Winning the 2026 World Cup: Colombia’s Biological Imperative of Joy

Written on 12/30/2025
Luis Felipe Mendoza
The narrative pushed by the media is that to win the World Cup, Colombia must remove the metaphorical perpetual cultural Friday from the team. Credit: FCF – Russia 2018

Before becoming a World Cup Champion with Argentina in 1986, Carlos Salvador Bilardo managed a team in Colombia. He managed Deportivo Cali between 1976 and 1978. Bilardo, an arch-pragmatist of football, who viewed the sport as a matter of life and death, encountered a local phenomenon that horrified him, the ‘Cultural Friday’, an event in which players would gather around to drink aguardiente until three in the morning.

For Bilardo, this custom threatened professional standards. His biography details how he moved to impose a more rigid structure inside the club, which led Cali to become the first Colombian side to play in a Copa Libertadores final in 1978 against Boca Juniors. 

Bilardo’s attempts to impose a total repression of Colombian customs during his time at Deportivo Cali would ultimately hit a wall. Not from the players, but from his own mentor, Osvaldo Zubeldia.

In South America, Zubeldia is known as the father of anti-football, a man who was renowned for his relentless discipline and double-training sessions. At the time of Bilardo’s tenure in Cali, he was managing Atletico Nacional.

When Bilardo vented his frustrations about the cultural Friday, Zubeldia stopped him and told him: “Carlos, please, don’t mess with this.” Zubeldia knew that in Colombia, certain social releases and valves are systemic, and thus, he knew that trying to turn Colombian footballers into robots was a losing battle.

Instead, Bilardo was able to make that team successful by resorting to isolating specific players or managing their personal lives, rather than banning their ways. 

Today, the debate rages on. When Colombian players engage in dancing, or “unserious behavior,” criticism from some sections of local media is relentless. There seems to be a common interpretation of such behavior as unserious, or as lacking professionalism, or as having a weak mentality.

It has become normalized to assume that when Colombian players smile, it must be because they are not focused. The narrative imposed by some voices is that to win, Colombia must remove the metaphorical perpetual cultural Friday from the team and replace it with a more grounded approach like the ones seen in European teams.  

This demand for repression and ‘seriousness’ is scientifically flawed. The book, The Numbers Game, by Chris Anderson and David Sally, suggests that for specific demographics, social cohesion is not achieved through rigid silence but through what they call “communal relaxation” and high-arousal social bonding.

The Scolari Family model of Brazil’s 2002 squad proves that a team can have a 100% win record while remaining relaxed and festive. For the Colombian player, much like for the Brazilian player, suppressing the instinct to bond through music or joy does not create focus.

Instead, it raises stress levels, which hinders muscle recovery and cognitive function. This is why, for Colombia in 2026, there must be a professionalization of cultural Friday, as it can be the biological imperative needed for the elite performance Colombia must deliver if it wants a chance at bringing the World Cup back to Bogota. 

What Colombia can learn from Brazil’s 2002 World Cup Squad 

To understand the tangible value of joy, the last Brazilian team to rule the world is the prime example: Luiz Felipe Scolari’s 2002 Brazil. Scolari has been historically known for his coarse, paternalistic nature and a preference for more combative football over aesthetics.

However, while managing one of Brazil’s most notorious party-goers in Ronaldinho, Ronaldo Nazario, Rivaldo, and Co., he did not impose a regime of pragmatism; instead, he dostered the Scolari Family, a close-knit unit that functioned as a shield against external pressure. He went as far as encouraging pagode, samba jam sessions on the team bus and hotel.

The result was Brazil’s fifth World Cup victory. The impact of the environment was absolute; as far from causing a lack of focus, the relaxed atmosphere prevented performance anxiety. The team led by the three Rs: Ronaldo, Rivaldo, and Ronaldinho, achieved a perfect record, winning all seven matches to become Penta-champions. The 2002 campaign proved that a team can play best when it is culturally and emotionally at ease, not when it is terrified of losing. 

A relaxed atmosphere may be the key to allowing Colombia to reach peak performance during next summer’s tournament, especially considering the group La Tricolor was drawn into.

To explain why more “serious approaches” often fail for Colombia, there has to be an understanding of the science behind “choking.”

Choking is defined as a performance decrement caused by high anxiety related to the stakes of the moment. Before the 1994 World Cup, Pelé famously said that Colombia was one of the favorites to win the tournament, but they ultimately were knocked out in the group stages.

This is one of Colombia’s most infamous “chokes,” which resulted in the tragic murder of Andres Escobar. Psychological models attribute ‘choking’ to the self-focus theory, where athletes begin to overanalyze movements that should be automatic, and the distraction theory, where attention is diverted by fear of external judgment.

When a player is forced into a rigid, joyless system, they become hyper-aware of the consequences of failure. In high-stakes moments, such as penalty shootouts, the anxiety can cause cognitive overload, which results in players stopping to rely on instinct and starting to overthink, which usually ends in poor execution.

James Rodriguez is not Ronaldinho, Luis Diaz is not Rivaldo, and Luis Suarez is not Ronaldo Nazario, but what Colombia can learn both from the 2002 champions and from the 1994 disaster is that joy within the squad is more likely than not a biochemical necessity for La Tricolor to perform.

This amount of social team cohesion is achieved through communal relaxation within the squad and high-arousal social bonding. If Colombia were to stop the music and ban the dancing, it would almost be shooting itself in the foot, because a repressed Colombian player is a stressed player, and stressed players miss history-making penalties.           

Liberating the artists should be Lorenzo’s plan for Colombia at the 2026 World Cup

Prominent voices in Colombian sports media claim that for the Colombian national team to win trophies, it needs to act like a modern European team, where everyone attacks, and everyone defends.

History shows, however, that in short tournaments such as the World Cup, teams that win it usually do so by granting tactical exemptions to their geniuses. A good example for Colombia should be Carlos Bilardo’s 1986 setup, where he imposed a rigid team that granted Diego Maradona and, to a lesser extent, Jorge Valdano total freedom, and relieved them of defensive duties.

The book Inverting the Pyramid notes that Bilardo famously stated that Maradona was the only guaranteed starter, while the rest of the team was mostly designed to cover him.  

At 34, James Rodriguez cannot be asked to press like a 20 or 25-year-old. To do so would neutralize his greatest asset, his brain. Not everyone is a fan of the number 10 position, or the “enganche,” as it has slowly lost its place in football tactics.

But there are arguments that support its preservation. Modern analytics from the book Football Hackers support the ‘walking playmaker’, which is James’s role in the national team, through the concept of Packing. This is a metric that measures the bypassing of opponents through passes, and is also one at which Rodriguez is in the 99th percentile. The data shows that expecting James to chase opposition players would be a waste of his cognitive energy. 

Maradona isn’t the only example of a player who was given total freedom and excelled at a World Cup. In 2006, Zinedine Zidane was also given similar freedom and led France to another World Cup final appearance in Germany.

Zidane, who was also 34 at the time, was surrounded by players such as Claude Makelele and Patrick Vieira, whose job was to win back the ball and give it to the genius. Colombia has the possibility of having players like Richard Rios and Jefferson Lerma to do the running for their captain, allowing James to do what he does best: Play with the ball at his feet. 

Luis Diaz, Colombia’s second brain

Rodriguez is not the only player who deserves this sort of freedom. While James is the one who is expected to be the brain of the team, Luis Diaz will be called to generate chaos.

Nestor Lorenzo’s 2026 setup should also prioritize Diaz’s dribbling as a key attacking asset that could win matches. The book, The Numbers Game, argues that football is a weak-link game where avoiding mistakes usually wins matches, unless a team possesses a superstar that can produce “black swan events, moments of high-variance brilliance. Diaz is Colombia’s black swan.” 

The data shows that Diaz’s dribbling success rate in the 2024 Copa America dropped to 45.5% because he attempted high-risk actions. At Liverpool or Bayern, this drop could potentially cost him his place in the starting 11, because it would most likely be deemed as “inefficient.” The Colombian national team should not see this drop as inefficient, but instead, authorize and encourage taking the risk. 

But how does a head coach accommodate two players who do not press and defend with the same intensity as the rest of his teammates?

Lorenzo won’t really have to, as Diaz is one of the most tireless forwards in the world, who in Liverpool and now at Bayern Munich has posted remarkable pressing statistics.

But if Lorenzo chose to grant less defensive duties to Diaz, he would then most likely adopt a ‘broken team’ structure. In the book Zonal Marking, Michael Cox explains that teams like the 1998 Juventus or Brazil’s 2002 team were split into two units: a defensive block of seven and an attacking unit of three. To win in 2026, Colombia will most likely have to outplay its rivals, and the only way to do that is by trusting the artists.