Develop? Learn?
I tracked down my column - I've not exactly got what I called for (Gold Cup still exists, and there's no qualification as yet), but we're getting there. One fellow journalist walked up to me at RFK a few days later and said the column was "asinine" and then stomped off. Read it again, bell-end.
Scrap The Gold Cup, Melt It Down Into ‘America’
July 14, 2005
Who would have thought it? A soccer competition in the US played out in huge empty stadia, with an almost invisible TV audience, several pointless games, virtually no promotion, and little domestic or outside interest in the final outcome. For once, I’m not talking about MLS. Right now, we’re all in the frenzied midst of Gold Cup fever.
In the Gold Cup, the US gets to play almost the same teams that they play in World Cup qualifying. This happens every two years, and so MLS clubs lose their top players for a month of the six-month season, just like they do during World Cup summers. Except while the World Cup means something, the Gold Cup is just something for the US and Mexico to say they’ve won, which is like bragging about having picked up the USSF Department of TV Rights’ Sales Employee of the Month Award.
The solution is simple. Merge the Gold Cup with the Copa America, and stage it every four years, halfway between the World Cups. Make it a tournament that people can care about, against teams that will not necessarily be Panama and Honduras. There will be no more ‘invited’ teams to demean its significance.
My own preference would be for an eight-team finals tournament, with Brazil and Argentina to qualify automatically and placed as number one seeds in two groups of four. Add to them the host nation, leaving five qualification spots up for grabs – three in South America, and two in Central and North America. Those figures could be reversed, depending on the location of the hosts, so that in the end there would always be five South American teams, and three from Central and North.
This would also allow region-based, competitive qualification matches either through two-leg knockout games or group format, to take place in the eighteen months after the World Cup and fill that two-year, friendly-filled vacuum before the next WC qualifying campaign begins. There would be no need for any single team to play, at most, more than half a dozen qualifying games.
So in the finals you could hypothetically have Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Uruguay in Group One, and Argentina, USA, Peru and Costa Rica in Group Two. The top two in each group would qualify for the straight knockout semi-finals. This way you would have an attractive, slimmed-down tournament that maybe even ESPN would buy.
Assuming they qualified, it would also give the US team (and other CONCACAF teams) the chance to play against nations from outside its immediate geographical area in competitive internationals. As it now stands, they come cold into the World Cup every four years, playing European, Asian or South American teams in meaningful games with little or no experience of what the pace, the standard and the tactics of their opponents are going to be like in the context of a major tournament.
Even with the carrot of automatic qualification, there’s always the danger that Brazil and Argentina might send along second-string rosters for such a tournament, but they often do that for the Copa America in any case. If sold properly, as a tournament equivalent in stature to the European Championships, a new streamlined Copa America would give a huge boost to soccer in the collective Americas.
I’ve no doubt such a fest could be sold, sponsored and fully exploited to the satisfaction of FIFA and the various national associations, who would need the lure of commercialisation in order to make them sit down and organize such an event. But if the game’s ruling body can continue to fabricate hyped-up pointlessness like the Confederations Cup, it’s surely not beyond their abilities to put together a soccer tournament actually worth winning.
Am I missing something, or does it all make too much sense?
