During Copa América final, fans experience terror and trauma due to ‘inhumane’ neglect by CONMEBOL

The little girl was crying in fear. The little boy was clutching his chest. The women were desperately fighting not to collapse. The mother was running around in circles in panic, searching for what appeared to be her missing daughter, screaming.

Everyone had come to watch a football game on Sunday night at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.

She 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, failed in an utterly chaotic way 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 Rodriguez prepared to entertain the fans, thousands of fans, including players’ relatives, were trapped outside in fear.

Some were never allowed in because the organizers botched the security operations. They let fans without tickets walk around freely outside the stadium, right up to the stadium gates. Inevitably, some broke through. And of course CONMEBOL and the local authorities will blame them for the chaos that ensued.

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

The ticketless fans are of course not entirely innocent. Some shot through barriers. Some climbed over walls and fences. Some apparently tried to enter the stadium via a huge fan to see their beloved Colombia.

But ticketless fans are a regular feature of major international soccer matches, especially in South America. Sunday was only made a hair-raising experience because organizers had not prepared for it — and had not properly cared for the 65,000 ticketless fans whose money they had taken.

There was a fairly obvious solution, a well-rehearsed strategy that many foreign football fans are familiar with. When you go to a World Cup match or a European final, there are multiple security perimeters, at least two heavily fortified layers of protection between the outside world and the stadium. In Argentina, when I went to the Copa Libertadores group stage matches last year, there were at least three checkpoints. Fans had to show a ticket a few blocks from La Bombonera or El Monumental. A block further, they had to show their ID. They were frisked. At the entrance, ticket checks again.

Tight security keeps fans without tickets out. And if a few do try to sneak in, the multiple layers ensure that a backlog of fans doesn’t grow into a dangerous mess.

In Miami on Sunday, there was none of that.

Only security personnel and police officers were present, trying to contain the chaos with the only means they knew: excessive force.

They tackled, beat and bloodied the relatively few fans they caught, while many others seemed to be running free.

Their only solution then was to lock down the stadium. “Several stadium gates were strategically closed and reopened in an effort to allow ticket holders to enter in a safe and controlled manner,” a Hard Rock Stadium spokesperson said in a statement.

In doing so, they left thousands of innocent fans, who did have a ticket, sitting outside and suffering.

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

CONMEBOL could have demanded them — and paid for them — in contract negotiations, however. It is clear that the South American Football Confederation bears ultimate responsibility. It is clear that the owner of this century-old competition oversaw “a disaster” on Wednesday and apparently did nothing to change it.

The consequences were clear, too. The sun was beating down on fans trapped outside. The South Florida humidity was beginning to sap their energy and sanity. As the night wore on and the gates remained closed, either partially or completely, the crowd only grew larger. In some places, danger lurked. The crowd was crushed. Parents were lifting their children up and over a barrier to safety, but they themselves could not move.

Scattered around the stadium, according to photos and videos from the scene, fans — men, women, people — lay on the ground, stricken with stress or heat, staggering in search of medical help or dousing themselves with water.

At one of the entrances, fans stood shoulder to shoulder, back to back, pressed against turnstiles that seemed to let no one through. Until a barrier fell to the ground and the fans fell with it.

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

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

So the fans poured in. No one will ever know how many paid thousands of dollars and how many paid zero. They were packed, seemingly to capacity, when the game started an hour later than originally scheduled.

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

Suddenly the fans who did not have stormed the entrances and increased the crowds — including many people with children — were unlucky.

Some waved their phones, Ticketmaster tickets held high, hoping that sanity and order would prevail, but no. No, helmeted police officers ignored them and instead cursed at journalists who tried to give them a voice, and sent the journalists away.

Many — including authorized officials and journalists, two people at the scene told Yahoo Sports — were still stuck outside as the game they wanted to watch continued. Some simply turned around and went home.

“The venue was completely full,” the statement from Hard Rock Stadium said. “The gates have not reopened.”

Even among some of those who came in, there was sadness and anger and exasperation. Excitement, certainly, because the show was about to begin, but perhaps scars as well.

They were all victims of CONMEBOL, which brought the Copa América to the United States to make millions and apparently didn’t care how many people would get hurt.

An investigation must determine what went wrong and who else is responsible.