"Who is doing the criticising?" wondered Luiz Felipe Scolari at an event in Sao Paulo last week. "Some people in other countries have an interest in this. If you Brazilians watch them play, you'll see that they are important for their teams - they're just not important for the journalists in the cities where they are playing."
According to this view, criticism of Barcelona striker Neymar, 22, and Tottenham midfielder Paulinho, 25, has little to do with the pair not living up to expectations at their new club sides. Instead, it is all part of an attempt to destabilise Brazil's World Cup build-up.
This sheds some light on the paranoia which is a small, but not totally insignificant, part of Brazil's footballing mentality.
Dunga, the 2010 World Cup coach, took it further. In his eyes, calls around the globe for the team to revert to the kind of football the men in the yellow shirts played in, for example, 1982, was part of a fiendish plot to ensure Brazil did not win.
It never seemed to enter his mind that for millions of fans around the world the flowing play of past Brazil sides represents an aesthetic value in itself, and it was something everyone was desperate to see again.
But in one aspect Scolari surely has a point. The club form of Neymar and Paulinho is not necessarily of great relevance to Brazil's World Cup challenge.
In the case of Neymar, a bedding-in season was only to be expected, made more difficult by the need for Barcelona to find their way in the post-Pep Guardiola era. Paulinho, meanwhile, has found himself at a club that appears to have invented the concept of the permanent transition.
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