Copa America Was Already Embarrassing Before the Disastrous Final Took It to the Next Level

By Phil West | July 17, 2024 | 9:30am

Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Sports Copa America

Copa America Was Already Embarrassing Before the Disastrous Final Took It to the Next Level

Sunday’s Copa America final in Miami was disastrous on several fronts. The tournament was supposed to function as the dress rehearsal for the United States hosting the World Cup in two years, but it raised more questions than answers about soccer’s biggest spectacle.

Many of the stadiums used for this tournament, also to be used for the ‘26 World Cup, are massive football stadiums with turf fields. To conform with international soccer’s requirements for grass fields, the solution is often to lay grass over the turf and hope it holds up.

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AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, which looked as if it might be awarded a World Cup final but settled for a semifinal and eight other matches instead, got positive reports from American players on how its grass-over-turf performed. MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which was awarded the World Cup final, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, where Argentina opened its title run, drew more negative reviews for their playing surfaces.

Argentine goalkeeper Emi Martinez — you know, the one who won the ‘22 World Cup’s Golden Glove award and then did the most juvenile thing you could possibly do with it in front of his stern Qatari hosts — declared per ESPN, “The state of the pitch was a disaster.” His manager, Lionel Scaloni, added, “The field is not apt for these players.” Canada’s Kamal Miller, on the losing end of that 2-0 match, chimed in as well, noting that “It felt like walking on a stage, as if it was hollow.”

MetLife had field issues compounding its inherent problem being a concrete monstrosity eight harrowing miles away from midtown Manhattan. After her experience getting to and from the venue, TV personality Julie Stewart-Binks tweeted, “I have no idea how Met Life is going to host the World Cup Final.”

Uruguay head coach Marcelo Bielsa let loose in a press conference ahead of its third-place match — AKA the match no one wants to play, yet major international tournaments still insist on staging. He criticized playing surfaces, the training grounds, the U.S.’s role in bringing charges against FIFA executives in 2015 (a long story), and perhaps more alarmingly, the chaos that ensued following Uruguay’s semifinal loss to Colombia, when some of Bielsa’s players went into the stands at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium to fight Colombian fans under the premise of protecting their families.

Critics should not pin this entirely on U.S. organizers, though. CONMEBOL, the federation governing 10 of South America’s 12 sovereign nations, ran the tournament, held in the U.S. for the second time in a decade. (The centennial edition of the irregularly-staged event, in 2016, saw Chile vanquish Argentina in penalties in the final, which happened to be at MetLife.)

Bielsa, by the way, said CONMEBOL is run by a “plague of liars.”

This year’s final in Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium was described by the Miami Herald as “marred by thousands of unruly fans — many without tickets — who stormed the gates, scaled walls, jumped turnstiles and even slithered through vents to get a glimpse of the spectacle.”

Miami-Dade Police and Fire Rescue demanded the stadium’s gates be opened hours before kickoff in a Sophie’s Choice of either letting in thousands, many of whom did not have tickets, or risking injuries or even deaths in a sweltering crush.

What it led to, though, was thousands of fans holding actual tickets left outside while gatecrashers who avoided haphazardly enforced ticket checks got to enjoy the match once it started — well over an hour after it was scheduled to begin. They also got to witness an extended Shakira halftime show that had aspirational Super Bowl vibes and helped drag the match past midnight for East Coast viewers.

One NBC Miami story followed a forlorn fan who got tickets for himself and his pregnant wife for nearly $3700, but didn’t want to risk being crushed in the crowds. They attempted to get in through a safer gate, and ultimately weren’t allowed in. He’s now trying to get a refund, awaiting word on how Ticketmaster and CONMEBOL will align on this and other refund requests from similarly-disgruntled fans.

CONMEBOL took to X (formerly Twitter) to blame fans and then the Hard Rock Stadium staff for the debacle despite, as Pro Soccer Wire pointed out in its coverage, declaring in its tournament guidelines that it had “full authority” over the match.

CONMEBOL execs even had their violent moment in the sun: 71-year-old Colombian Football Federation president and a CONMEBOL vice president, Ramon Jesurun, was arrested for grabbing a stadium security guard by the throat, pushing him to the ground and punching him.

Soccer journalist Favian Renkel tweeted, after a day of covering the mayhem, “It’s embarrassing for an organization to be so unprepared for such a major tournament in the United States. CONMEBOL did a horrible job planning or asking for help on this, making the United States look extremely bad. There has always been a belief that the U.S. could step in if any other country was unable to host. Today’s events suggest that belief was misplaced.”

Those are damning words, but consider all the video footage of the mayhem that Renkel and others pored over. That included fans hoisting aloft a half-full bottle of tequila they somehow got past security, others destroying an escalator or scaling a stadium wall to get past security, and a fan’s shih tzu getting loose from its carrier and roaming as other fans charged past a fallen gate. Then there was the most grotesque image from the actual match: Lionel Messi’s ankle, swollen to elephantine proportions thanks to an injury that will keep him from next week’s MLS All-Star Game and the Leagues Cup to follow.

The best thing the U.S. World Cup hosts could do is to undertake a post-mortem immediately and establish some take-home lessons from this before it happens again on a larger scale. Installing multiple security perimeters and making sure fans without tickets can’t get anywhere near any of the stadiums would be a good start, but it goes beyond that. Ultimately, FIFA will be in charge of this tournament, and the U.S.’s northern and southern neighbors will also be co-hosts; but embarrassment from any mishaps, though, will likely come down almost entirely on the U.S.