Flamengo vs Palmeiras: the turnaround, xG and the run-in to December

Sunday, 20 September 2026, shifted the title race in the Brasileirão, Brazil's top flight, in two acts. At 11am, at the Arena do Grêmio, Palmeiras had 72% of the ball, took 31 shots, piled up 2.52 xG (expected goals, in FotMob's model) and hit the crossbar twice, through Marlon Freitas and Vitor Roque. They left Porto Alegre with a 0-0, because Weverton, a former Palmeiras goalkeeper, made 10 saves. At 18:30, Flamengo beat Red Bull Bragantino 2-1 at the Maracanã, and Varela, who scored the first goal, said afterwards that, once they knew Palmeiras had drawn, opening a three-point gap was very important. The gap, which had been 1 point, became 3: after round 28, Flamengo 60, Palmeiras 57, both with 28 games played. Then the league stopped for the FIFA international break.

The standings tell you who finished round 28 in front; the numbers underneath tell you how each side got there. It was a two-horse race: 3rd-placed Athletico Paranaense ended the round on 49 points, 11 behind the leaders. Up to that point, Leonardo Jardim's Flamengo had been the team that produced the most in the league, 1st in xG (49.0) and in big chances (92), according to FotMob. Abel Ferreira's Palmeiras had been the team that made the most of the least: 13th in xG (33.7), with 47 goals and 15 points more than their chances were worth, the biggest surplus in the league. My take, and it is only an opinion: the Sunday in Porto Alegre was the day Palmeiras played like Flamengo, with volume, and lacked the efficiency that had carried them since the start of the season. That difference in nature runs through this analysis.

From 8 points behind to the top: the Brasileirão 2026 title race, milestone by milestone

The starting point is Palmeiras's 3-0 win at the Maracanã on 23 May, in round 17. Carrascal was sent off after 21 minutes for a high boot to Murilo's face, and Palmeiras scored through Flaco López, Allan and Paulinho. ESPN's numbers sum up in 90 minutes the pattern the season would confirm. A man down for more than an hour, Flamengo still spent more time in the opposition half before the interval, as the club itself noted, and finished with 22 shots to 12. Only 3 were on target. Palmeiras, with 52% of possession, put 6 on target and scored 3. Both sides lined up in a 4-2-3-1. After that night the table read Palmeiras 38, Flamengo 31, with a game in hand for Flamengo. Volume on one side, efficiency on the other: each campaign's signature was already there.

The biggest gap, 8 points, had already opened after rounds 9 and 10, on 2 and 5 April, and returned in round 21, on 29 July: Palmeiras 47, Flamengo 39, with the Rio club a game in hand. The surge came between August and September. The postponed round 4 game, a 2-0 win over Mirassol on 2 September with goals from Carrascal and Lucas Paquetá, cut the gap to 1 point. Four days later, a 1-0 win at Remo put Flamengo top for the first time in the season, in round 26. This is where the arithmetic has to be done right. On the table the turnaround looks like 10 points, from 7 behind at the end of the first half to 3 ahead, but 3 of those points came from the postponed game, which belongs to the first half. With the same number of games played, the first half ended 44 to 40 to Palmeiras. Flamengo clawed back 7 points in the second half of the season: 20 to 13.

The second half of the 2026 Brasileirão up to round 28: 20 points for Flamengo, 13 for Palmeiras

The second half of the season explains the turnaround better than any soundbite. Palmeiras's defence held firm: 7 goals conceded in 9 games, the same 7 as Flamengo. What vanished were the wins. Of the 9 matches, Abel's side won 3 and drew 4, and three of those draws ended 0-0, against Internacional, Botafogo and Grêmio. The 14 goals scored in that stretch are misleading too: 8 came in two thrashings, 4-0 at Vitória and 4-1 against Vasco da Gama, and in the other 7 games there were 6. Flamengo took 20 points from 9 games, with 18 goals, and closed round 28 with five straight wins, from 30 August to 20 September; Palmeiras's last five games brought a win, a draw, a draw, a win and a draw. In the table for the second half alone, compiled by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Flamengo were 1st and Palmeiras 8th.

The home and away splits help read what was left to play. Flamengo took 78.6% of the points at home and 64.3% away; Palmeiras, 76.9% at home and 60.0% away. Up to round 28, Flamengo's only home defeat had been that very 3-0 loss to Palmeiras, and Palmeiras's only one at home the 2-1 loss to Atlético Mineiro on 26 July. Of the ten games left after round 28, Flamengo had 5 at home and 5 away; Palmeiras, 6 at home and 4 away, with the head-to-head at Nubank Parque, their stadium in São Paulo. And there is the coach split. From Leonardo Jardim's signing on 4 March 2026 to round 28, Flamengo played 25 Brasileirão games and took 56 points, a 74.7% return; in the first three rounds, under Filipe Luís, they had taken 4 points out of 9.

Volume versus efficiency: what xG says about Flamengo and Palmeiras

Jardim's Flamengo settled games before reaching the box. Up to round 28 they had 57.3% of possession, the second-highest in the league, and 497.9 accurate passes per game, the most. The top two in accurate passes per 90 minutes were both Flamengo players: Jorginho (78.8), the midfielder who sets the tempo, and Léo Pereira (71.8), the centre-back who starts the build-up. The ball reached the final third in scoring positions. There were 92 big chances, 14 of them created by Samuel Lino, the individual leader in that category. Up front, Pedro racked up 14.5 xG and 16 goals, the league's 2nd top scorer behind Kevin Viveros of Athletico Paranaense (18). Control also protected their own goal, because a team that circulates the ball in the opposition half concedes few transitions: 26.1 xG against, the lowest in the league. The price of volume showed at the other end, with 53 big chances missed, also the highest figure.

Palmeiras went the opposite way. With 52.9% of possession (8th) and 53 big chances (14th), exactly the number of clear chances Flamengo missed, they produced 33.7 xG and scored 47 goals: 13.3 more than expected. The difference is not in raw finishing, and that is the detail a quick glance hides: Palmeiras's conversion rate (11.2%) was lower than Flamengo's (12.6%). Set pieces accounted for a big share of the total, with 10 goals, more than a fifth of the 47, but there the surplus over xG was small, 1.3 (10 goals from 8.7 xG): almost all of the difference came from other situations. In their own box the efficiency was the same, with 1 set-piece goal conceded, the fewest in the league, and Carlos Miguel saving 79.8% of the shots on target he faced, the best rate among goalkeepers. Adding up both boxes, Palmeiras's goal difference (26) exceeded their xG difference (5.6) by 20.4; Flamengo's (32) exceeded theirs (22.9) by 9.1.

Expected points are not a forecast. xPTS estimates what the chances created and conceded were worth; the model does not know what lies ahead, but it shows what each campaign is made of. Flamengo's, 5 points above expectation, rested on what the team produced. Palmeiras's, 15 above, rested on doing more than they produced at both ends, and that is where the Sunday in Porto Alegre matters. With 2.52 xG, 31 shots and 10 on target, Palmeiras ran into Weverton, the league leader in goals prevented (7.9), and did not score; Flamengo, with 11 shots to Bragantino's 15, built 3.15 xG and scored 2. My take, and it is only an opinion: Flamengo's campaign needed to stay what it had been, and Palmeiras's needed to keep doing more than the model expected. That Sunday showed how that can fail in a single day.

The coaches: Leonardo Jardim, hired in March, and Abel Ferreira, on a new deal until 2027

Jardim did not start the season at Flamengo. The club began 2026 with Filipe Luís, who lost the Supercopa do Brasil final to Corinthians and the Recopa Sudamericana to Lanús, the latter in extra time of the second leg at the Maracanã. According to Flashscore, he was sacked hours after an 8-0 win over Madureira in the Campeonato Carioca, the Rio de Janeiro state championship. The Portuguese coach signed on 4 March, on a contract until December 2027, and took his first training session that same afternoon. In the 3-0 defeat in May and the 2-1 win in September, Jardim's Flamengo lined up in a 4-2-3-1; against Bragantino, with Jorginho and Saúl as the double pivot, Plata, Arrascaeta and Carrascal in the line of three and Pedro leading the line. My reading: a team designed to have the ball and pick its moment; possession, passing and big chances confirm the design.

At Palmeiras, the story was one of continuity. Abel Ferreira signed a new contract on 10 December 2025 running until the end of 2027, and the club's website at the time listed 10 titles won by the coach, among them the 2020 and 2021 editions of the Copa Libertadores and the 2022 and 2023 Brasileirão. The fixture list for the restart, however, had two games without him on the bench. Brazil's sports court, the STJD, raised his suspension from two games to three for kicking a microphone in the draw with Mirassol; after São Paulo and Grêmio, the third fell on Palmeiras v Bahia, scheduled for 8 October. His sending-off in Quito on 16 September, 20 minutes into the second half, by referee Wilmar Roldán, also ruled Abel out of the Copa Libertadores semi-final first leg against Fluminense, on 14 October. In Porto Alegre, assistant João Martins was in charge: "There are 16 finals left. Game by game," he told the Brazilian sports outlet Lance!, adding that the club would not prioritise any competition.

The fixtures to 6 December: Brasileirão, Copa Libertadores and Copa do Brasil

João Martins's arithmetic matches the fixture list: 10 Brasileirão games, 2 Copa Libertadores semi-final legs, 2 Copa do Brasil semi-final legs and 2 possible finals. The Libertadores final was scheduled for 28 November at the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo; the final of the Copa do Brasil, the national cup, for 6 December, a single match for the first time. After round 28, Palmeiras had 14 guaranteed games up to 6 December and could reach 16; Flamengo, knocked out of the Copa do Brasil by Vitória on 14 May, had 12 and could reach 13. The semi-final against Vasco da Gama was provisionally set for two Sundays, 1 and 8 November. And the round 37 window in the provisional fixture list of Brazil's football confederation (CBF), 28 or 29 November, coincided with the weekend of the Libertadores final, whose bracket allowed for a Flamengo v Palmeiras final, like the one in 2025.

On opponents' strength, the two run-ins balanced out. Adding up the points their opponents had after round 28, Flamengo's totalled 394 (an average of 39.4; 37.4 without the head-to-head) and Palmeiras's 385 (an average of 38.5; 36.1 without it). Each had 4 games against sides that finished the round in the top six and 2 against teams in the relegation zone. The difference lies in home advantage and fatigue. Palmeiras had 6 home games, the head-to-head included, and had taken 76.9% of the points at home; on the other hand, they were juggling two cup competitions. The Sunday in Porto Alegre showed the size of the schedule: the team had come from Quito, where they played on Wednesday the 16th at an altitude of 2,850 metres and went through on penalties; in Porto Alegre they kicked off at 11am. Flamengo had played at the Maracanã on Thursday the 17th, a 1-1 draw with Independiente del Valle that took them into the semi-finals.

Title chances: what the UFMG and InfoBola models say

Probability, here, is the language of simulation: how often each team finishes as champion when the model projects the rest of the season. The UFMG model belongs to a group in the university's Department of Mathematics that says it began this work in 2005. In the update consulted on 23 September 2026, Flamengo were champions in 76.8% of the simulations and Palmeiras in 21.3%; Athletico Paranaense (1.1%), Fluminense (0.56%), Cruzeiro (0.14%) and Bahia (0.089%) came next. On 12 September, after round 26, Lance! reported the same model at 66.2% for Flamengo and 27.2% for Palmeiras. According to Lance! on 20 September, InfoBola, run by mathematician Tristão Garcia, gave Flamengo 74% and Palmeiras 25%. The UFMG also calculates how many points are enough: a team that reaches 72 is champion in 58.757% of the simulations, one on 75 in 87.482% and one on 78 in 98.097%. To reach 75, Flamengo needed 15 of the 30 points on offer; Palmeiras, 18.

Precedents: 9 of the 23 round-robin editions ended with a gap of 3 points or fewer

The history of the round-robin era teaches you not to treat 3 points as a cushion. Of the 23 editions played from 2003 to 2025, 9 ended with 3 points or fewer between champion and runner-up, 5 with 2 or fewer and one with 1. That was the 2020 edition, which ended on 25 February 2021: Flamengo were crowned on the final day despite losing 2-1 to São Paulo, because Internacional drew 0-0 with Corinthians. In 2009, Palmeiras went top in round 15, lost the lead in round 34 and finished 5th; Flamengo, 10th at the halfway point, went top for the first time in round 37. And in 2025 the same two finished 3 points apart, 79 to 76, with Flamengo's title sealed in the penultimate round; in that year's Copa Libertadores final, Flamengo also beat Palmeiras, 1-0.

My take, and it is only an opinion: Flamengo reached the FIFA break with the sounder campaign by the numbers and the lighter schedule; Palmeiras, with home advantage, the league's most secure set-piece defence and a coach used to run-ins on several fronts. None of that is a result. On paper, what remained was the fixture list. Santos v Flamengo and Palmeiras v Bahia were scheduled for 8 October, and the derbies against Fluminense and Corinthians for 11 October. The Libertadores semi-finals were set for 14, 15, 21 and 22 October; the head-to-head for the window of 21 to 23 November; the final round for 2 December. The table of 20 September says 60 to 57. The rest is for the pitch to decide.