Conmebol could have seen this coming.
During this summer’s Copa América, the signs of an impending logistical disaster were clear. In cities across the United States, transportation problems frustrated fans, security issues made them less safe, hot weather put everyone at risk, and the games themselves were either sparsely attended or, as on Sunday, the dangerous opposite.
Indeed, the terrifying circumstances of the final in Miami ensured that all the individual problems seen throughout the tournament were summed up in one very representative example. It was everything happening everywhere at once.
It’s tempting to say that the chaos was a bad advertisement for soccer to the general public in the United States (or to anyone who happened to be watching). Whether that’s true or not, it’s clear that the advertisement was accurate. That’s the way soccer is, and an organizer can either prepare for it or make fans suffer.
This is now the third time in four years that broadly defined “crowd issues” have overshadowed the finals of major tournaments, including the 2020 European Championship final in London (postponed until 2021 due to Covid-19) and the 2022 Champions League final in Paris. If you widen the lens slightly to include all major football events, you can also include the problems in Rio de Janeiro for Argentina and Brazil’s 2023 World Cup qualifier, making four such cases in four years.
Each of these matches took place in world-capital-type cities, with well-developed infrastructure and a history of hosting huge events without major incident. The organizers of these matches were the two most powerful and well-funded regional confederations in world soccer. So while the issues surrounding the 2024 Copa América raise questions about whether the United States is truly prepared to host the World Cup alongside Mexico and Canada in less than two years, there is a larger question that goes beyond that: is each Is a football organisation prepared to organise major football events as they exist now?
Gone are the days of assuming that the vaunted infrastructure, in the US or elsewhere, would get the job done. No organization can hope to contain the passion, dedication and reckless abandon that football can inspire – but they can plan for it, and use those plans to limit the damage.
This summer, Conmebol, the South American confederation that oversaw most aspects of the tournament’s organization, failed to do so. There is every indication that the confederation cut corners where it could and simply assumed that if it built it, it would attract dedicated fans, without paying much attention to the fact that their dedication could manifest itself in dangerous ways.
The confederation has much to learn from this, and those lessons may well be needed, as the United States could theoretically host another edition of the Copa América in 2028. The host for that edition has yet to be determined.
You would hope that FIFA, which organises the World Cup, would also be watching and taking careful notes on what should definitely not happen in 2026.
Adopting guidelines and best practices from locals is a big part of that equation. It’s not that Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium is unsuitable for major events. The venue has hosted Super Bowls, Formula One races, past international friendlies, and is the weekly home of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. The standard operating procedures used for those events were clearly ignored, with local journalists Mike Ryan Ruiz says that security outside the stadium was less present than at American football games involving Bethune Cookman, a college with an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 2,500. There was no security perimeter around the stadium, which might have deterred the ticketless fans so consistently blamed for the problems from gathering outside the gates in the first place.
FIFA must also take into account the high temperatures that affected various aspects of the Copa América in several cities. Perhaps nowhere was that more pronounced than in Kansas City, where an assistant referee collapsed on the field due to heat exhaustion in Canada’s game against Peru. The temperature on the field that day was measured at around 91F, with the humidity making it feel like a steady 100F (38C). The scheduling didn’t help matters – that game kicked off at 5pm, when the sun was still beating down on the stadium and well before temperatures had even begun to cool. Qatar tackled a similar problem by deploying a phalanx of migrant workers to build air-conditioned stadiums under appalling working conditions. The US stadiums are already built, worker protections are more advanced (if flawed), and the political will to borrow millions to build and/or improve stadiums owned by billionaires seems to be slowly evaporating.
Kansas City also exhibited far more basic infrastructure problems that could be replicated in any number of other cities. An almost complete lack of public transportation links to Arrowhead Stadium meant that the freeways around the Truman Sports Complex where it is located were gridlocked before kickoff of the United States v. Uruguay match. It’s a familiar scene to any Kansas City resident who has ever attended a Chiefs game in the NFL, but it’s perhaps less familiar to visitors from around the world.
Even places with strong public transportation have problems. In New Jersey, fans have had to deal with stuck trains and a lack of reliable bus service on their way to MetLife Stadium for two games, both of which arrived late. This is the venue, remember, that is scheduled to host the World Cup final in just over two years. New Jersey Transit, which was supposed to be primarily responsible for transporting fans to the stadium, is facing a $1 billion budget deficit this fiscal year. A transitway from a nearby station is now scheduled to be completed next year, but is designed to handle 12,000 fans per hour. MetLife Stadium has a capacity of 82,000.
The timeline is so tight that completely new infrastructure changes are virtually impossible – Kansas City isn’t expanding the streetcar to Arrowhead for a year and a half, and additional transit projects to MetLife are unlikely to be completed either. The Kansas City World Cup committee has stated that buses will be used to shuttle fans to and from games, but of which remains an open question, as Kansas City is one of the most sprawling metropolitan areas in the country.
Security issues also frequently became public spectacles. The most notable, at least until Sunday, was in Charlotte, where a clash between Uruguay and Colombia fans after the teams’ semifinal match resulted in the families of Uruguayan players getting caught up in the fray. This included the children of some of the players—a scene understandably so terrifying that it sent several players running into the stands. This too had its viral image: Darwin Nuñez comforting his child on the field, a look of exasperation that clearly had little to do with the semifinal they had just lost. What happens in less than two years, when any number of international rivalries can flare up in a showdown with high stakes and a global television audience?
In these and other scenarios, the best Fifa can do after watching Sunday’s final is to get its final plans out to curious eyes as soon as possible. The size of Messi’s ankle may have gone viral, but so did the scenes before it. People will remember the latter longer than the former.
Show us how fans can get from their homes in Kansas City to any of the six games at Arrowhead Stadium without using public transportation. Explain how a World Cup final with a billion-dollar audience will play out in the middle of an industrial swamp in New Jersey. Reveal plans for dealing with the extreme heat in the asphalt parking lots that surround so many of these venues. Explain how security will be managed and who will staff those positions. Make it clear and make it quick.
Americans naturally believe that the country is a natural at hosting big events, and to some extent that is true. But the Copa America has raised doubts, and FIFA now has no excuse not to heed the warning.