Interesting side note from Wahl on his podcast last night. Made a point that this, early on, seems more about Conmebol negotiating with concacaf for the purposes of both a money grab, and for the purposes of getting votes for their 4 nation 2030 WC bid. Interesting angle.
I figured that. The 2030 World Cup should go to SA, IMO, but there's a UEFA bid and apparently Saudi Arabia really wants to bribe people so they can one up Qatar.
The 2030 stuff has become entirely ridiculous. Spain and Portugal adding Ukraine for geopolitical leverage, Saudi Arabia adding Egypt and Greece trying to piece together confederations, this whole process is killing the golden goose of this tournament.
Well Concacaf should in any case support the Conmebol 4 nation bid since it's the best option, so hopefully the two confederations can align on all this....
The 48 team field has really screwed with things too. There are very few countries that can hold it on their own outside the US. And just the way FIFA voting works with each country having one vote, it's not like they're picking the best actual bid. Of course before when it was just the executive committee making the choice, they were even more susceptible to being bribed. I'm not entirely sure the right way of picking the World Cup, but FIFA hasn't figured it out yet.
There should be objective criteria that give real nations more votes than micro nations like Grenada. UEFA has 55 members. Asia has 47. The Caribbean group has 25. So a bit more than half the clout of Asia, and a bit less than half the clout of Europe. I don’t feel like looking it up, but I’ll bet the Caribbean has more clout than every nation that has ever made the final.
Has Copa America 2024 being officially confirmed to take place in the US and with 6 CONCACAF teams? Wasn't there rumors of USSF planning to do a tournament in 2025 in the US with several other national teams? If so, I wonder how that will work with Gold Cup also taking place that year. This area can't really grow with all the bad teams we have and with so many games played against them. Poor to low infrastructure Central America and no infrastructure in the Caribbean. Playing against Mexico (and now Canada) won't help you grow. Same goes for Mexico playing against US so many games that matter.
Could simply allow a Central American country like Costa Rica host the Gold Cup or allow several nations across Central America/Caribbean host together.
I mean if you had a time machine? The 32 team format, single nation hosts and a rule regarding only countries meeting certain minimum size and development and preparedness thresholds being eligible as hosts should have been matters only changeable by a supermajority of, say, 4 of the 5 major confederations. Then you vote among the confederations themselves who, because they are accountable to their distributed individual members are much harder to bribe. But now that there's no guardrails on anything it's pretty much impossible to rein back in. They should still try.
I think England will get their asses handed to them, but I'm pulling for them anyway. Special relationship and all, though it was the French who helped us the most in the Revolution ( Spain did a lot too but we never hear much about it ).
Makes sense. These are the types of back-room deals that game things done at FIFA. You scratch our back, we'll scratch yours. I'm sure that we voted for nations in 2018 and 2022 with the understanding that those federations would vote for North American in 2026. As far as the Copa America goes, I don't care how it gets done. We need competitive games this cycle without WCQing. THis is the best way. Would I prefer for it to be held somewhere other than the US in order to test the guys? Sure. But if it's in the US, who the hell is gonna complain? Reallly..............more soccer please!!!! As far as the CONCACAF Gold Cup goes, I find the comments on this thread funny. Have people gone to soccer events in Costa Rica and other places? Those countries don't have the infrastructure for it. We host the CONCACAF youth events there. That's the deal made in return for the Gold Cup being in the US. Since 2000 all of Honduras, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Guatemala, T&T, etc. have hosted the U20 CONCACAF Championships. They all cycle thru the U17 Championships as well. The CONCACAF U17 Championships will be held in Guatemala in a few months. People understand the capacities of the stadia in the Costa Rican league? Right? Come on, folks. There are maybe three stadia in Costa Rica that could host a Gold Cup game. Estadio Nacional 35k Ricardo Saprissa Stadium 23k Estadio Alejandro Morero Soto 18k Every other stadium is 10k or less. Most stadia in the Costa Rican league are blown away by Texas high school football stadiums. People understand this, right? That you could host a Gold Cup Dallas-Fort Worth alone, and have better stadia to play at than if you were hosting it in Costa Rica. Then you could have AT&T Stadium, the Cotton Bowl, Toyota Stadium, Amon Carter Stadium (TCU's stadium), Ford Stadium (SMU's stadium), etc. etc. and it would be a more professional and money-making event than if it was in the nation of Costa Rica. Now maybe you could have a Central American event shared between the countries. Why, though? Do Central American nations actually submit proposals to host the Gold Cup? Not that I can tell. People have seen how little games outside of Mexico games are attended when events are held in Mexico? The one event outside the US that was very well attended was the U20 CONCACAF Championships in Canada. That showed that people in Canada will go to the games that don't invovle Canada. Hait versus Panama in Canada got 10k fans. That's not happening if you host in most places.
These are all good and valid points. The trouble is, we might hope for several things from a championship of CONCACAF 1. Provide a big TV and attendance event that draws a ton of interest 2. Be a trophy and a title teams and their supporters deeply care about 3. Create difficult matchups that challenge the better national teams 4. Serve as a catalyst for the development of the sport in the broader region As currently constructed the Gold Cup does basically none of those things. It's a slush fund of $100 tickets for soccer idiots like me who are happy to pay first-world prices to go grab a couple beers and watch Jamaica and Venezuela at a mostly-empty Soldier Field (that was Copa America Centenario, but still). There's gotta be a better way. Given that the degradation of the World Cup has stolen the old format of WCQ away, what if we just exactly replicated that tournament and called it the Gold Cup? Or, say, in the Hex instead of playing for three spots you're playing for two, and those two play a final at the Rose Bowl or something? You can't justify non-US nations building out the infrastructure to host the whole tournament with a bunch of games with two foreign teams no one cares about. But you could justify each nation needing one home venue of reasonable standard.
I've always thought there should be a Confederations tournament e.g. two groups of 3, top two teams qualify for final e.g. group 1: UEFA, CAF, OFC group 2: CONMEBOL, CONCACAF, AFC
While the fan support here has gotten a lot better I think people are assuming our homefield advantage in this would be a lot larger than it actually is. Depending who we play there could be a lot of fans of the other team in these "home" games, and the WC will be the same.
It’s not about allowing. It’s about them wanting to. They don’t. Because they want the money derived from the US hosting every one.
Well the voting was different for 2018 and 2022 in that it just limited to the executive committee, so those sorts of deals wouldn’t have been on the table. Since then every country gets a vote. The Netflix FIFA documentary does a very good job running through what happened in this process. We thought England had the best 2018 bid and that we had the best 2022 bid, and we were convinced that was how it was going to turn out. Obviously that didn’t happen. My sense is more that FIFA wanted 2026 partly to go to the US(and Mexico and Canada)because they very much wanted to brush the Qatar stuff under the rug and thought this would help (and also because a US World Cup will make tons of money). Fox also got a no bid contract for the 2026 World Cup to keep them happy. Around that time Mohammed bin Hammam from Qatar was challenging Blatter for FIFA president and it is widely believed that Blatter agreed not to take away the World Cup from Qatar for the corrupt way they got it, in return for bin Hammam standing down. And then they worked from their to make sure aggrieved parties were given something to assuage them. Ironically Blatter gets forced out shortly after anyways,
Matt Doyle does 2024 squads for Copa America and Olympics... he forgot a few guys (Malik Tillman, Johnny Cardoso) and left off a bunch of others that he addresses in the replies (Dike, Mendez, Parks, Busio, Luna, A Morris, Vines, Gressel, Glad etc.) Having fun w/ a few folks brainstorming ways to build credible 2024 Copa America & Olympics squads that get our best players on the field and gives us a shot at a deep run in both. pic.twitter.com/SkNxLIEBpX— Matthew Doyle (@MattDoyle76) December 11, 2022
Gotta find a way to get Paredes all the minutes he can handle at the Olympics. Watching Saka is like looking into our future. The end product isn’t quite there yet but the quick feet and skilled dribbling causes all kinds of problems for any team. Paredes = Saka in one year or less.
I mean that's would be quite the trajectory, and I say that as a big Paredes fan (he was my dark horse to make the WC roster back in the summer)... I wouldn't present such an optimistic scenario as an inevitability unless you're prepared for disappointment.
Maybe my timeline is optimistic, and things like injury or club situation can complicate things, but otherwise I feel good about it. Kevin is about a year and a half younger than Saka. I do think it's a bit of a reach because there's a chance Kevin is never as goal dangerous, Saka has put up numbers, but put Paredes in that Arsenal squad and give him time to gel, there wouldn't be much drop off imo.
That was my thought too. I know I rate the importance of the Olympics less than many people, but I basically consider it a youth tournament still. Put the best guys on the Copa roster since it's our best prep for 2026, even if they are Olympic eligible. For instance, if Scally is better than Cannon and much more likely to play a part in 2026, Scally should be on the Copa roster, even if he's a backup to Dest. The only exception I could see is for Slonina, if you think he's going to be the 3rd keeper on the Copa roster, making him pretty much guaranteed not to play.