The assumption that a major football tournament on American soil will run smoothly has been tested severely this summer. Across the cities that hosted Copa América, a succession of organisational failures — transport bottlenecks, security lapses, dangerous heat, and attendances that swung between worryingly sparse and dangerously overcrowded — combined to produce what the Guardian has described as a tournament of chaotic character.
Conmebol, which organised the competition, had ample warning. The signs, according to the Guardian's account, were visible throughout the group stage and into the knockout rounds. Cities struggled to move fans efficiently between venues and accommodation. Security arrangements fell short in ways that left supporters exposed. The North American summer heat — a factor that tournament planners had known about long in advance — created conditions that put health at risk across multiple matchdays.
The final itself brought the starkest illustration of what can go wrong at the opposite end of the spectrum. Where some earlier fixtures had attracted thin crowds, Sunday's showpiece drew numbers that strained infrastructure and raised immediate safety concerns. The Guardian reported the atmosphere as the culmination of a tournament that had tested patience and endangered people in roughly equal measure.
The significance extends well beyond Conmebol's immediate post-mortem. The 2026 World Cup is scheduled to be held across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with a far larger number of host cities, a greatly expanded field of 48 nations, and an audience that will dwarf anything Copa América drew this summer. The organisational demands will be proportionally greater in almost every respect — more matches, more travelling supporters, longer periods of sustained heat in several venues, and security requirements on a scale that will test every host city simultaneously rather than in rotation.
Fifa and the local organising committees will have studied this summer's events closely. The lessons available to them are not abstract. Transportation infrastructure in several American cities was not designed with mass sporting events in mind, and the short lead times for Copa América left limited room to remedy that. For 2026, the lead time is longer — but it is not unlimited, and planning decisions are already being made.
What Copa América demonstrated, the Guardian's piece argues, is that the era of assuming tournaments will simply work — that the logistical machinery will hold — is over. Whether that conclusion reshapes how Fifa approaches venue selection, ticketing, scheduling around peak heat, and security coordination remains to be seen. The evidence from this summer suggests that hoping for the best is not a strategy that the world's largest football event can afford.