compensates?

Who feels the other?

Futebol-arte is not only beautiful attacking.

It is defending with belonging.

Without Jiwasa, each one comes back for himself.

Window 5 - Goal conceded

A conceded goal is an earthquake in the Tekoha.

Breathing changes.

Posture changes.

Gaze changes.

Bench changes.

Crowd changes.

Coach changes.

The question is not only how the team reacts tactically.

It is:

does the third body survive the blow?

Or does the team break into individuals?

Window 6 - Goal scored

A scored goal also reveals.

Is there organized euphoria?

Is there humility?

Is there reconnection?

Is there excess?

Is there vanity?

Is there loss of field?

Not every goal strengthens Jiwasa.

Some goals inflate ego.

Others reconnect the collective body.

Window 7 - Bench, coach, and physical trainer

The bench feels before entering.

The substitute may be coupled or disconnected.

The coach may feel the field or merely read the spreadsheet.

The physical trainer may perceive a drop in readiness before the model.

That is why the coach and physical trainer must be part of the experiment.

They are not external to the game.

They modulate Jiwasa.

A coach who does not feel the third body may choose the wrong Capta.

May replace a piece without understanding the field.

May correct a metric and destroy rhythm.

May follow the plan and kill the art.

Window 8 - Stadium and population

The stadium is not scenery.

It is a sensitive organ of the match.

It breathes.

Sings.

Falls silent.

Pressures.

Accelerates.

Frightens.

Sustains.

In Brazil, the stadium also expands into bars, homes, streets, beaches, screens, and families.

Millions of bodies enter the game.

When the national team plays, the country tries to form a larger body.

If this body meets futebol-arte, it discharges allostatic load and creates belonging.

If it meets only spreadsheet logic, the load returns as shame.

Luciane Moscaleski: When Capta Meets Lived Body

Here enters an important Brazilian bridge.

Luciane Moscaleski appears publicly as the founder of inBrain, a consultancy in Sport Neuroscience and corporate well-being. Her public trajectory includes postdoctoral work at the School of Physical Education and Sport of the University of São Paulo, a PhD in Neuroscience and Cognition from UFABC, participation in the NAPeN network, training in Physical Education, Administration, and Marketing, as well as experience as a former professional basketball athlete.

This matters deeply.

Because EEG, fNIRS, EMG, and any measurement technology are still Capta.

But there is dead Capta and living Capta.

Dead Capta is when technique becomes cerebral Excel.

Living Capta is when data encounters someone who can feel the game.

Luciane represents, for this project, a rare figure: someone who moves between science, body, sport, neuroimaging, athletic experience, and applied language. The body of a former athlete does not read a physiological signal in the same way a spreadsheet reads it. It knows that a brain pattern only gains meaning when it encounters gesture, court, field, pressure, rhythm, fatigue, gaze, bench, coach, and collective.

That is why this text should value her not only for the titles and work already accomplished, but for the kind of listening her trajectory makes possible.

In the language of this project, we can say:

Luciane Moscaleski is one of the Brazilian researchers with the greatest potential to transform NIRS/fNIRS into a tool for detecting Jiwasa in sporting groups.

Not because NIRS alone will “prove” Jiwasa.

But because someone who has lived sport from within, studied the brain from within, and works with applied neuroscience for performance may perceive what many models ignore:

that the group has a pulse.

that the team has a climate.

that the bench feels.

that the coach modulates.

that the gesture carries history.

that data needs to encounter lived body.

It is fair, within this proposal, to say that Luciane can feel the Jiwasa of groups.

Not as mysticism.

But as a rare integrative competence:

to measure and listen.

to analyze and perceive.

to capture signal and recognize presence.

Without feeling Jiwasa, data becomes orphaned.

With Jiwasa, data may become listening.

And perhaps this is exactly the next leap for sport neuroscience in Brazil: not to copy cold methodologies of high performance, but to create a Brazilian science capable of measuring coupling without killing art.

Why Brazil Was a Shame

Brazil was a shame not because it lost.

It was shameful because it did not present the third body of Brazilianness.

There was no futebol-arte as Jiwasa.

There was no sensation that the country entered the field together.

There was no TMJ.

There was no Latin agent.

There was no field that makes the supporter say:

“we lost, but it was Brazil.”

The shame came because the defeat felt empty.

It felt like execution without soul.

Plan without body.

Data without Weichö.

A globalized, marketized, well-trained team poor in belonging.

Perhaps this is harsh.

But it is a necessary harshness.

Because Brazil does not need only another coach.

It needs to recover the territory that forms futebol-arte.

It needs to protect the small field.

The street.

Childhood.

Ginga.

Improvisation.

Joy.

Collectivity.

Play.

Creative error.

The symbolic hunger to represent a people.

Without this, we may have millionaire athletes, rich clubs, advanced metrics, and famous coaches.

But we will not have Brazil.

Proposal: A National Cycle of Footballing Brazilianness Until Age 24

Shame must become proposal.

Brazilian players should not be permanently sold abroad before the age of 24 without completing a minimum cycle of technical, affective, territorial, and collective maturation inside Brazil.

This should not be formulated as imprisonment.

It should be formulated as neurocultural sovereignty.

Brazilian sports law already recognizes the importance of the training organization. The next step is to recognize that formation is not only contract, housing, training, and competition.

Formation is territory.

Formation is culture.

Formation is belonging.

Formation is protection against the premature monetization of consciousness.

The proposal would create:

a National Cycle of Footballing Brazilianness from 18 to 24;
a progressive contribution for international transfers before age 24;
a Sovereign Fund for Brazilian Football;
protection of youth academies from betting platforms;
prohibition of individual betting contracts for under-24 athletes;
funding for futsal, street football, várzea, women’s football, and school championships;
research centers in NIRS/fNIRS, creativity, decision-making, and sporting Jiwasa;
programs in financial education, mental health, and territorial belonging for young athletes.

Brazil does not need to stop its players from conquering the world.

It needs to stop them from being sold before becoming fully Brazilian on the field.

DANA Against the Capture of Football

DANA is religare DNA.

It is a religiosity, a politics, and a society that respects Weichö — the singular power of world-creation that DNA Intelligence allows in each body-territory.

In football, DANA asks:

is sport creating world or capturing consciousness?

Is the academy forming collective body?

Or financial asset?

Is the club forming a player?

Or a brand?

Is the national team representing a people?

Or a showcase?

Is technology listening to the game?

Or replacing the game?

Is AI helping us feel better?

Or erasing what does not fit the spreadsheet?

DANA is not against technology.

DANA is against technology without reconnection.

Against Capta without Jiwasa.

Against science without body.

Against football without people.

Final Study Proposal

The NIRS experiment in football would have three levels of analysis.

1. Individual

How does each player respond to pressure, fatigue, decision-making, error, goal, crowd, and tactical change?

2. Team

How do players from the same team synchronize attention, decision, movement, transition, and recovery?

3. Match as Third Body

How do the two teams, benches, coaches, physical trainers, crowd, and field form an adversarial Jiwasa?

The larger hypothesis:

real high performance is not only inside the athlete’s brain.
It is in the coupling between body-territories.
It is in the living third body of the match.

Closing

World Cup 2026 left a wound.

Not only a sporting wound.

A civilizational one.

Brazil saw its national team lose, but what hurt was something else:

the absence of Brazil.

Perhaps futebol-arte does not disappear because of a lack of talent.

Perhaps it disappears when human consciousness is monetized to the point where the player enters the field as an asset, the coach as a spreadsheet manager, the crowd as an audience, childhood as content, and the country as a brand.

Before, colonialism captured territory.

Now, digitalization also captures attention.

And when attention is captured, Jiwasa weakens.

Brazilian football does not need to choose between science and art.

It needs a science capable of feeling art.

A science that uses EEG, fNIRS, EMG, video, tracking, and AI without forgetting the third body.

A science that knows the game does not live only in data.

It lives in the between.

In the field.

In the stadium.

In the shame.

In the silence.

In the chant.

In the dribble.

In the pass no one expected.

In the body that feels before the spreadsheet.

Perhaps Luciane Moscaleski, because of her trajectory between lived sport, neuroscience, body, and practical application, is one of the people capable of transforming this intuition into a research project.

Not to prove that Brazil has a soul.

But to show that groups have coupling.

That teams have pulse.

That the crowd enters the system.

That there is a physiology of belonging.

That Jiwasa may be measurable not as an isolated object, but as an emergent pattern between bodies.

The final question is:

will the next Brazil measure only players, or will it relearn how to feel the Jiwasa of the match?

Because without Jiwasa, we may still play football.

But we will not play Brazilian football.

Highlighted Reference

Leiva-Cisterna, I., Barraza, P., Rodríguez, E., & Dumas, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 20(1), nsaf104. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsaf104.

Post-2021 Supporting Publications

Allostasis and Latin America
Migeot, J., et al. (2024). Allostasis, health, and development in Latin America. Supports the reading that inequalities, adverse experiences, and social contexts in Latin America shape health, development, and the body across the lifespan.

Executive functions and maturation
Tervo-Clemmens, B., et al. (2023). A canonical trajectory of executive function maturation from adolescence to adulthood. A study with 10,766 participants aged 8 to 35, useful for treating the discussion of maturation between adolescence and adulthood with care.

Social media and youth
Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Social Media and Youth Mental Health. Important for discussing the capture of the young person’s intimate calendar by digital platforms, without reducing all youth suffering to a single cause.

Collective events, music, and belonging
Rickard, N. S., et al. (2025). The unifying power of live music events: A systematic review of social outcomes for audience members. Helps support the idea that collective encounters with emotion, music, and presence can generate social and communal benefits.

Interbrain synchrony and cooperation
Leiva-Cisterna, I., Barraza, P., Rodríguez, E., & Dumas, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. A neuroscientific basis for thinking about coupling between brains and cooperative behavior, conceptually expanded here toward the adversarial Jiwasa of football.

NIRS in sport and exercise
Perrey, S. (2024). Could near infrared spectroscopy be the new weapon in our scientific arsenal to improve exercise performance? Discusses the use of NIRS to measure cerebral and muscular oxygenation during exercise.

Muscle oximetry in sport science
Perrey, S., et al. (2024). Muscle Oximetry in Sports Science: An Updated Systematic Review. A review on NIRS as a non-invasive method for assessing muscular oxygenation in different sporting contexts.

fNIRS hyperscanning in athletes and trust
Wang, H., et al. (2025). An fNIRS hyperscanning study on the influence of team types and sex factors on athletes’ trust behavior and interpersonal neural synchronization. Supports the possibility of studying interpersonal synchronization in athletes through fNIRS hyperscanning.

Sports betting advertising
McGrane, E., et al. (2025). What is the impact of sports-related gambling advertising on gambling behaviour? A systematic review. Useful for discussing how exposure to sports betting advertising relates to gambling behavior.

Gambling sponsorship in sport
De Jans, S., et al. (2024). #Sponsored: A Systematic Literature Review and Theoretical Framework of Gambling Sponsorship Research. Supports the discussion of betting platforms’ presence in the sporting imaginary.