Copa Chaos

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There are a lot of bad takes and articles about the crowd issues during last night's Copa America Championship in Miami. Here's my two cents as a 20+ year veteran of event ticketing and front-of-house ops (including large scale events like Super Bowls, golf majors, music festivals, etc.):

At the end of the day, the buck stops with the event organizer/promoter, which is CONMEBOL. It's not the stadium, vendors at the stadium, the host committee, local law enforcement, or any of the other entities that I've seen thrown around. CONMEBOL would be the organization ultimately responsible for signing off on, and paying for, the entry and security protocols, for the event. Renting a stadium for an event doesn't include an enhanced security plan, for free.

If you've ever been to a major event, I'm sure you've noticed a large amount of security personal, multiple security checkpoints, copious amounts of camera towers or other surveillance, magnetometers, uniformed police personal, and a lot of public safety vehicles (police, fire, ambulance, etc.) before you even get close to the entry gate. All of this would have been planned in advance.

From the videos I've seen, it would appear there was a lack of an extended security perimeter around Hard Rock Stadium to keep the "riffraff" out. This allowed potentially thousands without tickets to get up close to the stadium to the point where bum-rushing the gates was feasible. In my opinion, this scenario was brought up as a possibility, but the promoter declined to implement an extended security perimeter due to the added costs.

Once it became obvious that things were getting out of control, closing the gates made sense. Again, this is a conversation that the event organizer would be heavily involved in, though stadium personnel and local authorities may have a little more influence at this point. However, as time went on, it became clear that there was no way to separate out those with tickets from those without, given the poor ingress planning. Add in the heat, the volatility of the situation, and the importance of the game, there was a very real possibility of a riot. The best way to mitigate this imminent danger was to open the gates and just let people in and relieve the pressure. Yes, that created problems as well, but it was the lesser of two evils in this instance. Once capacity was reached, the gates were closed again, stranding some with tickets outside with no hope of being let in.

Of course, the Colombian fans are to blame too. They ruined what should have been an amazing event with their selfishness and overall lack of respect for society. I have absolutely no sympathy for gate crashers that got ejected or arrested. They willfully put other people at risk of injury or worse.

I imagine now that the dust has settled, the narrative is going to shift to ticket refunds, lawsuits and/or whether the US should host the World Cup. On the ticketing side, this is going to take some time to sort out. On the primary market side, Ticketmaster and CONMEBOL will need to reach an agreement as to the finances of this will work out. Obviously, TM is not going to be on the hook for all the refunds that will potentially get paid out. They will either draw off the money waiting to be paid out and if that's not enough, they will request CONMEBOL to send them money to cover the losses.

The secondary market gets even crazier since the exchanges aren't really partners with COMNEBOL directly. Many ticket brokers that sold tickets will probably want to get refunded on the original purchase before issuing refunds to their buyers. We're going to find out how much the exchanges are willing to go above and beyond for people who buy tickets from their site.

As far as future events like the World Cup being held in the US, this fiasco should have no effect on that. As I've laid out, the event organizer was the main culprit here. Also, Hard Rock Stadium has hosted Super Bowls, World Series', major concerts, NCAA Football National Championships, etc., without incidents like what happened yesterday. This was a terrible, but avoidable, situation that occurred and all things considered could have been a lot worse if not for the many event professionals onsite making quick, correct decisions. This was certainly not an indicator of a systemic problem with US-based events.