At a May 1, 2014, news conference announcing that a special centennial edition of the Copa America tournament would be played in the United States in 2016, then-CONCACAF President Jeffrey Webb exclaimed, “The American continent may have been discovered in 1492, but I can’t imagine a better way to unite this continent than with football and an exceptional celebration of talent in 2016.”
Just over a year later, the future of an event billed as being the biggest soccer tournament held in the United States since the 1994 World Cup (and biggest sporting event in the country since the 2002 Winter Olympics), not to mention a tremendous revenue generator for all parties involved, looks increasingly unlikely, according to multiple sources.
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Lead-up events are underway for the event’s 2015 edition, but 2016 holds uncertainties.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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That uncertainty is a direct result of the Department of Justice’s indictments of FIFA officials and sports marketing executives last month, many of whom were directly involved with the staging of the 2016 event. In addition, the commercial rights holder for the event — a partnership of sports marketing firms Traffic Sports, Full Play and Torneos known both as WeMatch and Datisa — was heavily implicated in bribery schemes related to the 2016 tournament.
The Copa America tournament is governed by CONMEBOL, which is the governing body for soccer in South America. The tournament determines that continental champion and has been played, intermittently, 43 times since its first staging in 1916.
Because the federation has only 10 teams, CONMEBOL has invited other national teams to participate in the tournament field, with CONCACAF members such as Mexico, the United States and Costa Rica being invited since 1993.
CONCACAF’s governing oversight covers North America, Central America and the Caribbean.
The 2015 Copa America event is slated for Chile, starting on Thursday and continuing through July 4.
The 2016 edition of the event, however, was created with a particular goal of celebrating the 100th year of the competition — Copa America Centenario. Its plans call for matches to played in the United States for the first time. The field also would feature six CONCACAF teams with the traditional 10 CONMEBOL teams, compared with the 12-team fields of past Copa America tournaments.
In addition, in perhaps the biggest coup for the event, federation officials arranged for the tournament to be placed on FIFA’s official calendar. That slotting guarantees that the most talented and most marketable stars of the national teams could not be held back by their respective professional clubs from playing. Such players include Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Brazil’s Neymar and Uruguay’s Luis Suarez.
The 2016 event aims to “break the Hispanic/multicultural ceiling of soccer in USA,” according to a WeMatch sales presentation obtained by SportsBusiness Journal. The tournament also has the opportunity to “unite USA, Canada, Latin American and Caribbean marketing vision and budgets,” the presentation notes.
WeMatch had been pitching licenses for consumer goods along with retail-exclusive products and private-label opportunities. It also had shopped a variety of cross-branding and promotional options, as well as activations around ancillary events like a fan fest, music concerts and exhibitions, according to the presentation documents.
It was uncertain last week whether any sponsorships or licenses had been sold specifically for the tournament already. WeMatch representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Whether CONMEBOL would look to reassign the rights it had given to WeMatch was uncertain as well.
Also according to the presentation, 32 matches would be played for the 2016 event, and they would be played in at least 10 “top” U.S. markets between June 3 and June 26. Two dozen markets were announced as potential hosts for the tournament in December. Only stadiums with capacities larger than 50,000 were being considered, due to expected ticket demand.
The actual match hosts had been expected to be announced in late May, but since the indictments and upheaval at FIFA, no further word has come about venue selection.
Univision Deportes President Juan Carlos Rodriguez, speaking during the network’s upfront presentation last month, touted the 2016 event to potential advertisers. The network acquired the Spanish-language rights to the event in the United States last year. Rodriguez said the network has forecast that ratings for the event would beat its numbers for the 2014 World Cup, where the final averaged 9.2 million viewers.
Every Copa America Centenario match would be played in prime time, he added.
“It will be the most-watched tournament in the history of Spanish-language television,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t want to miss this, unless you want to wait another 100 years.”
Sources told SportsBusiness Journal in early May that Fox Sports was close at that time to signing a deal for the tournament’s English-language rights, but no deal had been signed as of last week.
Soon after the unsealing of the indictment, CONCACAF dismissed Webb and General Secretary Enrique Sanz, who was later revealed as one of the indictment’s unnamed co-conspirators. The federation’s executive committee subsequently created a special committee consisting of U.S. Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati, Canadian Soccer Association President Victor Montagliani and Mexican Soccer Federation President Justino Compean that was given the task of “evaluating and sustaining all of the business operations of the Confederation in the wake of the indictments brought against certain members of FIFA and CONCACAF,” according to a press release.
That group was expected to meet at the end of last week to discuss how best to stage this year’s CONCACAF Gold Cup, that federation’s continental championship, set to begin play in the United States on July 7. The viability of hosting the Copa America Centenario was also on the docket.
