What's the consensus on this year's Copa with the North American teams? Personally i LOVE it!
Gold Cup is BS. so obviously this is a way better competition for the concacaf teams. But also past copas seemed like smaller tournaments with 2 groups. This year it feels like a bigger more substantial competition all across the board.
I wonder what south american purists think? I really hope this is going to be the format for Copa from now on.
This Copa is making it painfully obvious how poor the structure of Concacaf's tournaments is.
For one, CONCACAF's setup includes too many knockout games. Basically, if the US or Mexico drops an egg early in a CONCACAF tournament, there is no negative.
To put this in perspective, if Canada won the Gold Cup but never got to face either team, they would have a trophy but wouldn't gain any real ground in world rankings.
For the South Americans, it comes down to how much the money means (because the US hosting will always be a huge gate) and how much risk they are comfortable with (that CONCACAF does well). That being said, having a tournament like this is good at letting each conference see what their relative quality is in a tournament setting.