Introduction
The Copa America 2024 championship was meant to be a football festival, a way to encourage Americans to become more passionate about the game, and a taster for the 2026 World Cup.
Rather, what was left was a dismal, if not horrifying, vision of women and children gasping for air and needing medical assistance for heat exhaustion as a result of a crowded area. Without tickets, desperate supporters leaped fences, raced over guards, and even squeezed through tiny openings close to a ventilation system to enter the stadium.
The mother of Argentina’s star player, Alexis Mac Allister, Silvina Riela, told the Argentine news outlet TYCSports, “It was inhumane.”
The unfortunate turn of events placed tremendous pressure on FIFA, the World Cup organizers, and the host cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico to pick up lessons and get ready for the next big football competition, which takes place in two summers.
Thank goodness, nobody died. However, who is at fault for this Copa America mishap?
Let’s start with the offenders, who took matters into their own hands and caused the Miami-Dade Police Department to make 27 arrests and 55 ejections from a restless crowd of spectators who were beaten by the oppressive heat and humidity of South Florida and pressed close to one another.
Outraged by the Copa America debacle at Hard Rock Stadium, the mayor of Miami has joined the cries for change. Remembering the enormity of the event: This Copa America final between Colombia and Argentina was a once-in-a-lifetime football contest and experience, with possibly the greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, playing in his final major international competition.
Let’s move on to the relevant organizations: CONMEBOL, the South American Football Confederation, and the Copa America tournament organizers failed miserably in this regard. CONCACAF, a similar-sized North American organization, also made a serious mistake by not helping stadium officials and CONMEBOL more during the championship game.
Without the foresight of prior incidents where rowdy fans created dangerous or deadly situations in other football matches around the world, Hard Rock Stadium officials, local law enforcement, and first responders found themselves in a precarious situation due to the lack of coordination from CONMEBOL. These groups were outnumbered in comparison to the stadium’s over 70,000 fans.
Copa America
The 2024 Copa América was the 48th edition of the Copa América, the quadrennial international men’s soccer championship organized by South America‘s football ruling body CONMEBOL, and was co-organized by CONCACAF. The tournament was held in the United States. Argentina was the defending champion, and successfully won a record sixteenth title after defeating Colombia 1–0.
The organizations did not prepare for or take any lessons from the February 2015 stampeding fans that killed 22 people in Cairo. or from the July 2017 deaths of two individuals in South Africa. Or the 125 fatalities that occurred in October 2022 in Indonesia, or the 12 fatalities and over 100 injuries that occurred earlier this year in El Salvador. Not to mention the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 or the Euro 2020 final featured in Netflix’s The Final: Attack on Wembley. These are just a few of the more recent catastrophes.
After waiting for at least two hours to enter the stadium, Maria Morales, a Colombian fan who went to the game on Sunday with her three companions, remarked, “It was scary.”
Lionel Scaloni, the Argentina coach, stated following the match, “We had players waiting for their family to get in the stadium.” “Without knowing the whereabouts of your family members, we had to begin a match. It was quite strange to watch the videos together.
The Copa America final was delayed by at least one hour and twenty minutes from its original start time of 8 p.m. ET because stadium officials and local law officers had to leave to deal with the horrific events before to the game. CONMEBOL took nearly twenty-four hours to produce a statement regarding the incident. The statement laid the blame at Hard Rock Stadium and accepted no accountability.
