The CONMEBOL Copa America is the leading football competition for teams in South America and is the oldest active competition for international football teams. The winner of the CONMEBOL Copa America is crowned as the champion of South America.
Teams from Asia and North America have been invited to take part since the 1990s. This guide looks at the ins and outs of the CONMEBOL Copa America as well as options available for betting on these great games.
History of CONMEBOL Copa America Betting
The CONMEBOL Copa America was called the South America Football Championship until 1975 having initially been played in 1916. Uruguay holds the record for the most CONMEBOL Copa America titles, having won 15 titles over the years.
Since 1993, most of the CONMEBOL Copa America tournaments have contained a dozen teams. There are 10 teams from CONMEBOL and two teams for different conditions. For example, Mexico was part of CONMEBOL Copa America every time between 1993 and 2016 and usually there was another team added from CONCACAF.
In 2016, there were 16 teams playing in the CONMEBOL Copa America. The highest finish a non-CONMEBOl team has had in the event is runner-up, which Mexico has done on two occasions.
Eight of the teams in CONMEBOl have managed to capture the CONMEBOL Copa America title at some stage. The only two teams that have not yet won the title are Venezuela and Ecuador. The only nation not from the region to host the event was the United States, doing so in 2016. For four different occasions, the tournament was held across numerous countries in South America.
Format of the CONMEBOL
There are two different phases to the tournament. There is a group stage where there are three groups with four teams in them. Three of the teams will be seeded, including the host country, with the other seedings determined by the FIFA World Rankings.
Then there will be pots based on FIFA Rankings when the other teams in the groups will be picked from. The group stages will see each side playing three games, with the leading two teams for each of the groups going to the quarter-finals, as well as the two best performing third-place teams.
Total points first determine the group positions, with a goal difference of all games in the group being the next determinant followed by the greatest number of goals scored in the group stage. Teams then progress to the knockout phase of the CONMEBOL Copa America.
There are penalty shootouts if the match is a tie after the 90 minutes. If the final is a draw, the game will first go to extra time before a penalty shootout. There is also a third-place playoff as part of the tournament.
Invited teams
As there are only a certain number of South American nations, there is an invite system that boosts the number of teams in the CONMEBOL Copa America. Most of the time, teams that are culturally and geographically close to South American nations will be preferred.
To date, there have been nine countries that have gotten invitations to compete in the CONMEBOL Copa America. These are Costa Rica, Japan, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, Panama, Haiti, Australia, Qatar and the United States.
The United States had to turn down an invitation on many occasions as the CONMEBOL Copa America conflicted with the running of the MLS season. Spain was invited to play in 2011. However, they had to decline as they did not want to affect the holidays of their players.
Betting options
The CONMEBOL Copa America sees some of the best players in the world battling it out against one another. The likes of Brazil and Argentina have been some of the most exciting teams in world football.
There is also the emergence of other nations in recent years, such as Chile who won CONMEBOL Copa America in 2015 for the first time. As a result of the competitive nature of the CONMEBOL Copa America, it is the ideal tournament for betting. You have plenty of games to watch, with many of them being highly exciting and going down to the wire.
To find a great betting site that will be a good fit for CONMEBOL Copa America betting, you can check out the list of options on Roger.com. These have all been reviewed by an expert team, doing the hard work for you.
