Man, let me tell you, this whole ridiculous project kicked off because of a stupid argument I had with my neighbor, Tony, last Saturday. We were talking about what team had the most frustrating underperformance ever, and he swore blind that the 2006 Brazil squad was the most stacked team never to win. I agreed with him on the underperformance part, but then we started picking the starting XI, and things got heated.
He insisted Adriano was always the plan B guy, never the starter, and I just knew he was wrong, or at least that he wasn’t the default choice everyone expected. I told him, “Tony, I’m going to find the actual list. Not the ‘consensus’ list, the official roster they handed to FIFA, and the lineup they rehearsed endlessly.” That night, I decided I was going to stop relying on my foggy memory and actually dig up the proof.
The Messy Start and the Deep Dive
I usually just hit up Wikipedia for quick facts, right? But this time, I knew I needed to do better. If I just showed Tony a generic online list, he’d say I edited it myself or that it was just some fan theory. So, I started the proper digging. I pulled up all the big archived sports news sites—the stuff from 2006. ESPN FC, BBC Sport, the works. The problem? They all had predictions or slightly different variations based on the warm-up games and who was nursing a hamstring the week before the tournament kicked off. Everything was speculation.
I spent a solid three hours that Sunday just wading through ancient forum posts, trying to find someone who had a scan of the actual official FIFA press release. Talk about a goose chase. The search results were drowning in speculation about Robinho and whether Emerson was going to hold his nerve after that weird injury history. Pure static and outdated opinions.
My breakthrough finally came when I remembered an old trick I used back in college when I needed actual primary source material. You can’t look for the news report; you gotta look for the specific country’s football association archives. I managed to track down the official CBF (Confederação Brasileira de Futebol) website archive snapshots from way back. It took forever to load, and it was mostly in Portuguese, which I definitely don’t speak, but thank goodness for basic machine translation, even if it made everything sound like a bad poem.
Snaring the Roster and the Starting XI Proof
What I unearthed was fantastic. Not just the final 23-man squad list they submitted, but a couple of subsequent official press releases detailing the formation utilized in the final tune-up game against New Zealand, which gave a massive, non-negotiable hint to the initial starting line-up for the group stage matches. This was the gold standard I needed.
I compiled everything into a single document. It was messy, full of my own notes and highlighting, but it was legit. The sheer quality of the bench still blows my mind. People forget just how loaded this group was, even the guys who didn’t get much play time.
Tony was dead wrong, by the way. Adriano was definitely in that initial attacking setup alongside Ronaldo, at least according to the formation they practiced relentlessly before their first match. I locked down the full 23-man squad list first:
- Goalkeepers: Dida, Júlio César, Rogério Ceni.
- Defenders: Cafu, Cicinho, Lúcio, Juan, Roberto Carlos, Gilberto, Cris, Luisão.
- Midfielders: Edmílson, Juninho Pernambucano, Gilberto Silva, Zé Roberto, Kaká, Emerson, Ricardinho.
- Forwards: Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Adriano, Fred, Robinho.
The Official Starting Eleven (Game 1 Prediction)
Based on the final practice details and the press analysis I had to cross-reference between three different Brazilian sports pages that covered the team’s camp in detail, the initial starting setup for that first group match against Croatia looked something like this. Remember, this is the one Tony and I argued about—the one where everyone was supposedly fit and ready to go, the famed “Magic Quadrilateral” lineup:
- Goalkeeper: Dida
- Defense (The Back Four): Cafu, Lúcio, Juan, Roberto Carlos
- Defensive Midfield (The Holders): Emerson, Zé Roberto
- Attacking Midfield/Wingers (The Quadrilateral): Kaká, Ronaldinho, Adriano
- Striker (The Main Man): Ronaldo
Seeing that list written out, man, it just feels like overkill. No wonder everyone thought they were unbeatable. It took a lot of late-night scrolling, fighting through bad translations, and yelling at old archive websites that barely loaded, but settling that argument with Tony made it all worthwhile. I printed the whole thing out and pinned it to his garage door with magnets. Next time, he’ll think twice before challenging my memory about football history without having done his own homework first. Practice makes perfect, even when the practice is just proving a stubborn friend wrong.