Brazil Through To Copa America Finals

Brazil is through to the Copa America Finals following a 2-0 win over a defensively porous and generally listless Argentina side. To be fair, they got a healthy dose of ‘home cooking’ help in the form of poor (Argentina’s player suggested the correct term would be ‘biased) officiating. Brazil will now play the winner of Wednesday’s game between Chile and Peru in the Copa America Finals. The Finals will be played on Sunday at 4:00 Eastern.

If you’ve ever had any doubt of Brazil’s status as the ultimate ‘public’ side the histrionics in reaction to their advancement to the finals should explain it all. The reality is that Brazil turned in a mediocre and erratic group performance, survived a tough scoreless draw with Paraguay in the quarterfinals and beat an aging Argentina team with some serious defensive issues. Overall, the play in the tournament has been fair to middling without any team showing what could be considered high level excellence. The second tier teams at next year’s Euro 2020 could have run roughshod through this tournament.

That is the reality. The media narrative, however, suggests that ‘BRAZIL ARE BACK!’ as ESPN soccer writer Gabriele Marcotti gushed in an article that was subtitled: “Why this squad is the best Selecao we’ve seen in a long time.” He (correctly) points out the absence of soccer’s reigning drama queen Neymar as a positive but then unleashes this howler suggesting that head coach Tite ‘oozes confidence’. I generally like Tite and he is a confident dude but lest we forget the narrative following Brazil’s scoreless draw with Venezuela in the group stage was that his days as head coach were numbered.

With this sort of media backdrop the reaction of the betting market to Brazi’s advancement to the finals is predictable. Taking a look at the soccer betting futures odds to win the Copa America we learn that Brazil is now a -400 favorite. That’s a tough price to lay and particularly with a good chance that a tough Chile squad playing for the ‘three peat’ could await them in the finals. In fact, you could do a lot worse than grabbing a piece of Chile to win the Copa America at +400 in advance of their semifinal matchup.

Chile is in no way a dominant side and the pronouncement before this tournament was that they were simply too ‘long in the tooth’ to win again after back to back championships in the previous two Copa America events. In particular, they’ve struggled on offense at time and the game against Peru should be a low scoring contest which obviously puts the at risk of losing a penalty shootout. That being said, the implied odds at +400 are 20% and they’re a much better team than that.

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