Ask HN: Brazil World Cup wins paradox

We say that "Team Brazil won the World Cup five times." This sentence is grammatically correct but it does not make sense. Who or what won the cup five times? For instance, the team who won the 1958 cup is totally different than the team who won the 2002 cup. A different team of players constituting the Team Brasil won each Cup. There are two things that remained constant: team's badge and its colors. But neither the badge nor the colors went in the field and played the game!

Since the elements who actually played the games and won the Cup, the players, were different, the correct sentence may be: "The Team Brazil badge won the World Cup five times." But that's absurd because the badge had no effect in winning the Cups. Different players played and different teams won the Cup. We should say, "a different team won one Cup each and this happened five times."

This appears to be similar to Xeno's Paradox, that is, a paradox about the assumption of continuity. This is actualy true for every similar statement assuming continuity because we know, by Heraclitus, that "one cannot cross the same river twice." The only constant is the change.

In some cases, the change occurs so slowly, so gradually and imperceptibly that we have no difficulty assuming that the subject stays constant. So we normally assume that a co-worker who comes to the office every morning is the same person even though he always changes in some ways. But in the case of Team Brazil we know that the entire team changed. This is like Lincoln's axe problem: Is it still Lincoln's axe if the metal and the handle had been changed along the way? No. That's a different axe now.

Similarly, the team who won the 1958 Cup and the 2002 Cup are two completely different teams. The two teams have the badge as common but the badge did not play the games and had no influence in winning the Cups. This seems like a paradox to me. Do you agree? Or is it just a semantic issue with an appearance of a paradox?