The Copa America final was played Sunday night and it turned into such a security shitshow that fans were trying to get into Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium via the HVAC system:

The short version of a long story is that tons of fans without tickets showed up for the Argentina/Colombia game. There’s video all over social media of those fans rushing the gates, climbing over fences, jumping walls, pretty much anything they could think of. They had to delay the start of the game because of this, and security then started going through the seats and removing everybody who didn’t have a ticket. There were videos of people who paid $2,000 for seats stuck outside while loser fans who paid nothing pushed their way in.

You’ll read stories and see social media posts blaming the U.S. for this fiasco and saying that we’re not equipped to host the World Cup in 2026, which is absolutely fucking comical considering that we hosted an incident-free World Cup in 1994, we have Super Bowls, college football playoffs, huge NASCAR events, and everything else on the planet. No issues there. Also no problems with the Copa America Centenario, which was held in this country in 2016 and went off without a hitch. There were three games in Philadelphia that included fans from the U.S., Panama, Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Paraguay and no issues with security or fan behavior there.

So how is it that we held a clean Copa eight years ago, but not in 2024?

The difference, based on reporting from various credible journos out there, is that this version of the Copa was primarily organized by CONMEBOL, which is the soccer governing body of South America. Back in 2016, the United States Soccer Federation and Soccer United Marketing were involved in the Centenario, but not this time around.


Jeff Carlisle at ESPN:

The 2024 Copa is a joint venture between CONMEBOL and Concacaf with the two confederations splitting most of the proceeds, and U.S. Soccer set to get the aforementioned $10m, plus 5% of ticket sales. U.S. Soccer will have no role in the actual running of the tournament.

Right, so we really had very little to do with any of this. CONCACAF is the governing body of North American soccer, which reportedly wasn’t responsible for security:

Nonetheless, the optics look bad. Makes it look like we’re to blame. There’s a lot of anti-American horseshit floating around out there, people saying we can’t run a tournament and can’t be trusted with the World Cup. But there’s very little blame being directed toward the Colombia and Argentina fans who bum rushed the gates and pushed their way in past women and children and created the whole debacle in the first place.

Remember, personal responsibility never comes into play. It’s always someone else’s fault! Imagine if we sent 10,000 American soccer fans to Medellin and stormed the gates and tore their stadium apart and then blamed Colombia for it. “You weren’t prepared for how crazy we are!” Sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is.