I make lists. Not the end-of-year resolutions that are common these days. Mine come from past things. I write in a red cardboard notebook the books, films, series, podcasts, courses, conferences, shows, exhibitions and plays that cross my life every 365 days. The initial goal was just to help me memorize, but I ended up discovering other uses, like identifying topics I can pay more attention to. Side effects also emerged, particularly focusing on numbers rather than nouns, transforming pleasure into productivity. I learned to control this momentum, in which I sought the motto of this column: none of my tallies in 2025 reached 70 points, the equivalent of the minimum number of matches that a big club from Rio (Botafogo) played this season. Vasco scored 71; Flamengo, 78 years old; Fluminense, 79 years old, world record.
At the opening of an edition of “Redação SporTV”, just after presenting the newspaper’s headlines on the decisive matches of the Copa do Brasil and the Intercontinental Cup, the editor-in-chief of the GLOBO Sports section, Thales Machado, joked: “And this on December 17.” It is so. I thought we would all be here on this date if the Brazilian and world football calendar were more reasonable, but the program would have other themes. In the madness of 2025, we only started dedicating more space to the Central do Mercado during the Christmas period, when competitions were replaced by end-of-year matches in our calendar.
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Other leagues and other sports have already gone further in this direction. In England, Guardiola’s complaints, who this time threatened not to list the players returning from Christmas dinner with extra pounds, have become an end-of-year tradition. In the United States, where American football games were already held on Thanksgiving Day, the calendar spread over Christmas and New Years, and basketball followed suit. This is a good thing for television channels, which have more games to broadcast. This is good for fans, who have more games to watch (not everyone likes to spend their time talking about politics and making street jokes at the end of the year). And that’s good for the clubs, who earn more money from broadcast and ticketing rights.
It’s just not good for the players. In their account, the only number that does not change is the number of weeks in the year. There are 52, and if we take into account the work obligations of a month and a half of pre-season vacation, that leaves 46. To make life easier for those who are human, we will stay at 69 games, because then the rule of three makes sense: it’s one and a half per week, or three every two weeks. Applying the math to my lists, if you went to the movies at that rate, aside from being a movie buff that I admire, the most you needed to do was go into a room and sit and watch the screen while eating popcorn (films watched in streaming, from the comfort of your home, count too). Playing football in Brazil involves traveling long distances, walking on uneven terrain and enduring pressure from fans and the press.
Brazilian football’s resolution for the end of the year was to change the calendar. I hope that with this the number of games will decrease, while I try to increase the number of my lists. Happy New Year 2026!
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