Brazil are your super early, very narrow, utterly unconvincing World Cup favorites

The top teams have run through two rounds of World Cup play, and no one looks great. Germany, France, Canada and the United States have all dropped points, and all four looked worse in their second game than they did in their first. Japan have six points, but got outplayed by Switzerland between the boxes and were lucky not to drop points against Cameroon.

Brazil are the only team to emerge from their first two games totally unscathed, having outplayed their opponents convincingly in both of them. They have plenty to work on, but in their 1-0 win over Spain, they looked closer to the finished product than their rivals to win the World Cup.

Marta didn’t get to see as much of the ball as she’d like -- Brazil shifted her out to the left for this match -- but she was extremely effective when she got it. The five-time World Player of the Year was responsible for almost all of Brazil’s dangerous attacks and looked up to sacrificing a bit for the sake of getting Brazil’s best player on the pitch. Plus, she did stuff like this.

Even more importantly, Brazil appear to have their center of midfield sorted out to a degree that the other elite teams don’t. Andressinha, Brazil’s youngest player at this World Cup and Formiga, their oldest, look like a formidable midfield pair. Spain captain Vero Boquette didn’t have nearly the space, time on the ball or volume of touches to make an impact that she did in her team’s last game against Costa Rica.

But there’s plenty of evidence that Brazil being the best team at the moment means nothing. This was their eighth straight group stage win, and they haven’t lost in the group phase since 1995. Hot starts and cool finishes have become standard for a Brazil team yet to win a World Cup.

There’s also a lot of recent precedent for top teams starting slow before going on to win major tournaments. Japan lost in the group stage of the 2011 World Cup, Germany lost in the group stage of Euro 2013 and the German men were utterly unconvincing through their first five matches in last summer’s World Cup. Just because the big favorites have played poorly in their first two games doesn’t mean they won’t come together soon.

At the same time, this really might be the best Brazil team ever. Many of the starters in this team were inexperienced at the last World Cup, but are now in their mid-to-late-20s. And for the first time ever, Brazil went through a real training camp ahead of this World Cup, in which the players lived and trained with each other for a long period of time in the lead-up to the tournament. If they made semifinals and finals without that, it’s easy to believe that they’re capable of winning the World Cup now.

If the knockout stage started tomorrow, it would be hard to pick against Brazil, but just because they’re narrow favorites at the moment doesn’t mean they’ll stay on top. The tournament’s best teams have a couple of games left to get things right before there are only excellent sides remaining, and by that time, it’s likely someone will have caught up.