Ooops, I am behind on Concacaf news. Was too busy with school and work
to churn out a post as soon as the press release dropped, but I
certainly wanted to weigh in on the recent announcement of the new "W" rebrand in Concacaf. The short of it: there
is now a new Women’s Gold Cup and a fresh format for World Cup
qualification in the region. Feel free to watch the official video explanation of things here.
But wait, you say, there has already been a Women’s Gold Cup! You are mostly correct. There have been several Women’s Gold Cups before. But
the Women’s Gold Cup (which doubled as a continental championship and World Cup qualifiers) is now rebranded as the W Championship, and the W
Gold Cup is a completely new tournament. Not exactly the greatest naming
scheme in the world. Concacaf's competition names have never been my favorite.
But aside from the poor names, what exactly has changed here? Let’s
start with the W Gold Cup. Not to make things even more confusing, but
this tournament actually also resembles something of a W Nations League.
Essentially there will be a qualifying phase where teams are divided
into Leagues A, B and C and split into groups within each league. From
there the League A group winners will qualify to the Gold Cup, with the
League A Runner Ups and League B winners going to a playoff much like
the Men’s Nations League/Gold Cup. This pathway produces a total of six
teams, plus USA and Canada who will skip the Nations League phase
entirely and automatically qualify. There will also be four invited
teams to the 2022 W Gold Cup. Exciting stuff!
The final tournament will undoubtedly be completely awesome. This is
going to be much cooler and more fun than the previous era of Women’s
Gold Cups. It is also good that a pathway has been created to get lower
ranked national teams more matches. Concacaf recognized how quickly this
system improved the overall level of play on the men’s side and it is
wise to implement a similar system here. Overall I have basically
nothing but good things to say about the new competition. Other than
that the branding is el stinko, of course. Is there some sort of international law that your WoSo branding must incorporate a ponytail?
As for the Concacaf W Championship, which has inherited the history of
the old Gold Cup and is now the pathway to the World Cup, my feelings
are more mixed. Again, it is good to get all these teams more games, but
I worry more about how productive some of these matches will be. In the
W Gold Cup qualification phase, teams are divided by League into groups
of relatively equal strength; it is hardly perfect, but it will prevent
a lot of unbalanced games.
In the W Championship, with groups made up of a single team each from
Pots A-E, you wind up with a lot of wildly unequal games. What exactly
is the point of having Anguilla play Mexico? There is a benefit to
playing teams better than you, but that has its limits. There is
nothing to be gained from a 15-0 defeat. We just learned this from the
2022 Men’s qualification cycle. Anguilla, the US Virgin Islands, Turks
and Caicos, etc. would have been much better served playing a
preliminary round amongst each other first. It is a little disappointing
to see Concacaf not make this change.
But still, the W Championship looks promising. The first round may not
be the most exciting thing in the world, but once it gets down to that
final eight expect some more high stakes good eats. Can’t wait to see it
all unfold.
