Equitable coverage of the sixteen Copa América participants was one key focus of our site’s design. A common theme we noticed throughout the semester (Oxenham’s book and other final projects in particular) was the coverage gap between different teams and players in international soccer; while a lot of these disparities stem from gender inequities in media coverage, there is also a sizable difference between the amount of ink spilled on the different men’s teams in the 2024 Copa América. Coverage of the United States and tournament favorites like Brazil and Argentina is very easy to find, while for smaller nations in the field such as Bolivia, Jamaica, and Panama it’s hard to even find a team preview. We wanted to dedicate the same amount of space to every team in the field in our previews to symbolically put all sixteen sides on a “level playing field.” 

 

Our write-ups also emphasize a key difference between international soccer and American professional sports: the distinction between winning and success. In American professional sports, seasons without postseason titles or deep playoff runs are deemed failures; however, over the course of the semester, we learned about a variety of international soccer sides who failed to “win” in a traditional sense but still considered their tournament performances a victory. One of our favorite examples was Panama’s 2023 side at the women’s World Cup: though they didn’t even pick up a single point in the group stage, the moment of elation when Marta Cox scored the nation’s first World Cup goal on a banger free kick against France and the Panamanian team mobbed her at midfield to celebrate made Panama one of the tournament’s “winners” in an emotional sense. Some nations such as Brazil and Argentina will need to win this Copa to feel good about their performance — but for countries like the United States, a single victory against one of the South American powerhouses would feel almost as good as a title, while for other group-stage underdogs just making the knockout rounds would be a win. International soccer isn’t just about winning hardware, and our write-ups emphasize how success can look different for every nation in the 2024 Copa América.

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Another thing we wanted to focus on, perhaps more indirectly in our approach, was how even though we all find joy in creating brackets and predicting who is going to win a tournament or even a game, life and football remains wildly unpredictable. Someone could take all of the statistics in the world and factor in as many variables into the calculation as they can, and still fall short of perfectly predicting the outcomes of a tournament. There is no way to know when someone or when a team is going to have an exceedingly good or horribly poor performance. We can watch a game expecting certain players and teams to shine and dominate only to find out that our expectations were wrong. We cannot predict which team is going to come in with such a fire and purpose that overcompensates for deficits in statistics or technical abilities. 

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Part of the love of creating brackets exists because of the fact that it mirrors life’s unpredictability, and part of the love of supporting the underdog exists because it gives us something to hope for. We hope that those who are expected to win and dominate the game do not always do that–we hope that people who we least expect can come in, shake the field, and win it all. We hope that when we end up being the underdog in life, we can still find a way to break through adversity and the odds that are stacked against us to emerge victorious. And so, we continue to have fun with our friends making predictions, making gentle fun of one another’s brackets, and taking turns being shocked when the game goes contrary to how any of us could have expected. We continue to watch, and we continue to hope.