Concacaf revamps Gold Cup format to make tournament ‘more competitive’
The group stage will involve two groups of eight teams, a change from four groups of four teams that could help spark renewed interest in the tournament
Concacaf on Thursday announced changes to the format of the Gold Cup, the confederation’s regional championship. The move is aimed at “delivering more meaningful matches and matchups between top-ranked teams”, Concacaf said in a statement.
Once the primary focus of teams in the region, the 35-year-old tournament will return for its 19th edition in 2027 having lost a bit of luster. The federation’s tweaks to the format – which center around the competition’s group stage – could help restore that. Here’s a look at the tournament, what’s at stake and what is changing.
What is the Gold Cup and why is it changing? The Gold Cup is the biannual regional championship for countries within Concacaf (the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football). Concacaf has crowned a regional champion in one way or another since the 1960s, but the confederation took strides towards standardizing the competition’s format – and more closely mirroring the championships of other global confederations – in 1991, when it introduced the Gold Cup.
The 16 participants in Gold Cup qualify via the Concacaf Nations League, a convoluted competition that awards eight berths through group-stage play and another seven via a second-chance style tournament for lower-placing teams. The remaining slot is filled by a guest country, most recently Saudi Arabia, who participated in the 2025 edition and will return next year.
The Gold Cup has been won by Mexico (10 times, including in 2025), the United States (seven) and Canada (once, in 2000).
The tournament’s previous format – a group stage featuring four groups of four teams, eight of whom advance to a single-elimination tournament – worked fine but was often criticized for failing to provide meaningful early matchups between the tournament’s highest-ranking teams. Fans in the US, Canada and Mexico, for example, were sometimes hard-pressed to tune in to early round action pitting those teams against the confederation’s minnows, with the results of those matches feeling almost predetermined.
That element – plus ongoing schedule fatigue and the fact that the tournament winner no longer qualifies for a global tournament, like the Confederations Cup – has caused the Gold Cup to lose significant fan interest and commercial appeal.
What, exactly, is changing? Concacaf’s adjustment is hardly groundbreaking but seems to be a significant and valuable step towards sparking renewed interest in the tournament. Put simply, the group stage will now feature two eight-team groups instead of four groups of four. Those eight teams will now play four group-stage matches instead of three. The groups will be populated via a “seeding band” system which ensures that each country faces a similar mix of opponents.
“Our fans want to see the best teams in our region compete against each other,” Concacaf president Victor Montagliani said in a statement, “and this format will create more opportunities for those matchups to happen earlier in the competition. At the same time, every match will matter, with teams facing a balanced mix of opponents and competing for a place in the knockout rounds. We believe this will make for a more competitive and exciting Gold Cup from the very first match through to the Final.”
Why does this format feel familiar? The format is similar but not identical to what is used by Uefa in Champions League and Europa League competition. In 2024, Uefa did away with traditional group-stage play entirely, replacing it with a single table during the “league phase”, where teams are divided into “seeding pots”.
The Champions League dwarfs anything within Concacaf in terms of relevance to US consumers, making it a smart enough target to duplicate. Concacaf’s format tweak won’t spike interest in the Gold Cup anywhere near enough to replicate the popularity of the world’s most popular club tournament, but every little bit helps.
The 2027 Gold Cup will begin 17 June and conclude with the final on 11 July. Host cities are yet to be announced, but every edition of the competition since 1991 has been staged or co-staged in the US.
