No Champs League for 2009 winner?

To the best of my knowledge, it has not been announced. It wasn't announced until the week before MLS Cup last year when they made all the competition announcements.

 

On one hand, that seems counterproductive to me, at least if you hope to make the USOC meaningful.

On the other hand, "top four in the league" getting into Champions League would be consistent with Europe, for the most part.

And we all know how much people here long for us to be just like Europe.

 

...with the difference being that Concacaf doesn't have a second tournament designated for cup winners, like Europe or Africa.

But, in terms of Concacaf and US teams, I do find it odd that only one spot is garunteed via the league table, and three are via cup games (if you consider the MLS playoffs as cup games), with the next-best teams in the league table only taken into account if there are duplicates in the cup winners. A better balance would be to have two teams from the league table, the MLS Cup winner, and the Open Cup winner.

 

Yes, that is the case.

I would agree with you on that.

I think it would be unfortunate to not have the USOC winner go into the CCL, because, other than that, there's not a lot of reason to play in it.

 

I think it's cool Hanauer addressed the question and even contacted the folks in Chicago to try and get an answer. While not definitive, it's nice he made the effort.

 

Aren't these the kind of decisions that should be made before the start of the season? It seems like the only reason to wait to announce it would be as a failsafe in case a USL team won the final. "Oh, we decided the cup winner doesn't get a spot this year, sorry."

Even if it's not that cynical, it's still a bush league way of handling things that makes the USSF look like...well the good old Canadian Soccer Association. *spits*

 

Welcome to CONCACAF.

 

I would bet that the only thing up in the air is that the 2010-11 CCL format hasn't been announced. So they can't really have official qualification criteria if they don't know exactly how many teams the USA will get.

 

I can see taking a spot away from some pissant third world country. But how does it serve the competition (or CONCACAF's avowed financial interests) to take a spot away from the USA? Unless you feel you have too many extraneous games and you're going to reduce the whole field and the US just loses proportionally.

 

If they're trying to make the competition have some kind of legitimacy (yeah, I know), then they could make the allocation based on results, and the chips will fall where they may.

And there's that.

 

They're not taking away spots from anyone unless the country cannot support an additional bid.

 

They're not taking bids away yet.

The old tournament had eight teams. This has 24. If they find that that's unwieldy, they could reduce it to 16 or 18 or 20 and somebody'd have to lose spots - and the big boys would have more to give, proportionally.

We'll have to see how it plays out.

 

The old tournament had 8 teams in the final round, but Central qualifying had 16 teams for three spots, and Carribbean had 17 teams for one spot. That would put a total of 37 teams. (The new tournament basically folded the Central teams into the tournament proper.)

Kenn, I'm not sure where you are going with this "24 may be too unwieldy" line. Are you saying that a group stage in the round-16 is too much? In that case, I wouldn't mind if they went to 32 teams in the tournament proper (after the qualifying in the Carribbean), starting with two knockout rounds, then playing the group stage at the round-8. (Interestingly, both this format and the current format would be 78 games.)

But how that affects the LHUSOC winner in the CCL, is probably not part of the issue.

The CCL is now in the "growing pains" stage. Some countries still don't have the structure to support the matches, etc. Hopefully these blips would be ironed out in the next cycle.

 

Board meeting minutes from the USSF site include this nugget.

 

boy i hope not lolol

 

http://www.championsleague.premiumtv.co.uk/page/CL/201011/0,,12856,00.html says:

"The United States again will start to fill the field for next year's CONCACAF Champions League when D.C. United faces the Seattle Sounders for the U.S. Open Cup title on September 2."

 

and here's why it was so fast. we're awesome!! go sounders!! we're gonna own that tourny as well!!!

ALL WE DO IS WIN TROPHIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Yeah, I'm sure the Mexican teams are shaking in their boots.

Haha, get ready for a rude awakening.

 

Have you not followed the competition? Aside from Houston, the USA teams are not competitive - in fact, they are downright awful. How does it serve the competition to have a bunch of teams that can't compete with "pissant third world countries"? New York and New England can't even beat the "small" teams from Trinidad & Tobago (not only can they not beat them, but they get blown out by them), DC United gets annihilated by every team they come up against, etc.

WTF is the point in letting a league who's teams are not good enough to compete continue to play and continue to send more teams than anyone else, when instead you could add another team from Panama or Honduras or Costa Rica or wherever - teams that would actually be more competitive?

 

You're not the one who's saying that Seattle is going to "own that tourney."