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.