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After uniting last month in strong opposition to FIFA's plans to sell shares of the World Cup, UEFA and Concacaf have reportedly entered into discussions over the past several weeks to organize a joint tournament independent of soccer's governing body.
According to The Guardian, the two confederations are eyeing a biennial Nations League competition that would include all 96 European, Caribbean, North American and Central American nations, posing a direct challenge to FIFA's global tournaments.
The tournament could get underway as soon as 2028 and adopt a multi-league structure, similar to how each confederation's individual Nations League currently operates—with the top-ranked nations competing in the elite League A tier, followed by a knockout stage.
The Asian Football Confederation (AFC), which publicly aligned with Concacaf and UEFA in their stance against FIFA, does not currently run its own Nations League, but has signaled interest in joining the combined competition at some point down the road.
Major Win for the USMNT
While a joint biennial tournament between UEFA and Concacaf would only deepen the divisions within an already fractured FIFA, it would represent a major victory for the U.S. men's national team.
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The Stars and Stripes have repeatedly struggled in the modern World Cup era—reaching the quarterfinals just once, back in 2002—largely due to a shortage of consistent high-level competition in the years building up to the quadrennial global event. A joint Nations League offering the USMNT regular matchups against elite European sides in high-pressure settings is precisely what the team requires to arrive better prepared on the world stage and finally shed the tendency to be overwhelmed that has plagued the men in recent World Cup cycles.
Over the four-year window between the 2022 and 2026 tournaments, the currently 16th-ranked Stars and Stripes played just five matches against top-10 globally ranked opponents ahead of this summer's World Cup, two of which came against Germany and none of which were competitive fixtures. Three of those five games were crammed into the months immediately before the World Cup, rather than being evenly distributed across the full four-year period.
Setting up a joint Nations League would also be relatively straightforward, given that both confederations already run the tournament individually during the same international windows. The league phases typically take place in September, October and November, with the knockout rounds held in March and the finals in June.