Bob Koep
OBE Blog
The re-organization of the CONCACAF Cup into a Champions League is a welcome sign that soccer in these parts is catching up with the rest of the world.
Based on the way Europe and most other continents run their Champions League, the CONCACAF version now also selects teams from most of its member countries according to their current rating with some of the stronger countries getting three and four berths, while others get just one.
Canada, for example, gets one lone slot in the tournament while tiny Panama gets two. But that is based on the fact that Canada is an unknown quantity as it hasn’t contested the Cup for over 30 years.
Group play in the Champions league will go with four groups of four teams each from Sept 16 till Oct 30.
Seeded are two Mexican and two USA teams as well as the champions from Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
16 other clubs, including two more from Mexico and the USA, the one Canadian entry, and several from the islands and Panama for instance, will contest a head to head elimination in late August/early September with the eight survivors then joining the seeded clubs to form a 16 team starting lineup.
There are three clubs going to contest the lone Canadian spot, Vancouver Whitecaps, Montreal Impact and Toronto FC. in a round robin during the summer months. But who ever wins the berth will have to do some serious head scratching of how to go about playing in the League, provided they reach the lofty heights of quarter finals.
The top two clubs in each group will go to the knock out quarterfinals and that is where the fun starts. Home and home quarterfinals will go in February and semi finals in March.
Canadian teams, however, are in the middle of winter recess at that time and the teams are, in fact, not operating at all. The players are at home, wherever they may live, and certainly not game fit at that time.
Moreover, in the case of Toronto and Montreal, their fields will be unavailable in freezing temperatures and it is not possible to play there in mid-winter.
Of course there is always a way around everything, play home games in Florida for instance, but game fitness is something else unless the team start training in January, three months ahead of the season start.
And that will cost a lot of extra money.
Whoever gets the Canadian berth in this loop will have a fight on its hands in the latter stages of the tournament but if it reaches the final in April and wins, the prize is a slot in the 2009 FIFA Club World Cup in Japan.
