Avoiding the Drop

While most of Europe is gearing up for the octofinal of the UEFA Champions League, South America is getting ready to kick off their own party: the Copa Libertadores (or, if you’re into sponsorship deals, the “Copa Santander Libertadores de América”) starts up first round action tomorrow. And while most of us probably will only watch a couple of games, it’s still the biggest tournament on a continent where soccer is king. And unlike the Champions League – which tends to be dominated by the same teams over and over – the Copa Lib likes to recycle their clubs. Let’s take a look at the nuances of the South American Champions League after the jump.

Date Started: 1960 was the first year a formal tournament between more than one South American country was held. To look at the first iterations of the tournament, however, you’d have to go back to 1913 and the Copa Ricardo Aldao.

The Copa Ricardo Aldao (named after Ricardo Aldao, the head of the Argentine FA and the guy who donated the trophy) was a tournament between the champions of Uruguay and Argentina. Initially, it was a one-leg final; the Argentine team would host the game one year, Uruguay the next. The tournament “officially” began in 1913, when the final was rained out and not replayed; it would resurface in 1916, and it ran until 1955.

If the Copa Ricardo Aldao started the trend of South American club teams playing against club teams from other South American nations, the 1948 Copa de Campeones perfected it. For that tournament, six teams (Colo Colo from Chile, Emelec from Ecuador, Lítoral from Bolivia, Municipal from Peru, River Plate from Argentina, and Vasco de Gama from Brazil) played a round-robin tournament, with Vasco de Gama winning out with ten points from four wins and two draws.

(Notice how when you apply the “three points for a win, one point for a draw” standard to those results it doesn’t add up? That’s because the Copa de Campeones didn’t use that standard; you were awarded two points for a win and one for a draw instead. This format was carried over into the Copa Libertadores, where it ran from 1960 to 1987; the tournament now uses the scoring format we’re familiar with.)

In 1960, CONMEBOL (the South American version of UEFA; they actually predate UEFA by a good 38 years, so one should perhaps say that UEFA is the European version of CONMEBOL) decided to dust off that tournament, switch it around a bit, and start it up again; the Copa Libertadores (named for the freedom fighters that liberated South America from Spain and Portugal) has been with us in some form or another ever since.

Who’s Eligible: Okay, you’re gonna need to pay attention here. Remember how we talked about the Copa do Brasil at the beginning of December? If you recall, the Copa do Brasil was kind of a mishmash of leagues; each state tournament sends a representative, the winner of the local state cups go, and the winner of the cup goes to the Copa do Brasil. It’s not the most confusing thing in the world, but it does take a little bit of figuring out.

Well, in South America, all of their leagues are like this. That means that qualification is considerably more complicated than anything we’ve talked about so far. I’m going to try to break it down for you based just on the 2010 version of the tournament in a minute.

Argentina

Argentina typically receives five berths; in 2010, they receive their normal five, plus an additional berth for Estudiantes (who won the tournament in 2009). The berths are determined as follows:

• The 2009 Clausura and Apertura champions both go (the Argentinian season, like most of South America, is broken into an “Apertura” (opening) tournament and a “Clausura” (closing) tournament; the winner of the first half and the winner of the second half both get automatic berths. The Clausura – which runs from February to July – is first).
• Amongst the teams not already qualified, the three teams with the highest average finishing position in 2009 also get berths (so if you finished in second place in both the Clausura and Apertura, you’d still go to the Copa Libertadores).

Bolivia

Bolivia has three berths to the tournament; the first two are, as with Argentina, the winners of the Apertura and Clausura tournaments (that’s in the right order; Bolivia’s Apertura runs at the same time as Argentina’s Clausura. No, I don’t know why). Additionally, the top three teams in the Clausura and Apertura enter into a “playoff” tournament to determine the Bolivian champion; that team also gets a Copa Libertadores bid. I don’t know what happens when a team wins one of the tournaments and also wins a playoff, but I’m sure that there’s a tiebreaker of some sort applied.

Brazil

Brazil, like Argentina, has five berths. This is the easiest one to figure out: the winner of the Copa do Brasil, as well as the top four placed teams in Brazil’s Série A, all advance on to the Copa Libertadores. That’s about as European as it gets, really.

Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, & Peru

These guys get grouped together because they all do it the same way. All of them have three berths; they each send the Apertura and Clausura champions, plus the best placed non-champion, to represent them at the Copa Lib. The only wrinkle is Chile, who send the best placed team in the Clausura stage on (instead of averaging together the results of the two tournaments); that gives the closing tournament a bit more importance.

Ecuador

Ecuador has three berths, and they send the first, second, and third placed finishers in their Serie A to the Copa Lib.

Uruguay

Uruguay has three berths. The first berth is granted to the team that won the most recent Primera División, which is a combination of results from their Apertura and Clausura seasons. However, since their on the Argentinian schedule (where the Clausura runs from February to July), that means that for 2010 the team that did the best in the 2008-2009 season is granted a berth. For their other two berths, they hold a “Liguilla Pre-Libertadores”, which is basically a round-robin tournament to determine who goes to the Copa Lib (the first two teams go to the Libertadores, the second two teams go to the Copa Sudamericana, and the bottom two teams whine about the officiating).

Venezuela

Three berths here, too. The Venezuela season is like Uruguay’s; the 2008-09 champion and runner up, as well as the best placed non-champions, all receive a berth to the Copa Libertadores.

Mexico

Wait, what?! Yeah, folks, that’s right. Mexico – a team from CONCACAF that isn’t even sort of close to South America – is in the Copa Libertadores. In fact, because of the swine flu outbreak last season, they even have five bids; that’s as many as Argentina and Brazil get.

Mexico’s been involved in the Copa Libertadores since 1998; they qualify in the same way that Uruguay’s teams qualify (i.e., they have a separate league – the Interliga – that determines who advances to cup competitions).

If I’ve typed this out right, that should be 40 teams from 11 different countries.

How it Works: So we’ve figured out who’s in; now let’s talk about what they do. Well…it’s a group knockout tournament, so they need to decide the groups. The group stage, however, is really the second stage (just like, in the Champions League, it’s really the fifth stage); first, there’s a preliminary round. That’s what starts tomorrow.

In that preliminary round, twelve teams face off in a two legged tie; the winner goes through to the group stage. The tiebreaking criteria, however, is as follows:

1. Goal difference
2. Goals scored
3. Away goals
4. Draw (or, in the first round, round of 16, quarterfinal, and semifinal: a penalty shootout)

That means that there’s no extra time, and that it’s advantageous to run the score up on an opponent; away goals is the third tie breaker, but it’s nowhere near as important as the other two criteria. That encourages attacking play all the time by giving each team an incentive to score.

Once the groups are filled out, the tournament follows the same path as the Champions League until the final. The final in the Copa Lib is a two-legged tie; again, away goals aren’t as important.

Competition Quirks: Given that this is probably the second or third most prestigious international tournaments out there, you would be right to expect that winning each match would be incredibly beneficial from a financial perspective. You would be wrong. As you remember from Adam’s post on the UEFA Champions League, the payouts are HUGE for successful European teams. Not so with the Copa Libertadores. Let’s look at how it breaks down (with a big shout-out to the Hexagonal Blog’s data from 2008, which is the most recent information I can find on Copa Lib payouts).

As you can see, it doesn’t. European teams are making about ten times more money, plus have additional incentives for winning matches in the group stages and payments for just making it into the later rounds.

Outside of the weird qualification systems, the crappy payouts, the two-legged final, and the inclusion of non-CONMEBOL teams in the tournament, there isn’t anything quirky about the Copa Libertadores at all.