The creation of this new European tournament of selections changes the football of the old continent, and isolates Latin America?

UEFA, the highest footballing entity in Europe, created a continental league at national level that had been conceived since 2013, when its president was the legendary former French player Michel Platini.

The project was approved in 2014, but it was not until January 24, 2018 that the draw for the league began in September. The tournament includes the 55 European teams affiliated with UEFA, and the group stage will be played on the FIFA dates of September and November 2018 and the play-off phase will be played on the FIFA date of June 2019. This guarantees a blank for all European teams. However, the question that raises is: the Latin American teams that used to measure against Europeans, what will they do?

Latin American teams such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Ecuador, and many others are accustomed to playing against European teams of great level in the aforementioned FIFA dates. These dates, in the case of Latin Americans, serve as preparation for the Copa America and leave a very high monetary gain. However, now, with the implementation of the League of Nations in Europe, everything changes.

Europe will gather and take advantage of this congregation to increase the quality of its football powers, to level the less experienced teams and to prepare them all for the Eurocopa 2020 and the World Cup in 2022. Latin America, alien to this competition and isolated with its implementation.

Will there be a League of Nations of Latin America?

With this change in European football, that indirectly affects world football, the Latin teams have two options: on one hand, to invent a tournament similar to the League of Nations in Europe, with a pleasant, striking, and competitive format; on the other hand, to settle for friendly matches against selections such as from Indonesia, China, Mali, Gabon or Yemen, to name a few.

The most appropriate for the Latin American teams would be to opt for the option of creating their own tournament that guarantees a good show, good preparation matches, good prizes, and a good economic gain, because if the option to be measured with fairly competitive teams from other continents is chosen, the preparation is not going to be the same and the economic collections are not going to be great either.

Governing bodies of Latin American football, more precisely Conmebol and Concacaf, will have to take radical and immediate measures because several of their most competitive teams will face a period of football drought after the World Cup.

Beyond that, the economic gains that some Latin American football powers were accustomed to winning with flashy matches against Europeans will disappear. Latin America does not have a contingency plan to deal with this abandonment of the Europeans, despite the fact that this scenario was confirmed since 2014. For now the Latin American teams will go to Russia in search of world glory, but when this adventure is over they will have to find the way of not succumbing isolated.

Latin American Post | Javier Aldana
Copy edited by Marcela Peñaloza