Lots of guys who might play for Brazil are named Igor? Why? And will it have any impact on the World Cup?

Terry Pratchett was a British fantasy novelist who conjured worlds that were full of heart and whimsy. Pratchett’s great skill was twisting the tropes of fantasy: he could tilt standard tales like the lost boy who would be king or the old witches up in the mountains just a few degrees into something that was at once funnier and more emotionally compelling than the familiar cliches.

One of Pratchett’s great inventions was the Igor. A send-up of the iconic mononymous laboratory assistants of the classic Universal horror flicks, Pratchett’s Discworld was full of strange, surgically inventive creatures who served their masters without question in exchange for the pleasure of sewing someone’s arm back onto someone else’s body. They were all named Igor.¹Sometimes they were named Igorina, but this is actually a minor spoiler for one of Pratchett’s best novels.

If there is a team in men’s international soccer most in need of some kind of insane surgery to bring it back to life, it is Brazil — the powerhouse of the World Cup that has been increasingly listless since the 7-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup semifinal. 

Luckily, there are a number of Igors who might just be up to the task. 

There are a lot of Brazilian soccer players named Igor. And not just in a way where there are a couple of guys who are named Igor and you think “Wow! A couple of Brazilian Igors. That’s funny!” There are so many Brazilian Igors. Professional soccer rosters are practically bursting with them: Per Transfermarkt, there are 161 currently active players named Igor who were born in Brazil.²For reference, there are only 39 English Johns.

This brings up two questions. Why are there so many Brazilian soccer players named Igor?

This has a two part answer. 

Part one: Brazil loves soccer, and is a massive country with a lot of people, so there are a lot of Brazilian professional soccer players. In fact, there are so many that the Transfermarkt search function taps out when you try to pull all of the currently active Brazilian-born players in their database and I am forced to accept SoccerWiki’s estimate that there are 5,244 professional Brazilian men’s soccer players.

Part two: The name Igor is very popular in Brazil. According to FirstName.net, which I suppose has got to be the main authority on this kind of thing, Brazil is the country where the first name Igor is the most popular.

Why? No one really knows? On this Reddit thread, Brazilian people speculate that it has to do with a character from a popular 1995 novella or that it has to do with people immigrating to Brazil from Slavic countries, followed by people who did not immigrate from Slavic countries deciding that Slavic names sounded cool and were easy to pronounce in Portuguese.

Our good friends at FirstName.net indicate that many of our current soccer Igors were probably part of a huge Igor trend in the 1990s and early 2000s, with over 10,000 Brazilian Igors born every year from 1990 through 2000. As far as anyone can tell, in the late 20th century, Brazilians just fell in love with Igor as a name.

Which leads to our second question: Will Brazilians be falling in love with Igor as a specific human soccer player? Will any Igors star for Brazil at this summer’s World Cup?

Of the currently active Igors, the most relevant include Igor Jesus, a crafty goalscorer currently at Nottingham Forest, Igor Paixão, a skilled winger playing for French giants Marseille, and Igor Julio, a bruising defender for Brighton who simply puts the name “Igor” on his jersey.

But the most likely to actually be World Cup relevant is Brentford striker Igor Thiago. Mostly that’s because he was actually called up to the latest national team, unlike the other Igors, but also because he fills a very specific role which Brazil has been missing for the better part of two decades.

The big striker has taken a circuitous route to the Seleção, making his way to English stardom by the way of the Brazilian second division, Bulgaria, and finally Belgium, but now that he’s at the top he’s playing remarkably well. After an injury plagued first season in the Premier League, Thiago is currently the second-highest scorer in the division, with 19 goals in 30 appearances. 

That’s great form, but this is Brazil we’re talking about — there’s always a Brazilian somewhere who has scored a bunch of goals recently. The important thing is that Igor Thiago scored a bunch of goals recently and also is shaped like a traditional big striker, the kind of player that has been absent from Brazil’s rotation for most of the past decade.

Brazilian soccer has been deeply listless since the 2014 World Cup. After the national trauma that was the 7-1 loss in a home World Cup semifinal, both of their last two World Cups followed roughly the same pattern: Neymar plays amazingly well through the group stage and round of 16, and then in the quarterfinal they simply can’t score enough goals to win. First a combination of bad luck and an outstanding defensive Belgium performance ended their run in Russia; then, they gave up a late equalizer chasing a clinching goal against Croatia and crashed out on penalties in Qatar.³Underrated narrative thing from the 2022 World Cup: Brazil had arguably been better than Argentina through five games in Qatar, and a win against Croatia would have set up the first World Cup meeting for South American football’s biggest rivalry since 1990. A Neymar win probably transforms his legacy as a Brazil player, or an Argentina win grows the legend of Messi even more. Sadly everyone in Brazil decided to run into Croatia’s half and we’ll never find out.

“If only they had a Real Striker up top” is overly simplistic English radio call-in show thinking, but a Real Striker is an inarguably useful tool for a team to have, and one that Brazil haven’t had in the toolkit for a long time.

In 2018 and 2022, the Brazil rosters were heavy on intelligent, skilled, tricky forwards — Gabriel Jesus, Roberto Firmino, Vinicius Junior, Rodrygo — and light on players who could play a one-two with any of those guys but also win a header when things got desperate. Probably the closest thing to a traditional striker Brazil have had in the past decade is Richarlison, who is scrappy and good in the air but still undersized.

Igor Thiago, meanwhile, is 6 foot 2, broad shouldered, and competent with the ball at his feet. He provides an avenue for Brazil to create chances or to bypass the opposing press that simply don’t exist when you don’t have an Igor Thiago-shaped striker on your roster. Having a big guy doesn’t guarantee that Brazil will actually score the goals in big moments, but it does open up more options to do so.

Will Igor Thiago start for Brazil at the World Cup? Probably not: Endrick is finally starting to play like the natural scorer that he promised to be as a teenager, Richarlison has been a mainstay for the national team when fully healthy, and Chelsea’s Joao Pedro might be the best overall fit alongside Vini and Rodrygo.

But the promise of an Igor isn’t that they will be the star of the picture. They are auxiliary characters; there to help the mad scientist achieve his goals, to stitch together the monster when it starts to fall apart. 

And when you find yourself staring down yet another premature World Cup exit, you might just need an Igor.