September 17 – Concacaf has redrawn the route to the 2024 men’s Olympic football tournament with the U-20 teams deciding the region’s representatives in Paris.
The governing body has discarded the traditional Olympic qualifying tournament for U-23 teams and replaced it with an U-20 qualifying campaign that will kick off late this year with the teams ranked outside the top 16 competing in the Dominican Republic. Four teams will punch a ticket for the Concacaf U-20 championship next summer when the semi-finalists will qualify for the U-20 World Cup in Indonesia in 2023 and the finalists will book a ticket for Paris.
The Olympic football tournament is restricted to U-23 teams, with each participant allowed three overage players. This year the competition featured U-24 teams because the Tokyo Olympic Games were postponed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Mexico and Honduras represented Concacaf in Japan. They had come through the traditional qualifying tournament in March 2021. Honduras failed to progress from the group stages following defeats by both South Korea and Romania, but the Mexicans once again demonstrated their Olympic pedigree by clinching bronze with a 3-1 victory in the third-place playoff against the hosts.
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