The 2024 Copa America left fans with a bitter taste: the organization of the tournament proved inadequate due to expense, inconvenience and chaos.
To say that the United States is an overdeveloped country with world-class technology is not a discovery: we are talking about a global giant, with enough resources to advance in almost every field.
However, to come to football and take as a reference what happened during the Copa América 2024, where Flashscore witnessed the terrible organization of the security agencies and workers of the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL), let me doubt their ability to organize the next World Cup which will take place in collaboration with Mexico and Canada.
What happened on Sunday, July 14 at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, in the run-up to the Copa América final, where Argentina beat Colombia 1-0 with a goal on Lautaro Martinezis truly deplorable, with crying children, decompensated elderly people, the public losing consciousness, many arrested people and pictures to forget that have gone around the world. planet.
It all started a few hours before kick-off, which was postponed for an hour due to the above incidents, when the organizers did not distinguish between spectators who had tickets and those who did not; everyone present was allowed to enter the stadium lobby, raising the possibility of what happened next. Violence.
The fact that the stadium gates were only opened an hour and a half before kick-off was another decisive factor. This decision prevented over 60,000 ticket holders from attending the event they had paid for, leading to logical despair.
Faced with these situations, we experienced what we experienced: crowded crowds over a very small number of meters and the ineffectiveness of the police to resolve them, mixed with many people who did not have tickets and who wanted to try to enter the stadium without a ticket .
Security made the decision to let two or three people through each quarter, another decision that caused a lack of enthusiasm among those present, and that separated families from their children, left the elderly alone, and presented sad, regrettable and avoidable images.
Eventually, and after CONMEBOL and the stadium staff tried to prevent us from showing what had happened and threatened to withdraw our accreditations if we continued to film, the turnstiles were released and all spectators present, ticketed or non-ticketed , could enter the stadium to watch the final.
WC 2026 cannot therefore be optimally organized in the USA. First, they must establish safety standards for organizing such an event by conducting pre-stadium ticket searches and asking the public without tickets to leave the premises.
Second, they must treat the public better by granting special attention to the most vulnerable people, so that the scenes that we unfortunately had to experience do not repeat themselves .
If they don’t fix these issues, if they don’t do a mea culpa for the next big event (and with a Club World Cup in between), we’ll have to regret more scenes like the ones we saw. Hopefully it won’t happen, but for that they will have to admit their mistakes and take serious action.
