Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana

They consider themselves to be more culturally Caribbean than South American.

French Guiana is actually a department of France so they are technically Europeans in South America regionally playing as Caribbean people. (Try letting that sit in your brain for a while.)

 

Why don't we recruit Colombia and Venezuela for CONCACAF?

 

Venezuela maybe.
Colombia would have to have Barranquilla and Cartagena maybe split from the rest of Colombia and play in the Caribbean. But Never going to happen since Barranquilla is the home of the National Team.

 

Technically Trinidad and Tobago is only a couple miles from Venezuela. Having them come with Guyana and Suriname will make it 13 instead of 10.

But they will get their asses kick 9/10 times, I think financially and politically, it favors them to stay with Concacaf.

 

Don't know if it's true, but one time I read that the reason why Suriname (I don't know about the others) is not part of Conmebol is because they have more things in common with caribbean countries than south americans and didn't care about football as much as the rest of south america, so they decide to join Concacaf.
Again, don't know if this is true but I read it somewhere and it made sense to me

 

We should get Venezuela and Colombia to join CONCACAF. They're both Caribbean nations.

 

Heck, culturally they're basically islands - massive rivers separate the (populated) coastal regions from each other, with no bridges between the three, only ferries. French Guiana (Guyane) and Brazil finally built a bridge, but it's still sparsely used.

Linguistically they have more in common with the Caribbean than South America too. Take the Guyanese diaspora, they tend to associate more with Caribbean festivals than Latin events in big cities in North America - English helps with that, obviously.

French Guiana has cultural connections with Martinique and Guadeloupe (Ligue des Antilles, anyone?), Suriname with the ABC islands. CONMEBOL probably does just fine operating in two languages already.

I believe Aruba, Guyana, Panama and Surinam are members of ODESUR - the South American Olympic organization - but I have a feeling CONMEBOL administers the football portion of the South American Games.

 

French Guiana is part of France along with Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy and the frozen Department of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

Suriname was part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands until 1975. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten still are.

Guyana is part of the West Indies along with Belize, Jamaica, T&T and all those other cricket playing nations.

Still, I think CONCACAF should try and adopt Venezuela as it's an afterthought in CONMEBOL.

 

Because they are culturally and historically Caribbean nations with no meaningful ties or shared heritage with the Spanish/Portuguese speaking world. They are each on the South American continent - beyond that, they have nothing really to do with South America. They're Caribbeans.

 

Shared heritage has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia, China and Australia playing in the same federation. Otherwise you could make a case for the US, Canada and Australia being in UEFA.

I'm just being devil's avocado.

 

Sure, you could always just totally ignore the heritage/historical/cultural factors and just throw teams wherever, and that happens (in football and other sports/organizations), but there seems to be a general tendency to try and keep some commonality where feasible and that's clearly what happened here. In this case, the Caribbean borders each nation, it isn't on the other side of the world, so to the extend geography prevents such unions elsewhere thats not a factor this time around.

 

Tbh AFC should probably should probably spilt into 3. The Middle-East/Indian subcontinent, Northern Asia including China, Japan and Korea and the Pacific nations including Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and Oceania.