Copa América 2024 bigger than European Championship? Lionel Messi knows it is

Kylian Mbappe clearly ruffled some feathers last week when he suggested the European Championship was the world’s most difficult international soccer competition.

“The Euros are complicated. For me, more complicated than a World Cup,” the French national team captain said at a news conference before his team's first game.

Hold my beer, said former club teammate Lionel Messi, who led Argentina past France in an epic 2022 World Cup final, in which he and Mbappe — who broke his nose in France’s Euro-opening win over Austria on Monday — combined for five of the game’s six goals.

Sure the Euros, the quadrennial championship for FIFA’s 55-member European confederation, is difficult. However, don’t sleep on Copa América, the South American tournament expanded this year to include the U.S., Mexico and four other teams.

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“Well, everybody prioritizes their tournament,” Messi fired back in a TV interview ahead of the  Copa América opener Thursday between Argentina and Canada. “The Euros is very important and has the best teams, but he's leaving out three-time champion Argentina, five-time champion Brazil, two-time champion Uruguay.

“There are a lot of world champions left off to say that it's the most difficult tournament.”

Not just world champions. In top-ranked Argentina and No. 5 Brazil, the Copa América field also has two of the top five teams in the latest FIFA world rankings.  Colombia, which is also in the 16-team field, hasn’t lost in 23 games over more than two years, the longest unbeaten streak in international soccer.

A third of the 24 teams in the top-heavy Euro field are ranked outside the top 32.

With that as an introduction, here are four things to watch when the 48th Copa América kicks off at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta:

It’s a World Cup dress rehearsal

The South American championship is being played in the U.S. for the second time in eight years and eight of the 14 venues, including Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, also will play host to games in the 2026 World Cup. That makes the tournament an important trial run.

“We will always look at every event as a test for the next things that’s coming up,” said Otto Benedict, senior vice president for facility and campus operations at SoFi Stadium. “Copa will allow us to have an international fan base that’s coming through the building, so we’re going to understand how those guests come, how they perceive the building.”

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SoFi, which will stage eight games in the World Cup, will host two Copa group-stage matches: Brazil’s tournament opener with Costa Rica on June 24 and Mexico’s second game, with Venezuela, on June 26.

Benedict said the stadium’s Matrix Turf surface will be covered with a carpet of natural grass, a procedure that will be repeated for the World Cup, but the retractable bleachers in the corners will remain in place, leaving the pitch slightly narrower than FIFA will require for the World Cup.

“We’re still going to have opportunities to learn,” Benedict said. “All those things are data points that will be collected.”

The seven other Copa stadiums staging World Cup matches will conduct similar trials.

Copa América will be a World Cup test for the USMNT as well

The 2026 World Cup will be a defining moment for the U.S., and the Copa might give an indication how the national team will be defined.

Is the U.S. one of the world’s top soccer-playing nations, as U.S. Soccer would like you to believe, or is it a pretender, a team that struggles against top competition and is undeserving of being ranked 11th — ahead of Colombia, Germany and Uruguay — in the latest FIFA rankings?

As a World Cup host, the U.S. — along with co-hosts Mexico and Canada — will not have to go through qualifying for 2026, making Copa the most challenging tournament it will face in the next two years.

The roster coach Gregg Berhalter will take into the team's opener against Bolivia at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Saturday is collectively the best in USMNT history, with 23 of 26 players coming off major European clubs. Copa provides an important international stage on which to display those talents.

“It's a chance for us to show, before the World Cup, that we're a team to be feared,” defender Chris Richards told reporters.

Is Gregg Berhalter up to the task?

No U.S. manager who has coached more than seven games has a better winning percentage than Berhalter, but given the quality of the roster and the team’s recent struggles — the U.S. has won only two of its last six games — he has come under fire. The protests grew louder after an especially poor showing in a 5-1 loss to Colombia earlier this month.

The Copa group stage, in which the U.S. will play Bolivia, Panama and Uruguay, offers a chance to flip that script. The three teams will present vastly different challenges, giving Berhalter a chance to show off his coaching chops with three different game plans.

Getting out of group play is the bare minimum for the U.S., but matters will get a little tougher if it advances and probably will face either Colombia or Brazil in the quarterfinals.

What about the rest of the field?

Argentina, the reigning World Cup champion and ranked No. 1 in the world, has lost only two of its last 57 games and has made the Copa América final a record 29 times, winning 15.

Although the team led by the 36-year-old Messi has aged — 11 players over 30 and the third-oldest roster in the tournament — it appears to have a fairly comfortable path to a 30th final  at Hard Rock Stadium in suburban Miami on July 14.

With Colombia and Brazil, Group D could be the toughest of the four four-team groups. Brazil, still without injured Neymar, needs to improve play  after losing its last three games — albeit to Uruguay, Colombia and Argentina — in CONMEBOL World Cup qualifying.

Ecuador, whose only losses in 14 games came to Argentina and Italy, could be a dark horse.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.