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Copa America 2024 was supposed to show the soccer world that the United States can successfully host major tournaments. The competition, which is typically held in South America, was played throughout the States in June and July. Many essentially saw Copa America as basically a dry run for the 2026 World Cup.
While there were lofty expectations, this summer’s tournament was a borderline disaster. High ticket prices forced several group-stage matches to happen in front of half-empty stadiums. Problems with pitches in multiple arenas caused backlash from a plethora of players and coaches. Perhaps most importantly, security issues marred the latter stages of the competition.
Despite all of these problems, there will be some notable changes ahead of the 2026 World Cup. While Copa America 2024 was in the United States, CONMEBOL took charge of the competition’s organization. The South American soccer federation was in charge of the event, including security and crowd control procedures. FIFA, however, will take charge of the World Cup in two years.
FIFA gets a head start on potential pitch problems
The world’s governing body of the sport will almost certainly take more of an initiative to make the World Cup run smoothly. South American soccer expert, Tim Vickery, claimed that changes will happen ahead of the tournament.
“You can guarantee with FIFA coming to town for the World Cup that the level of organization will be better than [Copa America],” Vickery talkSPORT. “I think a few lessons will be learned too, but thinking ahead to the World Cup in two years’ time, the crowd control and event organization is not the only possible problem that we’re going to have. There are two other problems.”
“The pitches which were a disaster [at Copa America 2024] in two senses. Firstly, most of these stadiums are American football stadiums, so what they did was put grass on top of artificial turf. They laid this grass two or three days before….
Source link : https://worldsoccertalk.com/news/tim-vickery-warns-of-problems-in-usa-for-world-cup-2026/
Author : Chris Moore
Publish date : 2024-07-17 14:36:54
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