Chasing their first league title since 1995, Botafogo began the 2023 Brazilian national championship like a train, stringing together a sequence of wins while their rivals floundered. By the halfway stage, they had an extraordinary 13-point lead. Too big to lose? Not at all. A collapse of11 consecutive winless matches meant that they eventually crawled over the line a melancholy fifth.
So, what went wrong? Perhaps the main problem was that everything went too right. At the start of the season, fifth place would have been seen as a triumph. This
