These Brazilians with a PSV past won the World Cup

For coach Carlo Ancelotti’s Brazil as well, the 2026 World Cup will kick off on Saturday evening local time. The Seleção launch the World Cup in Group C with a match against Morocco featuring PSV players Ismael Saibari and Anass Salah-Eddine.

Brazil is still to date the most successful football country when it comes to world titles. The Divine Canaries have won the World Cup five times so far.

The Brazilians were the best in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002. In the last world title of the Os Canarinhos in Japan & South Korea, former PSV striker Ronaldo Luiz Nazario de Lima was the top scorer of the tournament with no fewer than eight goals.

Thanks in part to two goals in the World Cup final against Germany (2-0), Brazil won the latest world title to date. Ronaldo was also the all-time top scorer of the World Cup up to the 2014 World Cup with fifteen goals until the German striker Miroslav Klose scored his sixteenth-ever World Cup goal in the semi-final Brazil - Germany (1-7) and therefore is currently the new all-time top scorer in World Cup football.

At the 2002 World Cup, another former PSV player was also in the squad of De Goddelijke Kanaries when the country became world champions for the fifth time. The midfielder turned defender Vampeta, who was under contract with PSV from 1994 to 1998, won in 2002—just like Ronaldo—the last world title for the Brazilians to date.

In 1994, thanks in part to a 2-3 victory over the Netherlands in the World Cup quarterfinal in the United States, the Brazilians became world champions for the fourth time. At the Seleção, striker Romario de Souza Faria played an important role in that tournament, scoring five goals on the way to the final.

In the final in Pasadena, Brazil beat Italy on penalties. During the 1994 World Cup, Ronaldo was indeed in the squad as a seventeen-year-old footballer, but the striker did not see any action in the United States.