The Copa América Centenario, referred to in English as the 2016 Centennial Copa America, is a scheduled international men's association football tournament due to be held in the United States in 2016. The competition is a celebration of the centenary of CONMEBOL and Copa América, and is to be the first Copa América hosted outside of South America.
The tournament, which will be the 45th edition of Copa América since its inception in 1916, will be held as part of an agreement between CONMEBOL (the South American football confederation) and CONCACAF (the football confederation for North and Central America and the Caribbean) as a special edition between the usual four-year cycle, and will feature an expanded field of 16 teams (increase from the usual 12), with ten teams from CONMEBOL and six teams from CONCACAF.
The winner will not receive a berth in the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup, as Chile have already qualified as winners of the 2015 edition.
In February 2012, Alfredo Hawit, then Acting President of CONCACAF, announced that the competition would be expected to take place in 2016, as a celebration of CONMEBOL's centenary. CONMEBOL President Nicolás Leoz said "Hopefully we can organize a big event, because we have 100 years and we want to celebrate big."
The tournament was announced by CONMEBOL on 24 October 2012 and confirmed by CONCACAF on 1 May 2014. On 26 September 2014, FIFA announced that the tournament has been added to the FIFA International Match Calendar, meaning that clubs must release players called up to the competition.
The tournament was placed in doubt after several high profile sports
executive arrests were made including people involved with media rights
holder Datisa (using the trading name of "Wematch"), a partnership
between three media rights companies; Full Play, Torneos and Traffic Sports Marketing. In December 2014, Brazilian José Hawilla,
the owner and founder of Traffic Sports plead guilty "corruption
charges including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering". In an
indictment, the FBI stated that officials were to receive bribes totalling US$20million for the 2016 event.
Datisa held agreements for the commercial rights with CONMEBOL and
CONCACAF and had their bank account frozen placing the tournament in
jeopardy. On 21 October 2015 CONCACAF announced that they had terminated their agreement with Datisa.On 23 October 2015, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and the hosting association US Soccer Federation all confirmed that the tournament was going ahead as originally intended.
A new trophy was suposed to be created for the tournament and was to be unveiled on 4 July 2015 at the Copa merica final. No trophy was unveiled amidst the FIFA corruption scandal.
Luis Chiriboga, the President of the Ecuadorian Football Federation stated the United States and Mexico were potential hosts of at least one stage of the competition. Hawit preferred the competition to be hosted in the United States for financial reasons, stating that "the market is in the United States, the stadiums are in the United States, the people are in the United States. The study that we have made [shows] that everything’s in the United States." In July 2012, CONCACAF President Jeffrey Webb stated there was much organizing to be done.
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| The current Copa America trophy |
On 8 January 2015, CONCACAF and CONMEBOL announced the 24 U.S. metropolitan areas which have indicated interest in hosting matches. The stadiums were chosen following a bidding process, with the minimum capacity to be 50,000. The final list of venues, anticipated to number between 8 and 13, was to be announced in May 2015. However, the list was not released and speculation regarding whether the tournament will be able to move forward arose because Interpol red notices were issued for the former presidents of the CONMEBOL and CONCACAF confederations in relation to the 2015 FIFA corruption case, including allegations that they accepted significant bribes in relation to the $112.5 million broadcasting deal for the event.
However, officials from CONMEBOL expressed a desire to move forward with the event despite the scandal.
On 19 November 2015, the ten venues selected for the tournament were announced by CONCACAF, CONMEBOL, and US Soccer.
The group seeds and match schedule were announced on 17 December 2015. The USA (Group A) were seeded as host, Argentina (Group D) were seeded as the highest FIFA-ranked team in the CONMEBOL region during December 2015. According to a press-release published by Soccer United Marketing, Brazil (Group B) and Mexico (Group C) were seeded as they were "the most decorated nations in the last 100 years in international competitions from their respective confederations".
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