Avoiding the Drop

Let’s say you’ve got a huge country that’s also crazy about soccer. You want to have a tournament amongst all those teams (something like the FA Cup), but the sheer number of teams in your country (plus the economic and logistical issues encountered when poor teams are trying to use poor roads to travel long distances) makes England’s method prohibitive. Furthermore, the country’s been playing soccer for a lot longer than your tournament, with each local state sponsoring it’s own  in each local state. How does that tournament look?

Enter the Copa do Brasil, which is equal parts FA Cup and Brazilian Champions League. Read on to learn about how they do things down in South America.

Brazil doesn't believe in logos.

THE COPA DO BRASIL

Date Started: 1989; it loosely replaced the Taça Brasil (Brazil Trophy), which was discontinued way back in 1970. Outside of the glory of winning the cup, the other perk associated with winning the the Copa do Brasil is an automatic berth in the Copa Libertadores (this is essentially the Champions League of South America; we’ll cover it at a later date). Grêmio and Cruzeiro are the most successful teams in the tournament, with four wins apiece.

Who’s Eligible: To discuss who’s eligible, we need to first discuss the structure of Brazilian soccer and a little bit about why it’s done this way. The first thing you need to understand: Brazil is huge. It’s the fifth largest country in the world with 8,514,877 square kilometers; this is broken up into 26 states. Travel between these states isn’t always easy, and can be pretty expensive. If you can’t easily drive from Eastern Brazil to Western Brazil, and flying is cost prohibitive, than you’re left with only one real option: state tournaments.

That’s how they roll in Brazil, at least. Each of the 26 states plays their own miniature league (complete with promotion and relegation), with a set number of allocations getting assigned to each state. So São Paulo, the largest state (twice the size of England), sends the top two league finishers. Also, the larger states have their own FA-cup style tournaments; the winners for those competitions also qualify. So in São Paulo, the winner of the Copa Paulista de Futebol (a cup tournament for São Paulo’s teams) also goes through, giving them three berths in the league. All told, that’s 54 teams.

However, to have a knockout tournament, you need ten more teams (to give you four groups of sixteen). The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) has a solution: send the ten best teams that aren’t already going, based on their rankings, to the tournament as well. Last year, those teams were Corinthians (2nd), Vasco da Gama (3rd), Santos (10th), Fluminese (11th), Guarani (13th), Portuguesa (17th), Santa Cruz (21st), Paraná (23rd), Ceará (25th), and América de Natal (30th); Corinthians won the whole thing last year.

Oh, and one more thing: this tournament has a time conflict with the Copa Libertadores. Since the winner of the Copa do Brasil goes on to the Copa Libertadores, the easy fix for that scheduling conflict is to make teams that qualified for the Copa Lib ineligible for the Copa do Brasil.

I really, really like how the Copa do Brasil handles qualifying. For one, it keeps the competition relatively fresh; none of the five Copa Lib teams are in it, so there’s no chance of having one team “overexposed” like the European Champions League teams are. And since the winner goes on to the Copa Lib, he automatically becomes ineligible the next year; there’s automatically a new winner every season, which inevitably freshens the thing up a bit. This method also fixes the fixture congestion associated with being involved in multiple competitions, and spreads the chance for Copa Libertadores qualification around a bit more to smaller teams.

Think about that in terms of, say, the Carling Cup. What if you weren’t eligible if you were also in the Champions League? It’d lessen the burden on the top teams, while at the same time creating a pipeline for smaller teams to both get some more cash and get into the Europa League.

This also is a fantastic template for a structure that might work in the U.S. We’ve talked about geography before, particularly in terms of how it impacts soccer’s success in the U.S. People don’t naturally support things that they can’t see; me being a Columbus Crew fan (with Columbus two hours south of me) makes about as much sense as a Liverpool resident rooting for Aston Villa (league table notwithstanding). That being said, there are plenty of people who would watch Cleveland play Toledo, Akron, and Dayton (and maybe even Youngstown), especially if the winner of those tournaments goes on to a national tournament. In fact, this replicates pretty closely how high school soccer is handled, and people definitely travel to watch those games. This might not work on a professional level, but it’d be neat to see it organized as an amateur competition.

How It Works: The tournament becomes a two-legged knockout tournament; I couldn’t find anything to determine who plays who (everything on this is in Portuguese; Brazilians really don’t care if Americans can follow their tournament or not), but I’d imagine it’s an open draw. Away goals are used as a tiebreaker; if you’re used to European knockout tournaments and have gotten this far, you’ll feel pretty much at home. The final is over two legs.

The only quirk is their “away goals mercy rule”. If, in the first two rounds of the tournament, the away team in the first leg wins by two goals or more, the second game is called off and the away team advances to the next round. Because of this rule, champions Corinthians played two fewer games runners up Internacional.

All told, I like this tournament a lot; I don’t know any of the teams, but it seems to be a much fairer and more organized tournament than the ones we’re used to seeing. Admittedly, part of that might be because qualification is so much different than it is in Europe. Different isn’t always better, but in this case I have a hard time thinking that it’s worse.