Read part one of the Copa America preview here, and the Euro 2024 preview here
There was too much Copa América to fit in one preview, and due to some extenuating circumstances1I have a day job the preview had to be broken up into two parts. Here is a second batch of key narratives and questions going into the tournaments, starting with the two secret favorites: Colombia and Uruguay.
Is this a year for a team outside of the Big Two?
The two giants of South American football are Brazil and Argentina: Combined, the two nations have won 24 of the 48 all-time editions of the Copa América, not to mention eight World Cups. 2Brazil have actually won fewer total championships than Uruguay, but that’s mostly down to a weird lack of success in the mid-20th century: The Seleção have been the most successful team in the Copa since 1990, with five titles in that span.
But it’s not like every single edition of the Copa is just a march to an Argentina vs. Brazil final, and several other teams have managed to either take advantage of down years for the two powerhouses or just outright beat them. Most recently, Chile won back-to-back championships in 2015 and 2016, and both Uruguay and Colombia have won the trophy this century. There are years, when for whatever reason another team has a shot.
2024 might just be shaping up to be one of those years, primarily because Colombia and Uruguay are both really really good.
Let’s start with Uruguay, who are the third giant of South American soccer despite being its third smallest independent nation by population. Uruguay’s team of the mid-1920s and early 1930s was probably the first great international side, and despite being a smaller nation it has continued to produce talent and punch above its weight into the 21st century.
The current roster is a mix of youth and experience, of control and chaos. They will start likely the best midfield at the tournament, with some combination of Federico Valverde, Manuel Ugarte, Rodrigo Bentancur, and Nicolás de la Cruz taking up the middle of the pitch. All three of these guys have slightly overlapping, but complimentary skillsets — to varying degrees, they are all somewhere between capable and elite as passers, dribblers, and ball-winners. 3De la Cruz is only really elite as a ball-winner if you compare him to attackers. He does a lot of defensive work for an attacking midfielder, but not that much defensive work for a general midfielder. However the point is that he is a “little bit of everything guy” for his club Flamengo, and his per 90 stats in the still-very-young 2024 season in Brazil are absolutely bonkers. He’s pretty much 90th percentile or better on FBREF for every single attacking stat.
The interchangeability of that midfield is perfect for their head coach, the legendary Marcelo Bielsa, who is sort of like if an evil scientist was a kindly avuncular soccer coach. Bielsa is known for a monastic dedication to preparation and for coaching teams to play in a highly coordinated defensive system that combines intense on-the-ball pressure with man-marking. The combination of midfielders at Bielsa’s disposal is perfectly suited for that system: All of them can win the ball in a one-against-one situation, and all of them can carry the ball forward and create danger once they have it.
Speaking of creating danger: Darwin Núñez. The Liverpool striker has developed a reputation as a serial misser of goals, which to an extent is fair: He only scored 11 real goals from 16.3 expected goals in the Premier League last season. But the stats nerds will all tell you that creating chances is a better predictor of long-term success than scoring them and simply put, stuff happens when Núñez is on the field: He chases after long balls, presses defenders, and makes slightly incomprehensible decisions, all traits that lead to goal scoring chances for himself and his teammates. And much like the midfield, Núñez’s combination of skill and relentlessness makes him a great Bielsa player.
Add in the spite-fueled reanimated corpse of Luis Suárez and the silky wing play of Facundo Pellistri and Uruguay have been really good since Bielsa took charge. They’re currently second in CONMEBOL World Cup qualifying, recording wins against both Argentina and Brazil in the process.
Uruguay are a team with a lot of complimentary gears, and the right mechanic to fit them into place. Everything seems to be clicking right now.
Colombia, meanwhile, has a slightly more complicated history as a national team. The country has produced some world-class talent over the years, but with the exception of one Copa América title in 2001, it has never quite all come together for Los Cafeteros.
In 2024, however, they are entering the tournament undefeated for nearly two years. They have been pretty much impeccable since they failed to qualify for the last World Cup: A few draws here and there, sure, but racking up friendly wins against Germany and Spain and a World Cup Qualifying victory against Brazil.
Plus this team is absolutely loaded. Headlined by another Liverpool star in Luis Díaz, the squad boasts lots and lots of players who have been key components for very successful European teams, including Raphael Borré, Mateus Uribe, Davinson Sanchez, and Jefferson Lerma and a few up-and-coming players who are just starting to make a major impact on the European stage like Luis Sinisterra and Jhon Durán. Juan Quintero has never quite been able to make an impact on the other side of the Atlantic, but he has more than enough talent to make a difference in tournament football, and was pretty good steadying the ship for Colombia’s attack while James Rodriguez.
Speaking of James Rodriguez, he is also still here, and still just 31 years old. Generally speaking, he’s been hit with a bit of “one hit wonder” narrative — that he more or less burned out after his 2014 World Cup and subsequent transfer to Real Madrid. And that is sort of fair, but only in that during that World Cup he looked like he might literally become the best player in the world, and over the next decade he was simply one of the best players in the world, or at least he was when healthy. And then club football kind of moved past him: The physical demands that top teams in England and Spain and Germany now place on their star attackers don’t suit James, both because he is too much a classic creative player and because his body just isn’t up to playing 40 or more games a season.
But international football very much still moves at James’s pace, and he has always been outstanding for his national team. In Colombia’s recent friendly demolition of the United States, he was dropping a little deeper in possession and picking out passes to some of the aforementioned younger and faster attackers. And in the summer heat in the United States there will be plenty of space for him to continue to work that magic.
He was never the best player on a Champions League-winning team, but there is still potential for one more Summer of James. Any excuse to watch his goals from the 2014 World Cup, really.
Can Mexico actually be this bad?
Like they are stuck in an episode of Sex and the City, the Mexico men’s national team has never really recovered from a mismanagement drunken brunch.
This is mostly rumors and hearsay but if you’re a paying subscriber to Jon Arnold’s excellent “Getting CONCACAFed” newsletter you can read the most well-sourced English language version of the story here. Basically: In 2019, Mexico beat the USMNT 3-0 in a friendly at MetLife Stadium, and the following day a bunch of their star players went out for boozy brunch in New York City that allegedly got out of hand. Again, allegedly, Javier Hernández, AKA Chicharito AKA Mexico’s all-time leading goalscorer, was the leader of this brunch escapade and his refusal to apologize to head coach Tata Martino led to his exile from the team.
Now, Chicharito was on the downswing of his career and figuring out the attack without him was probably better for the program long-term, but it’s hard not to spot late 2019 as an inflection point. Mexico had spent the back half of the 2010s regaining the upper-hand from the USMNT for dominance of North American soccer. In 2018, they beat Germany at the World Cup group stage while the USMNT was at home having failed to qualify, and in 2019 they kept the Americans at a comfortable arms’ length in the Gold Cup final before keeping them at an even more comfortable, even longer arms’ length in that friendly.
Since then, things have gone much worse for Mexico. They have not managed to beat the United States this decade, and during that same time span they also had a quite uninspiring group stage exit in Qatar. While Chicharito might not have helped things in reality, in hindsight it feels like the brunch exile just threw everything slightly askew for Mexico.
But it’s possible that they are not quite as bad as their last couple years of results indicate. They’ve been capable of the odd good performance — a 2-2 draw against Germany, only losing to Brazil on a stoppage time goal — and the more that the post-Héctor Herrera and Andrés Guardado generation plays together the better they will likely get.
More importantly for this tournament in particular, they are drawn into a wide open Group B alongside Jamaica, Venezuela, and Ecuador. In an ideal world for Mexico, this group stage is a chance to play three matches against relatively evenly matched opponents and get their feet under them a little bit. But it has been far from an ideal world for the Mexican men’s national team the past four years.
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