7-1 Score Goes from Soccer to Symbolize Brazil's Failures
Humiliating defeat to Germany at Mineirão marks 10 years
Ten years ago, on July 8, 2014, at Mineirão Stadium in Belo Horizonte, Brazilian soccer suffered the greatest humiliation in its history: the 7-1 thrashing by Germany in the World Cup semifinal. This sports disaster not only shook a central pillar of national identity—the excellence on the soccer field, increasingly distant from the five-time champion team—but also entered the country's vocabulary as a metaphor for the climate of despair installed over the past decade in Brazilian life.
On the tenth anniversary of the disaster, the signs are not encouraging. In contrast to a similar sports catastrophe, the legendary Maracanazo, the 7-1 did not plunge Brazil into mourning but into denial. While the 1950 defeat was meticulously and obsessively lived as a tragedy by a country whose best international result was third place in the 1938 World Cup, the 2014 tragicomedy was already a joke before the final whistle.
If fans opted to treat the result as a comical accident, of no real importance, critics saw it as a welcome fatal blow to a collective illusion that was dying too late. And so the 7-1 found a home in the blind knot pointed out by Wisnik. The thing is, like any blind knot, it does not cease to exist just because it is invisible.