Brasileirão 2026 (M)

Brazil's first national club championship was played in 1971 and won by Atlético Mineiro. But the tournament was not officially called the Campeonato Brasileiro until 1989, and before 1971 there were two competitions that acted like a league without quite being one: the Taça Brasil, between 1959 and 1968, and the Torneio Roberto Gomes Pedrosa, between 1967 and 1970. For half a century, half of Brazil counted those titles and the other half did not.

The argument ended in an office. In December 2010 the CBF ruled by decree that both tournaments were Brazilian championships in full. Overnight several clubs woke up with new stars on the badge and the whole country's honours board was rewritten without a single match being played.

The format has changed skin too: knockouts from 1959 to 1968, group stages with finals until 2002, and only since 2003 has it been played like a European league — everyone against everyone, champion at the top of the table. It is the most stable formula it has ever had, and even so the title has gone to seventeen different clubs, thirteen of them more than once. Palmeiras leads with twelve.

On 29 November 2025, at the Estadio Monumental in Lima and in front of 70,048 people, Danilo headed in a De Arrascaeta corner in the 67th minute. That goal won Flamengo the Copa Libertadores final 1-0 against Palmeiras: their fourth, and the one that made them the first Brazilian club to reach four.

Four days later they were at the Maracanã closing out the other one. They beat Ceará 1-0 on matchday 37 and took the Brasileirão five points clear of Palmeiras with a round still to play. They did not win it from one end only: they finished with both the best attack and the best defence, 78 goals scored and 27 conceded, a double no other side managed.

The rest of the year left numbers and farewells. Kaio Jorge was top scorer with 21, and across the championship's 380 matches 959 goals were scored, 2.52 a game. And four went down to Série B: Fortaleza, Juventude, Sport and Ceará themselves — the team Flamengo beat to become champions.

The league starts on 28 January and ends on 2 December, and those two dates are the story of the year. Normally the Brasileirão waits for the state championships to finish and does not begin until April; this season it moves forward by more than two months so the whole thing can be fitted around the World Cup, which swallows a month and a half of the summer. Not a single round is played between June and mid-July, and everything left over is squeezed in on either side.

Four come up and four went down. Coritiba arrives as Série B champion, and with it Athletico Paranaense, Chapecoense and Remo, taking the places vacated by Ceará, Fortaleza, Juventude and Sport. Flamengo defend the title fresh from a continental double; Palmeiras arrive having lost both — the final in Lima and the league by five points.

And the prize changes, which in Brazil matters as much as the title. Last season the top six plus the Copa do Brasil winner went to the Libertadores; from this year it is the top five plus the cup's winner and runner-up. That is one place fewer through the table: sixth, which previously carried a continental ticket, now drops to the Sudamericana. In a league where half the table is fighting to get in, moving that border by one rung changes the season for seven or eight clubs.

Here two teams level on points are not separated by goal difference. They are separated by wins. The CBF rulebook orders the criteria like this: points, number of wins, goal difference, goals scored, head-to-head, fewest red cards, fewest yellows and, if they are still level, a draw of lots. Brazil is one of the few places in the world that puts wins ahead of goal difference, and it is not a technicality: it rewards the side that wins and loses over the one that draws a lot, and punishes whoever thrashes the weak but fails to close out tight games.

The effect shows most at the bottom. Four of twenty go down, a fifth of the league every season, so the relegation zone is not occupied by three broken teams but by a pack of seven or eight still alive in November. And there a tie on points between two clubs is settled by asking which has won more matches, not which has conceded fewer.

It is also why cards appear in the regulations at all: across 38 rounds and 380 matches, ties on points are common, and the CBF would rather settle them with discipline than with a draw of lots.