Copa America Centenario to test U.S. mettle on, off the field
The most important soccer competition to be played in the U.S. in a generation almost never got here.
The Copa America Centenario, the 100th-anniversary edition of the world’s oldest international tournament, kicks off Friday in Santa Clara when the U.S. meets Colombia. But as recently as last winter the event was dead, derailed by the Justice Department’s investigation into bribery and graft at the highest levels of global soccer.
More than a dozen men who had spent two years planning the tournament, and enriching themselves with at least $110 million in kickbacks along the way, had been indicted, so sponsors closed their checkbooks and walked away. U.S. Soccer, which was to play host to the event, wanted no part of it.
It took six months for organizers to raze the tournament’s criminally constructed foundation, sanitize it and assure enough transparency that stakeholders on two continents felt it was safe to revive the event. As a result the 16-team competition, to be played in 10 U.S. cities over the next month, could be the cleanest soccer competition ever held.
Juergen Klinsmann, the excitable coach of the U.S. team, is convinced it will be among the most prestigious as well.
“This is a big deal,” he said. “For our continent, North America, it’s the biggest stage you can play [on] besides the World Cup.
“The Colombians, the Argentines or Brazilians … they’re coming here for serious business. The 100th anniversary, you’re only going to win this one time in your life. This is the real deal.”
Klinsmann may actually be underselling a tournament that will feature five of the world’s top nine teams, four of the eight quarterfinalists from the last World Cup and arguably the planet’s best player in Argentina’s Lionel Messi, provided he’s able to play after bruising his back in a friendly last Friday.
It will also mark the first time top-ranked Argentina, five-time World Cup winner Brazil and Uruguay, a 15-time South American champion, will play in the same competitive tournament in the U.S. Also in the field is North American champion Mexico, defending Copa America winner Chile and Ecuador, which is ranked 12th in the world.
Just as important, though, will be what happens off the field, where the event will allow the U.S. to demonstrate its organizational and marketing muscle ahead of an expected bid for the 2026 World Cup.
“Other than the launch of Major League Soccer, I don’t think there has been a more significant happening on U.S. soil for the men’s game since ’94,” said John Guppy, who worked on the 1994 World Cup in the U.S., then ran two MLS franchises before starting a soccer marketing firm.
“In some ways it’s a test of the systems for putting on an event of this magnitude. [But] I don’t think we need to prove to anybody we can do it.”
Still, organizers delight in comparing the tournament to the World Cup, both in prestige and production.
The 32 games could pull in as many as 2 million spectators, they say, a Copa America record and more than 11 separate World Cups drew. Tickets are already selling well on the secondary market, with StubHub saying the tournament is the most-popular summer sports event in the U.S.
Commercial inventory, mostly stadium signage and other on-site advertising, has sold out and 15 corporate sponsors, from usual suspects such as Nike and Anheuser-Busch to Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer and Japanese power-tool manufacturer Makita, have signed on, guaranteeing the event will turn a tidy profit.
“I don’t know that anyone other than the United States has the facilities that we have or the infrastructure that we have to be able to do something like this in this short a time,” said Kathy Carter, president of Soccer United Marketing, the commercial arm of MLS. Carter’s group has been the backbone of the Copa America operation, selling tournament sponsorships and lending its expertise in everything from security and media relations to transportation and event management, all while working under a deadline tighter than Alexis Sanchez’s jersey.
“Just six or seven months to pull off an event of this magnitude is a terrific thing to do,” she said.
And few global sporting competitions can match the Copa America for magnitude and history.
The South America championships, the birth name of the tournament, predate the World Cup by nearly 15 years and helped shape the global tournament, especially in the early years. Inaugurated in 1916 to mark the centennial of Argentina’s independence, the tournament began as an annual event featuring Argentina and three countries with which it shared a border.
But it became a symbol of South America’s soccer superiority when Uruguay, steeled in part by its four tournament championships, entered the Olympics for the first time in 1924 and won there too.
Uruguay won a second gold medal four years later so when soccer was dropped from the schedule for the next Olympics in Los Angeles, the World Cup was organized to take its place.
Uruguay, chosen as the first host, won again.
That inspired the European powers to take their ball and go home, moving the next two World Cups to Italy and France and establishing a qualifying procedure that allocated 12 of the tournament’s 16 spots to European nations.
The World Cup didn’t return to the Americas until 1950. Uruguay won.
The South American championships, meanwhile, fell into disrepair and didn’t become a stable and significant part of the global soccer calendar again until 1975, when it was reborn as the Copa America. This year its centennial edition is being held opposite the European Championships, the only competition other than the World Cup it trails in terms of importance and prestige.
And Klinsmann says that makes the next month an important one for a U.S. team that will be tested in the toughest of the tournament’s four groups, one that includes two World Cup quarterfinalists in Colombia and Costa Rica.
“This is the stage that you want to kind of showcase yourself,” said Klinsmann, who said his goal is get his team to the semifinals. “You want to prove a point … that I can run with these guys, the Colombians Argentinians or Brazilians. From a player’s perspective, it’s like a World Cup.
“That’s the coolest thing that can happen as a player.”
For a country as well. Although Sunil Gulati, president of the U.S. Soccer federation, said he won’t make a decision about pursuing a World Cup until FIFA announces the new bidding guidelines for the tournament in the fall, he didn’t floor-manage the vote that got Gianni Infantino elected FIFA president simply because he’s a nice guy.
Gulati did it with his eye on 2026. And with Infantino promising to grow the World Cup field to 40 teams, the U.S. could wind up hosting the largest, best-attended and most profitable soccer tournament in history, one that could open with the U.S. playing in Philadelphia on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Putting on a clean, profitable and successful Copa America on short notice would all but guarantee the U.S. will get that chance.
“People understand that we are a soccer country,” Gulati said. “But more evidence is always a plus.”
Twitter: @kbaxter11
