In the space of two decades, the tactical aspect of Brazilian football would go through remarkable transformations. If we consider the shift from 2-3-5 of the late thirties to the 4-2-4 that Brazil used in winning the 1958 World Cup, then both Costa and Zezé could be said to have devised variations on a 3-3-4, a sort of midway point on the march towards 4-2-4.
The interpretation is reductive, yet compelling. From a distant vantage point it appears, on a macro scale and conveniently overlooking the minutiae of circumstance, that football was destined to evolve from 2-3-5 through to 4-2-4 with all its attendant midway stages, its growing pains. The men who helped to get it there were as often fleeing from the confines of orthodoxy as they were moving towards a clearly stated finality. None could profess a clear idea as to what lay ahead in 1958, though countless advocates would retrospectively claim credit for having instituted a 4-2-4.
There are those who argue the Magical Maygyars of the early fifties invented it, although the notebooks of their coach, Gusztav Sebes, show he saw József Zakariás, the putative fourth defender, as a deep-lying wing-half. Hungary's shape, if not their style, was rather the 3-2-1-4 that emerged in Brazil in the forties. Then again, could the Brazilians possibly have formalised the sum of their experiments into 4-2-4 without the vital contribution of Hungarian coaches such as Dori Kürschner and Béla Guttman, who were perhaps freed from convention by the environment in which they found themselves? Could Zezé Moreira, Flávio Costa, Martim Francisco and Fleitas Solich have imposed their respective visions had they had the opportunity to coach in Europe?
Such mavericks and improvisers needed a meeting point at which to rally. Brazil, with its narrative of ethnic miscegenation, and for which decades idealised itself politically as an austral United States, a land of opportunity and renewal despite the constrictive legacy of its Portuguese-inherited feudalism, provided the perfect ground for experimentation.