Fabinho’s international career is at a crossroads, and getting back into the Brazil team will be a difficult feat given Casemiro’s ongoing excellence and Bruno Guimaraes’s ascent.

Over the course of the 2022–23 season, it started to seem a bit like a pattern for Liverpool and its players: fleeting glimpses of promise were quickly followed by sobering reality checks.

Fabinho, by his own perfect standards, has had a difficult season on Merseyside as Liverpool faced a grueling follow-up campaign to their 63-game quadruple quest last season. That remark is arguably not more accurate for him.

Nevertheless, despite his late-season improvement, which came at the same time Trent Alexander-Arnold switched to a hybrid full-back-midfield position and the Reds started an 11-game Premier League unbeaten streak, the 29-year-old has once again been passed over by Brazil for their upcoming friendlies against Guinea and Senegal.

Ramon Menezes, the interim head coach, was given the task of choosing the team for the upcoming double-header with the assistance of the national team’s physiologist and performance analysts due to the failure to name a replacement for the long-serving Tite, who resigned from his position as manager after Brazi’s shocking World Cup last-16 exit at the hands of Croatia back in December.

Out of the 23 players chosen, Menezes chose five midfielders, including Joelinton from Newcastle United and the Premier League’s Casemiro, Lucas Paqueta, and Bruno Guimaraes. This was Joelinton’s first call-up for the Selecao. Andre Trindade da Costa Neto, 21, who plays for Fluminense in his country’s top division, took the last spot.

Everyone at Anfield won’t be overly surprised by Fabinho’s absence, even the player himself, who despite helping Liverpool win every major championship on the continent between 2019 and 2022 had just 21 international appearances to his credit.

He was given a starting spot in just 10 out of a potential 34 games over that three-year span when Brazil competed in two Copa America campaigns, a World Cup, and a number of routine qualification games.

Joelinton, on the other hand, was one of four players to be called up to the Selecao for the first time. Joelinton appears to have surpassed the Reds midfielder in the national team hierarchy after a stellar 18 months at St. James’ Park following his redeployment as a central midfielder under Toon manager Eddie Howe.

“In a press conference over the weekend, Menezes discussed his selections and said, “The debuts are explained by what these players are doing in their clubs, showing conditions to wear the shirt of the Selection.” With the exception of goalkeepers, we now call two players for each position.”

For Fabinho, his current difficulties may be traced back to the concluding weeks of the Reds’ pursuit of the quadruple in May 2022, when he was substituted in the opening minutes of the Premier League trip to Aston Villa after experiencing what was later determined to be a hamstring problem. The FA Cup final against Chelsea and league matches against Southampton and Wolves would both be played without the Brazilian as Naby Keita started alongside Thiago Alcantara and Jordan Henderson.

But only a few days after sitting out the 120-minute match in the capital as the Reds defeated Chelsea in the second domestic cup final of the year and won the eighth FA Cup thanks to the heroics of Alisson Becker and Kostas Tsimikas in an intense penalty shootout, Fabinhio would declare himself healthy for the upcoming Champions League final by telling reporters huddled at the club’s AXA Training Center: “All [is] good. I’ll be all set.

However, after announcing his return with a sluggish performance at the Stade de France as Liverpool succumbed to an exhausting loss to Real Madrid in Europe’s showpiece finale a year ago, it has been difficult for him to prove his value at Anfield.

It is perhaps both predictable and self-inflicted that the Brazilian has cost Liverpool so much this season and ultimately resulted in failure to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in Klopp’s seven full seasons at the club. The Brazilian began the season as Klopp’s only recognizable natural defensive midfielder. The Reds will suffer a significant financial setback as a result of missing out on the lucrative rewards that come with brushing elbows with Europe’s top, which has been all too routine since their return to the group stages in August 2017.

But when Liverpool limped to defeats at Nottingham Forest, Brentford, Brighton, and Bournemouth more recently, the Brazilian’s slow road displays almost became a weekly occurrence. With a huge summer shake-up on the horizon, such form at the beginning of the year had raised more concerns than it had supplied answers regarding the midfielder’s long-term future at Anfield.

Such was the nature of the competition that 18-year-old rookie Stefan Bajcetic, who had been trained under Klopp’s watchful eye for the first half of the season, was able to unseat the Brazilian in the early weeks of 2023.

Three months from now, however, and the Brazilian will have recovered thanks to Arsenal’s Easter match at Anfield, where he partnered with Alexander-Arnold in a brand-new two-man midfield pivot. The West Derby great was re-energized by a shift just days before the Gunners’ title dreams crashed on Merseyside after a season of difficulty there as well.

Before Sunday’s end-of-season thrashing at St Mary’s, Fabinho and Alexander-Arnold had established one of the division’s most balanced partnerships and allowed just eight goals in as many games after a problematic first half-hour at Anfield in which Gabriel Martinelli and Gabriel Jesus put the then-Premier League leaders ahead.

The agility Alexander-Arnold has added to the center of the park has been hailed as a tactical masterstroke by Klopp, enhancing the effectiveness of Fabinho’s spatial knowledge. Of course, it is still early, and despite the late-season comeback, which has helped to some extent restore the positive energy at Anfield ahead of the new season, it does not conceal the midfield dilemma that the club’s recently appointed sporting director Jorg Schmadtke will need to address head-on in the coming months.

On the international stage, Casemiro, a five-time Champions League champion, is almost always on display at Old Trafford, and Bruno Guimaraes has made a name for himself further north. As a result, Fabinho will have a tough time regaining his spot in the Brazil team before the Copa America tournament next summer.

However, if Liverpool has any hope of getting the best performance out of its defensive patroller once more, his most recent omission from the international stage may not be all bad news after making 148 appearances for the Reds since the start of play following the lockdown in July 2020.