Violette Reminds Us Concacaf’s Real Bias Isn’t Against MLS Or USA

Of all the embarassing things about the United States men’s national team’s decision to host a March 2022 World Cup qualifier in Minnesota, the worst might have been this: It was the kind of maneuver typically reserved for far poorer nations in Concacaf with a far smaller chance of qualifying for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. And it revealed the nagging insecurity that remains within U.S. soccer despite the obvious growth and the improvement of the game at most levels.

That same paranoia surfaces in a slightly different ways at regular intervals every spring during the Concacaf Champions League, the competition to crown the best domestic club from North America, Central America and the Caribbean.

You hear the prospect mentioned, sometimes in jest and at others in dread, of getting “Concacafed” during the tournament. In other words: falling victim to some quirk of the ethnically, economically and linguistically diverse region in some way that makes you suspect at least some subconscious bias against the Americans.

It might be the playing surface, or the scheduling, or the refereeing decisions. And until last season when the Seattle Sounders finally became the first MLS team, you could at least empathize with suspicions that the whole competition was a conspiracy against everything in pro soccer north of the Rio Grande.

But while there continue to be widely uneven standards and best practices between nations in the region, it was always a little silly to imagine that of all the leagues and all the countries, MLS and the United States were getting the short end.

Enter the travails of Violette AC, a CCL underdog story that is almost too good to be true, and if the U.S. State Department isn’t accommodating enough, might not be.

Last Tuesday, the heavy underdogs from a historically poor country going through a period of extreme turmoil not only defeated Austin FC of the MLS in the first leg of their round of 16 series, they romped to a 3-0 win. And they did so despite unrest forcing their “home” match to be relocated to the Dominican Republic.

To put it in a context fans of other American sports would understand, this is Chaminade over Virginia in 1982 … if the game had been moved to American Samoa.

And yet Violette was not even afforded the chance to relish their victory, because immediately following the win there was speculation they would not have enough of their team granted visas to be able to play Tuesday’s second leg of the first-round series in Austin. The most recent reporting from Hudson River Blue on Monday said the team was signing temporary players from the American semi-pro ranks to fill out Tuesday’s matchday squad.

And although a Concacaf spokesperson has told reporters the leg would go on as planned, there appears to be no acceptable Plan B to relocate the fixture if something happens. Plus, the rules of the competition stipulate that if a visiting team can’t travel to face the home team — even if it’s because of the home team’s immigration policies — said visiting team is interpreted to have withdrawn from the tournament.

In other words, somehow the burdens in both legs of this cup tie have fallen on the club from the tiny, impoverished and unsettled Caribbean state, and not on the MLS team with plenty more resources to absorb them.

To be clear, this isn’t Austin FC’s fault. And this isn’t the space to debate why the U.S. State Department is so demanding in granting the appropriate visas. The main point here is that this is a stunningly clear example of how Concacaf as a governing body far more often operates in a way that benefits the U.S. and MLS rather than harms it.

Don’t believe this? Consider how each of these competitions has evolved over time:

The Concacaf Gold Cup

The overwhelming majority of matches at the federation’s international championship have been staged in the United States since 2005, with only two finals played beyond American borders — in Mexico City in 1993 and 2003. Since then, the biennial tournament has occasionally granted cities outside the United States host duties for a small selection of group games. That’s it.

Additionally, the tournament is strategically designed to make improbably to impossible that the United States and Mexico — the region’s two historic powers over the last three decades — could possibly meet before the final.

Concacaf World Cup Qualifying

The original plan for qualifying for the 2022 World Cup Cycle made things far more cushy for the region’s elite and far more difficult for the rest. The top six teams in the FIFA World Rankings would automatically qualified into the six-team final group stage, with the top three finishers heading to Qatar. The remaining 29 member nations would be left to a brutal fight for one chance to playoff against the fourth-place finisher from that Hexagonal round, with the winner of that in turn to head to an intercontinental playoff.

The pandemic forced the federation to scrap that structure, but what it came up with instead still had clear benefits for the region’s top teams. The five best in the FIFA rankings reached the final round automatically with three additional teams qualifying from a 27-team preliminary round. And in the 14-match final round, four out of five match windows featured three games within seven days, clearly benefiting deeper squads.

Concacaf Champions League

For starters, the name Concacaf Champions League is deceptive, since it’s actually been contested entirely in a knockout bracket format since 2018, with each round (except sometimes the final) played in a two-match series decided by total goals.

But that hasn’t always been the case. When the competition was rebranded in 2008, it came with four groups of four and a six-game group stage for each team, similar to that of the famous UEFA Champions League. Then there was a stretch of a format with eight groups of three teams — with four group games for each team — before the transition to the all-knockout format.

The all-knockout format is clearly the most favorable to MLS clubs, since it shields them from additional travel during the business end of the regular season, as well as hosting additional games that typically did not generate much ticket revenue. Additionally, starting with a bracket guarantees the fewest games in late February or early March between MLS and Liga MXMX
sides, when the former are still gaining their full fitness out of preseason.

For now, it appears Tuesday’s match will go on in some form, though it will be impossible to know how much it impacted Violette in their preparations to defend their 3-0 aggregate advantage. That will spare Concacaf blushes from what has been a repeat issue. Just last season, another Hatian team — Cavaly — was eliminated for the same reason, though it did not capture media attention in the same way because neither first-round leg against the New England Revolution was played.

In the bigger picture, it’s unlikely the federation will take action to improve the integrity of competition if it impacts the amount of total revenue that can be generated and total expense that can be avoided. Hosting the second leg in Austin isn’t the fairest solution, but it is the one that will generate the most ticket sales and the most attention for the competition with the fewest logistical hurdles for everyone not named Violette AC.

And it should remind every U.S. national team or MLS fan next time they complain about getting “Concacafed” that yes, there are strange things that happen all the time in this federation that unites 35 countries of vast wealth, cultural and linguistic disparities. But most of them actually work in your favor.