At Copa América final, fans endure terror, trauma due to CONMEBOL’s ‘inhumane’ neglect

The little girl wailed in terror. The little boy grasped for his chest. The women fought, desperately, to keep themselves from collapsing. The mother ran in circles, frantically, in search of what appeared to be her missing daughter, screaming in panic.

All had come to see a soccer game Sunday night at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.

They and 65,000 others had paid hundreds, if not thousands of dollars — most of it to CONMEBOL, the organizer of this Copa América — for tickets.

And CONMEBOL, with tens of millions in revenue banked, failed, utterly, shambolically, to keep them safe.

That was the shame of the 2024 Copa América final.

The result — Argentina 1, Colombia 0 — hardly mattered.

As Lionel Messi and James Rodríguez prepared to entertain fans, thousands of those fans, including some players’ family members, were stuck outside in distress.

Some were never allowed to enter, because organizers botched security operations. They allowed ticketless fans to roam freely outside the stadium, right up to the stadium’s gates. Inevitably, some broke through. And of course, CONMEBOL and local authorities will blame them for the chaos that ensued.

But it is CONMEBOL, and Hard Rock Stadium operators, and anybody else involved in the planning of Sunday’s final, that have blood and tears on their hands.

The ticketless fans, of course, are not entirely blameless. Some blasted through barriers. Some scaled walls and fences. Some apparently tried to get in to see their beloved Colombia via a massive stadium vent.

But ticketless fans are a fixture at major international soccer matches, especially in South America. Sunday only devolved into a harrowing experience because organizers failed to prepare for them — and failed to properly care for the 65,000 ticketed fans whose money they’d taken.

There was a quite obvious solution, a well-rehearsed strategy with which many foreign soccer fans are familiar. If you go to a World Cup game or a European final, there are multiple security perimeters, at least two heavily reinforced layers of protection between the outside world and the stadium. In Argentina, when I went to Copa Libertadores group-stage games last year, there were at least three checkpoints. Fans had to show a ticket several blocks away from La Bombonera or El Monumental. A block later, they had to show identification. They were patted down. Near the entrance, ticket checks again.

The stringent security deters ticketless fans. And if some do try to sneak through, the multiple layers help ensure that a backlog of fans doesn’t spiral into a perilous mess.

In Miami on Sunday, there was none of that.

There were only overwhelmed security personnel and police officers scrambling to mitigate the mess with the only means they know: excessive force.

They tackled and brutalized and bloodied the relatively few fans they caught. Many others seemed to run free.

Their only solution then was to lock up the stadium. “Various stadium gates were closed and re-opened strategically in an attempt to allow ticketed guests to enter safely and in a controlled manner,” a Hard Rock Stadium spokesperson said in a statement.

In doing so, they left thousands of innocent and ticketed fans stuck outside, suffering.

It’s unclear who, exactly, made those decisions and other costly ones. CONMEBOL said in a Monday statement that it “was subject to the decisions made by the Hard Rock Stadium authorities, according to the contractual responsibilities established for security operations.” It also said that it “recommended to these authorities the procedures proven in events of this magnitude,” but that the recommendations “were NOT taken into account.”

CONMEBOL, though, could have required them — and paid for them — in contract negotiations. It’s clear that the South American soccer governing body bears ultimate responsibility. It’s clear that the owner of this century-old competition oversaw “a disaster” on Wednesday and apparently changed nothing.

The consequences were also clear. The sun beat down on fans trapped outside. The South Floridian humidity began to eat away at their energy and sanity. As the evening wore on, and the gates remained all or mostly closed, the crowd only grew. In some areas, danger lurked. Throngs became crushes. Parents lifted their children up and over a barrier, to safety, but they themselves couldn’t move.

Scattered across the stadium, according to pictures and videos from the scene, there were fans — men, women, humans — lying on the ground, stricken by stress or heat, staggering in search of medical assistance or dousing themselves with water.

At one entrance, fans were packed shoulder to shoulder, back to front, rammed up against turnstiles that seemingly would not let anybody through — until a barrier tumbled to the ground, and fans tumbled with it.

“It was inhumane,” Silvina, the mother of Argentina midfielder Alexis Mac Allister, told TyC Sports.

It was so inhumane that, around 8:15, security seemed to give up. “Stadium officials, CONMEBOL, CONCACAF and law enforcement officers communicated and decided to open stadium gates for a short period of time to all fans to prevent stampedes and serious injury at the perimeter,” the Hard Rock Stadium spokesperson said.

So fans streamed in. Nobody will ever know how many paid thousands of dollars and how many paid zero. They packed the stands, seemingly beyond capacity, as the game got set to begin over an hour later than originally scheduled.

But before it could, suddenly, after that “short period of time,” the gates closed again.

Suddenly, the fans who hadn’t rushed the entryways and exacerbated the crush — including many with children — were out of luck.

Some brandished their phones, with their Ticketmaster tickets pulled up, hoping common sense and order might reign, but no. No, helmeted police officers ignored them, and instead scolded journalists trying to offer them a voice, ushering the journalists away.

There were many — including credentialed officials and journalists, two people on the scene told Yahoo Sports — who were still stuck outside as the game they’d come to see droned on. Some simply turned around and went home.

“The venue was at capacity,” Hard Rock Stadium’s statement said. “Gates were not re-opened.”

Even among some who’d entered, there was sadness and anger and exasperation. Excitement, sure, because the show was about to start, but perhaps also scars.

All were victims of CONMEBOL, who brought this Copa América to the United States to make millions of bucks and apparently didn’t care how many people it would harm along the way.

An inquest, surely, must begin to deduce what went wrong and who else was responsible.