Photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
It didn’t take long after Qatar was selected to host the 2022 World Cup 14 years ago for people to start theorizing that the tournament would end up being played in the United States instead. Qatar’s weather was too extreme in the summer, people said (which ended up being true, so organizers moved the games to fall). Or the stadiums wouldn’t be ready, or Qatar’s human-rights abuses were just too monstrous, or some combination of these. FIFA even called hosting the tournament there “high risk.” And the replacement was obvious: us. It was surprising in the first place that Qatar had beaten out the U.S. as 2022 host for reasons that, of course, ended up being entirely about corruption. But the theorizing about America as a backup location rested on the assumption that if a sudden replacement had to be found, the U.S. had the infrastructure in place to handle a quick-turnaround World Cup. There are massive stadiums all across this country, and they constantly host sporting events, rock concerts, and conventions. They could roll out of bed tomorrow, the thought process went, and handle a World Cup just fine.
No one is saying that today.
The chaos that went down before the CONMEBOL Copa América final between Argentina and Colombia in Miami on Sunday night was essentially unprecedented in American sports, and the deeper one dives into reporting from people there, the more remarkable it becomes that something truly horrible didn’t happen. Here’s only one of the stories, from The Athletic’s haunting breakdown of the disaster:
One woman, who identified herself later to The Athletic as Diana, was carried unconscious into the stadium by a police officer. She was laid down on the concrete in the area set up with medics and eventually woke up and was given water. Steven, a 34-year-old Colombian who lives in Miami and was with Diana, described the situation.”
“Everyone started to push and you could feel yourself losing air,” he said. “And once we got closer to the gates, you can only imagine. I noticed that Diana was struggling. Fortunately, I was standing behind her.”
Diana, 28, said she remembered the moment she fainted.
“I tried to breathe,” she said. “A man kept telling me, ‘Try to breathe. Try to breathe’ and I responded that I wanted them to open another gate. They were using one gate for all of these people but people pushed back. I held on to a man that was standing near me. Everyone was pushing. Colombians, Argentines. Everyone was pushing.”
Videos showed Colombia fans breaking into the stadium through vents, an endless mass of people smashed against each other trying to gain entry, and disastrously poor ticket-scanning and security procedures. It is not at all difficult to see how this could have been so, so much worse.
Eventually, ticketless fans were let in en masse to prevent the situation from spiraling further (which may have been even more dangerous, considering many of them were never scanned through security and could have had a weapon). This meant that thousands of fans who had paid thousands of dollars for tickets to see Lionel Messi discovered, when they made it inside (if they even did), that they no longer had a seat. The game ended up being delayed two hours. It was complete chaos.
Tournament organizers, and staff at Hard Rock Stadium, have mostly blamed gate-rushing for the chaos, but, as Yahoo’s Henry Bushnell, a well-respected soccer writer, pointed out, “ticketless fans are a fixture at major international soccer matches, especially in South America.” And there is a widely understood, commonly deployed strategy that international tournaments and their hosts use to deal with this: Set up multiple security perimeters outside the stadium, making it difficult for anyone without tickets to even get close to the gates. This is a familiar tactic in the U.S., too, at the Super Bowl and the College Football Playoffs, among other events. (I have friends who, in anticipation of a featured visit from then-President Trump, tailgated a full four miles away from Mercedes-Benz Stadium before the national title game between Georgia and Alabama in Atlanta a few years ago.) But the Copa América organizers either were ignorant of such procedures or ignored them entirely. With chaos swirling nearby, CONMEBOL’s president was goofing off kicking balls around the stadium.
This maybe could have been spun as a onetime incident or just blamed on Miami or the intensity of a matchup between Messi and famously rabid Colombia fans. Except the Copa América — which the U.S. hosted without major incident once before — had been plagued with problems this year from the start. Players have complained about the grass they played on. Stadiums were three-quarters empty. Tickets were shockingly expensive. The heat was overwhelming. Media policies and procedures were shambolic. And in the highest-profile game before the final, Colombia’s thrilling win over Uruguay, the match ended with a violent fight in the stands between Uruguay players and Colombian fans. That happened five days before the Final, yet Miami and match organizers still weren’t ready. I myself attended two Copa America games, both in Atlanta, and was struck by how disorganized the events were at Mercedes-Benz Arena, from entry to merchandise to concessions, compared to essentially any other event I’ve attended there. Basically, everything went wrong.
This is particularly concerning because this Copa América was seen, explicitly, as a dress rehearsal for the World Cup, which will be here in less than two years. There will be three times as many nations in that tournament than there were at this one, and it will have a hundred times more eyeballs on it. If we couldn’t handle this, how in the heck are we going to handle the World Cup? The only salvation in 2026 may be that Canada and Mexico have been enlisted to help; they’re hosting a few of the matches but none of the big ones. The World Cup Final is July 19, 2026, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The third-place game will take place in Miami; so will seven other games. If you thought this was chaotic, wait until the biggest sporting event in the world arrives. There was a time, very recently, when the U.S. was the fail-safe place for security, efficiency, and preparation for an event like this, so much so that the world felt it could count on it in a pinch with an impossible turnaround time. Now? Now the Copa América, and perhaps soon the World Cup, is making us look like a place you can’t rely on for anything. We’ve got two years to figure it out. Look around you. Does it look to you like anything is going to be better in two years?
