There are three major international tournaments this summer. A preview of the European Championships, and a little bit about why international soccer remains so compelling is here. Next up is the Copa América, which starts Thursday night in Atlanta.

A funny dynamic in global soccer is that despite its persistent Eurocentrism, a lot of the best ideas originate from elsewhere around the globe.
Perhaps most notably, people in South America figured out that continental international competition was vital for the sport far earlier than their counterparts in Europe. The first Campeonato Sudamericano de Football was played in Argentina in 1916 — whereas there wasn’t a continent-wide European competition until 1960.1Technically speaking, the 1916 tournament only featured Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, — but the first Euros only featured 17 teams with England, West Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands all declining to enter. So it all evens out, I suppose.
Ever since 1916, the tournament that eventually became the Copa América has been a summer celebration of the intense rivalries, unparalleled skill, and Machiavellian bureaucratic infighting that make South American football what it is.2The era of the tournament between 1930 and 1975 is subtitled “Disorganization and intermittency” on Wikipedia, which tells you something.
Part of the beauty of the tournament is that it is kind of made up on the spot. Since the early 1990s, the bare bones have always stayed the same: the 10 CONMEBOL nations, a group stage into a knockout bracket, a gloriously oversized trophy awarded to the champions. But lots of the other variables change from year to year, including frequency, the continent in which it takes place, and what other teams play in the tournament.3Japan have played in the Copa twice, Qatar have played once, most CONCACAF nations have played at least once. Australia and China have both been invited but forced to drop out.
This year’s Copa is a blown-out special edition in the competition, with 16 teams rather than the customary 12, and games being played in the United States. This is hugely exciting for American soccer fans who will get to see the United States men’s national team play top-level competition at home ahead of the 2026 World Cup, but more exciting for CONMEBOL, who get to sell marked-up tickets to the droves of Americans with roots in various Latin American countries that will pack out NFL stadiums for the chance to see their teams.
Despite the semi-transparently financial motivations for playing the tournament in the US, the addition of six CONCACAF teams adds some interesting wrinkles to this year’s tournament. Below are a few key questions and narratives for this tournament, starting with the defending Copa América and World Cup Champions: Argentina.
What do you do the day after all your dreams finally come true?
For a long time, it looked like Lionel Messi had missed his chance.
The greatest player of all time at the club level, he had the misfortune of being the second otherworldly diminutive lefty to emerge from Argentina, and spent the first decades of his career haunted by Diego Maradona’s iconic 1986 World Cup victory and his inability to replicate it.
Messi’s international career by the end of the 2010s had devolved into a series of increasingly absurdist tragedies — in three consecutive major tournaments he led Argentina to the final only to lose narrowly thanks to a combination of slapstick misses and heroic performances by the opposing team. When Argentina lost to France in the round of 16 in the 2018 World Cup, it seemed like he would never catch the specter of El Diego.
But then, a squad clicked into place at the 2021 Copa América in Brazil, and Messi finally got his hands on a major international tournament, and at long last won that elusive World Cup in 2022.
So the question for Messi and the gang is after your dreams finally come true, what do you do next?
For the most part, the answer has been to run it back. If the 2022 World Cup was a classic “one last job” heist movie, the 2024 Copa is the “just kidding one more job” sequel cobbled together with the same cast after the original film did surprisingly well at the box office.
Argentina are largely going to rely on the same group of players from Qatar in the United States. In their last truly big competitive match — a mid-November World Cup qualifier in Brazil — nine of the starting XI also started the World Cup final. The two remaining starters from that match against France subbed in later.
There are some marginal differences to this squad with young attackers Alejandro Garnacho and Valentin Carboni joining on, but the formula here is definitely “Let’s do the 2022 World Cup again.” And hey, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
But also: It might kind of be broke? That 2022 World Cup run involved a lot of letting teams back into the game for no apparent reason, and a lot of turning seemingly easy win into nail biters: A 2-0 lead against Australia became a white-knuckle 2-1 win; a 2-0 lead against the Netherlands erupted into a bench-clearing fight and was eventually decided on penalties; a dominant 2-0 lead against France in the final turned into one of the most frenetic games of soccer ever played after a 79th minute penalty.
It would be dumb to bet against Messi, especially since he appears to have the Mandate of Heaven at the moment, but at the same time this core Argentina group has succeeded on a knife’s edge over the past three years.
Maybe one extra last job might be one job too far.
What happened to Canada during — and since — the last World Cup?
This tweet, in hindsight, was slightly unfortunate.
Kings of Concacaf 🍁👑#CANMNT #WCQ #WeCAN pic.twitter.com/QDTaY4ItoV
— Canada Soccer (@CanadaSoccerEN) March 31, 2022
Things have gone quite poorly for the Canadian Men’s National Team ever since they declared themselves “Kings of CONCACAF” despite having won precisely zero of the multiple trophies currently awarded in men’s senior CONCACAF football.
That’s a joke, and obviously Canada should have celebrated finishing first overall in CONCACAF World Cup qualifying last cycle after decades in the wilderness. But ever since that qualification campaign, the results have not quite remained at the same level.
At the World Cup itself, they conspired to lose to Belgium in their opening game despite absolutely dominating the match (they produced 2.4 expected goals to Belgium’s 0.8). They followed that by losing a mostly even match against Morocco, and followed that by outright collapsing against Croatia.4Morocco and Croatia, of course, were both eventually semifinalists in that tournament so it was also just extremely unlucky for Canada to be in that group.
Then financial mismanagement and a pay dispute meant that two post World Cup friendlies were canceled. When the main squad finally returned to action, they were slightly disappointing in the 2023 Nations League and very disappointing in the 2024 edition.
But despite a slightly disastrous 4-0 friendly loss to Uruguay, there are signs that Canada could be a serious team if not kings of CONCACAF. Alphonso Davies remains the star of the show, but the key difference is that Ismaël Koné is coming off of an outstanding season in the Championship, where he was a key attacking midfielder for Watford. People have become over-reliant on green FB Reference bars when evaluating a player, but come on this is a lot of green:

Add in some really talented and still young attackers in Tajon Buchanan and Jonathan David, and there is the bones of a really good attack there.
The true wild card here is the coach. After being allegedly rejected by the USMNT player pool, Jesse Marsch is now coaching Canada. The tightly-pantsed Princeton grad has a fairly spotty record as a top-level coach with high highs and fairly hapless lows during his spells at Leipzig and Leeds. But it’s entirely possible that his slightly insane high pressing mania is better fit to the shorter bursts of the international game than the attritional warfare of a big European league. It’s also entirely possible that in players like Davies and Buchanon he has exactly the mix of on-the-ball skill and athleticism needed to execute on his plan.
And the truth is that at least some of what happened to Canada during and since the World Cup is freakish bad luck — missed penalties, bad deflections, unlucky concessions. If they can play more normal soccer games this summer, they’re fairly likely to win some of them.
Canada in the 2020s have been great, and they have also been inexplicably bad. Jesse Marsch teams over the past decade have been great, but have also often been inexplicably bad. This summer, both parties will hope that the upswing is aligned.
What is a signature win and can the United States Men’s National Team get one?
The tough thing about talking about the USMNT at the moment is that not only is most of the discourse swallowed up by always-tedious head coaching chat, a lot of the most vicious online fighting comes down to a camp of people who think Gregg Berhalter has committed grievous Crimes Against Soccer and should be tried at The Hague, and a camp of people who think he is more or less fine.
The latest flashpoint in the Berhalter Wars is the Signature Win Debate. Detractors say that Berhalter has not managed a “signature win” — a slightly amorphous concept with ever-shifting parameters but more or less just means that Gregg Berhalter’s USMNT haven’t managed to beat a top 10 or so national team yet.
The signature win stuff is slightly silly, because there are vanishingly few opportunities to actually achieve such a thing for the United States. If you discount matchups against a slightly flailing Mexico5Which anti-Berhalter folks argue you should. and friendlies6Which the anti-Berhalter folks are split on, but you also probably should. then the only signature win opportunities Berhalter has had were against England and the Netherlands in the World Cup.
Whatever you think of the whole signature win debate, the US will have at least one and likely two opportunities to get one at this tournament. The first will be when they close out the group stage against Uruguay in Kansas City on July 1. Then, assuming that they manage to beat both Bolivia and Panama in the other group games, they’ll play a quarterfinal against most likely Brazil or Colombia.
Can the USMNT actually beat any of those three teams?
Potentially! Berhalter’s saving grace so far is that he has managed to keep the variance quite close in most games. They were pretty comfortably outplayed by the Netherlands in the round of 16 in Qatar, but also generated 1.5 expected goals to the Dutch’s 1.7 in that game. The US were not particularly good in that game, but if they were not particularly good but a little more lucky, they might have a signature win.
And there are real players on this team. Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie had legitimately great seasons in Italy this year. Antonee Robinson was Fulham’s Player of the Season. Chris Richards became a stalwart for Crystal Palace. Folarin Balogun was a little disappointing for Monaco, but that had as much to do with struggling for playing time as actual poor performances.
The pieces are there, and at some point they will have to fit together. Or maybe they won’t and it will be time for Gregg Berhalter to head to the Netherlands.7I don’t mean to imply that Gregg Berhalter should be tried by the International Criminal Court. I’m much more on the “he’s fine” side of things. Just to say that a job in a mid-tier European league might suit him well after the weird experience of coaching the national team and the Dutch footballing tradition seems broadly aligned with his style of play so he might search for a job there if he is fired from the USMNT.
Does post-Neymar Brazil look that different from Neymar’s Brazil?
Poor Neymar.
He arrived in Barcelona in 2013 as one of the most hyped transfers in European football history. He had already won the South American Footballer of the Year Awards, and if that wasn’t enough he also had one of the greatest highlight reels in history by the time he was 21. It’s hard to imagine anyone having more pressure to be great than he did.
But here’s the thing. Neymar was really that good. He is Brazil’s all-time leading goal scorer and one of the key components of the last great Barcelona team. His stats in European football are just silly: 221 goals and 127 assists in 353 games before he departed for Saudi Arabia.
And yet the noise always drowned out the brilliance, it seemed. Too much attention on the diving, or the various transfer scandals, or the weird thing where he always seemed to miss games around his sister’s birthday. It didn’t help that the three World Cups he played in ended poorly, including the historic semifinal humiliation to Germany in 2014 and his nearly iconic would-be winner against Croatia in 2022 being nullified by a last-minute collapse. He probably never will get the credit he deserves as one of the only players to come close to Messi and Ronaldo while they were still at their peaks.
Now, with Neymar injured and all-but-retired, it’s time for the most successful nation in international soccer to play its first tournament of its next era. What is that going to look like?
So far, the results have been mixed: They’re currently sixth in CONMEBOL qualifying after six games, but partly that’s a product of the games that they have played so far. They lost away at Colombia and Uruguay and at home to Argentina, probably three of the five or so hardest matches of qualifying. Their only truly poor result in a competitive match was a 1-1 draw at home to Venezuela.8Although by Brazilian standards, the Argentina match is something of a disaster: Their first ever home loss in qualifying
It’s also worth noting that a lot of their 2023 struggles came during a strange period where Fernando Diniz was simultaneously Fluminense coach and interim Brazil coach while the federation was trying to convince Carlo Ancellotti to leave Real Madrid. Things have somewhat stabilized since Dorival Júnior stepped in as an actual full-time coach in January.
Brazil will obviously miss Neymar, and Richarlison’s persistent injuries mean they have to get a little creative with the striker position. But Vinícius Júnior has ascended to become one of the world’s best wide attackers just as Neymar faded from the spotlight, and Brazil’s front six is as skilled as any team in the world.
And just as the last few Messi-inspired tournament runs for Argentina have involved some combination of divine intervention and good luck, Brazil;s Neymar-era tournaments were also defined by crushingly bad luck, particularly the last two World Cups.
Brazil will likely be slightly worse overall at the Copa than they were in Qatar, but if they are slightly luckier it might not matter.
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