Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The new economics of Brazilian soccer, changing Cuban migration patterns, and a far-right surge in Colombia’s presidential elections.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The new economics of Brazilian soccer, changing Cuban migration patterns, and a far-right surge in Colombia’s presidential elections.

Brazil’s Soccer Shock Therapy

The FIFA World Cup kicks off next Thursday in Mexico City. Before play begins, rosters already reveal a story about the transformation of Brazilian soccer. This year, 25 players in Brazil’s top club division have been called up for the national teams of other countries, more than triple the previous record.

Brazil’s professional soccer sector has long been protectionist. But in the last decade, it internationalized—opening up to foreign players, coaches, and money. This year, the national team will be coached by a foreigner for the first time in decades.

Brazil’s protectionist streak hardened after its third World Cup title in 1970, when officials concluded that “we’ve done it all with Brazilian coaches and we don’t need the rest of the world,” Brazil-based soccer writer Tim Vickery said.

By around 2015, that thinking had changed. Brazilian teams were underperforming in the South American club tournament relative to how much money they had. And Brazil had suffered a humiliating 7-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup. “It was fairly obvious that Brazilian needed an external shock,” Vickery said.

Brazilian clubs tried out foreign coaches, and one dazzled: Jorge Jesus, a Portuguese coach who joined Rio de Janeiro-based club Flamengo in 2019 and won title after title.

“Brazilian football had gotten very defensive,” Vickery said, but Jesus allotted more players to the attacking wing than Brazilian coaches typically would. “They won in style and swagger,” and “that opened the floodgates for more foreign coaches,” he added.

Brazil’s top league began raising the limit for foreign players that could play for each club during a match, which went from three in 2013 to nine today. In 2021, Brazil passed a law that made it easier for private investors to buy shares in soccer clubs that opted to become for-profit entities.

For international players, “undoubtedly the most important factor is the revenue of Brazilian clubs,” Rodrigo Capelo, a Brazilian sports journalist, said. In 2024, Brazil’s top-division clubs together raked in $1.9 billion, around 10 times the revenue of their equivalents in........

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